SEIU doesn’t strictly organize fields traditionally perceived as male dominated, much the opposite. It has a roughly 50% female workforce. The IWW is happy to have you as long as you aren’t a class enemy and these is no employment barrier.
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Well… is your place hiring right now? Because it sounds like a worker’s paradise!
This is all well and fun, guys, but trust me - I wan’t getting recruited by unions except I threw the paperwork away.
There were no unions to join, or I certainly would have at least gone to a meeting. Think about it - did you check that the person who delivered your furniture was union? How about the guy who mows the lawn at work? Who cleans your toilets? Is your daycare a union shop?
These ones, too:
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The last people we had delivering anything at our house (dropping off shingles for a reroofing) were union. Our janitor mows the lawn and cleans the toilets; he is Bargaining Unit 01 for HGMA, the rest of us are also HGMA members. We even have a shop steward who is instrumental in keeping us updated. Our state is strongly pro-union and Democratic, so even when we are inconvenienced by a strike and grumble, we consider that it’s like taxes: the dues we pay (ISWYDT) to live in a civilized society. When I was a younger substitute I was a lot grumpier about my union dues (that was an extra $20/mo I could use for groceries!), but seeing the abuses non-union areas are tolerating, I don’t think we would necessarily be better off without.
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There are places that are famously anti-union (Wal-Mart is one of them- workers there even breathe mention of unionizing, each one gets either canned over some piddly (and probably made-up) violations, or just scheduled for no hours.)
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Goalpost moving again. You made a blanket statement about unions not accepting women. We provided multiple examples to the opposite. Now you’re saying unions don’t care about specific jobs, and that you’ve never been “recruited”.
If you want your job to be organised, have you tried organising it? Or is that for “somebody else” to do?
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Organising it? You mean tell my boss - my only co-worker at the main job I’m starting a union? Or how about I recruit my co-workers, the sons of my other boss?
Sorry, but the unions you pictured are pink-collar unions. I’m talking about ‘men’s work’ - the blue-collar jobs, and I have been talking about them all through this post, because those are the jobs I’ve been shut out of despite my experience and skills.
The only job I’ve had that you can say is sometimes, rarely organized is cashiers. Small, independent business cashiers. When you shop local, take a good look at your cashier. She/he may be the only employee who isn’t family in that business. Is the union looking to take them on? How do you think that union conversation is going to go? Wal-Mart isn’t the only union-unfriendly chain. Home Depot gets around it by declaring everyone who isn’t a manager is a temp. Wells-Fargo does the same.
Like I said, blatant threats are part of the propaganda. But that’s not the fault of the union, that is how the employer keeps the unions out, so they can continue to do the bare, legal minimum for their employees, if even that.
I don’t blame people for being scared and capitulating in that situation. Combined with the propaganda that unions are only there to enrich themselves, and it’s hard to combat.
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Tell that to the Exotic Dancers Union, SEIU Local 790.
The fact is that Gen X took the advantages fought for by unions for granted, and they let unions fall by the wayside; also when the unionized industries went away, new industries (like tech) didn’t unionize (despite being male dominated).
Reagan, quite a bit. But he was a symptom as much as a cause, I’d say.
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Yeah…you win, pal.
Some of the first American unions were founded BY women, too, up in Lowell Mass.
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I’ll also note that I’ve done work in the Machinists archives, and about half of the oral histories I listened to during that time were from women who were in the union. that’s the IAMAW.
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Demographics are probably very location dependent. I’m friends with a “token” trans sexual union pipe fitter. I met her because she manages the metal fab shop at my maker space. I ended up and one of the union picnics once, the average attending age was much younger than mid-boomer. But I’m in a young, liberal, multicultural city (Minneapolis), not out in the aging rural hinterlands where yeah, I’d expect what you say to apply to most unions… and most jobs.
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I remember whe the Kroger’s union went on strike. Grew up in Detroit, some of my high school friends worked there and walked the pickets.
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Rosie was probably a union member. Can’t quite make out the pin on her lapel.
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…you mean urban Denver, where all the weed jobs are? I don’t see any unions sniffing around the giant weed factories…or organizing the dispensary clerks who keep getting robbed.
We’re w-a-y younger than MPLS…and a helluva lot more…ummmm…‘tan’. I don’t see the building trades trying to recruit the Mexican Nationals. Or even the brown guys who’ve been here a few generations.
I used to live and TRY to work in Minneapolis for 7 years before I moved back here in the mid aughts, and you have nothing to brag about. I used to work for Wells-Fargo headquarters, but I’ve been leaving THAT off my resume. They also did the ‘you’re a temp unless you’re management’, and I certainly don’t remember seeing any union meeting fliers circulating.
How about when I worked as a floor clerk in the Edina mall and our store got robbed twice in one month? Headquarters solved the problem by closing the store, and lying about the employees who didn’t flee at the first sign of trouble. If you lie about your employees, you don’t have to pay unemployment. Agaim I didn’t see any union fliers in that mall or the next one I worked in - as a ‘temp’.
Say…I knew people who fled Target’s white-collar behind-the-scenes jobs due to oppressive working conditions. Target is based in your worker’s paradise:
She was a cellist who quit after only two weeks because her predecessor got her hand mangled in a stamping machine. …but she would have just been forced out of her job at the end of the war, anyway:
"At the beginning of the war, the goal was getting more women into critical war-related jobs. At the end of the war, the goal was to get the women to give up those jobs and drop out of the work force so there would be more jobs for the men returning from the front. That’s an amazing bit of social manipulation–especially that last part. And it impacted more than just the middle-class women who had a choice about working. "
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No, I don’t mean urban Denver. I meant actual rural areas. You know, places that aren’t state capitals of solidly democratic states doing better than most economically. Places with greatly divergent demographics, hence my opening sentence saying “demographics are probably very location dependent”.
Nor am I saying the unions here are great, or do much for anybody outside government / university employees… but we have a hell of a lot of both of those in the cities. Since you wanted to drag in race… I worked with a whole lot of US born African American and (mostly Muslim) East African immigrant teamsters when I worked at the U of M. Tan enough for yah? We were actually AFSCME members up until the teamsters came in and got us reclassified. Was not a good deal by any stretch, but at least my health care was affordable and fully covered my open heart surgery… (I also did the teamster thing at UPS for a while before that.)
I was there at the UM doing lab animal care back around the time you were employed at Wells Fargo. I’m shocked that a national company with a proven record of scamming people, scams their employees even here in MN. Shocked I say.
Well, not that shocked.
Workers paradise? Nah, just a little behind the curve on chopping workers and unions to pieces, with some pockets of actual decency. But hey, its almost garden season, and now you have a nice straw man!
