And this very same dynamic exists within union membership as well, and is a huge turnoff for me. The whole solidarity-cheerleading thing enjoys squashing any members who might have different priorities than the majority. Feels pretty shitty to be forced to pay dues for policies you disagree with. Want to change the policies from within? Hey, don’t be causing trouble, aren’t you a team player?
This is a hard reality that is often missing from discussions about unions. Do you have leverage? If not, no amount of ideological pie-in-the-sky rah-rah-solidarity is going to help you- you’re simply sunk. So sad to see negotiations in which a strike is called and 1 or 2 months later they accept all the concessions and twist language up into knots trying to save face and convince people it wasn’t an utter and total failure.
Numbers are necessary, but it doesn’t guarantee leverage.
You do acknowledge that unions have their problems, but in my opinion the problems are baked in right from this start from this statement. The moment more that a couple people organize around something, the usual social group dynamics start in. Unions are doomed to be mostly shitty while doing a little bit of good because they consist of a large number of people* who are expected to subjugate themselves. It suffers the same organizational issues any group of people have- hierarchies, large pots of money, competing interests, it’s a microcosm of politics, and suffers from the same “if only the right people were in charge!” failing you get when you give one group of people too much formalized power over others.
*and of course any large enough group of people has it’s share of idiots and jerks who make the whole enterprise unpleasant for everyone.
I’ve wondered whether free-market types also endorse repealing this regulation.
See above – I think it covers (i.e. prohibits) exactly that.
Exactly. All this talk about unions is beside the point. Billionaires don’t want strong independent local news outlets. That’s why they’re lobbying against the rule about local broadcasters having local studios. And that’s why this douche bought out Gothamist. If they hadn’t unionized, I’d bet dollars to mini donuts (ah, inflation) that he would have turned Gothamist into a pro-Trump propaganda outlet.
Petty cronyism, limited voluntary association, and the “capture” of union representatives by company officials were among my chief complaints of the heavily unionised meat industry I used to work in.
Later, when I found myself working for a similar outfit in Australia with no union my previous complaints gained a little perspective.
To this day I’ve never experienced such abuse of power and polarisation between levels of the business hierarchy: from workers (mainly vulnerable and acquiescent immigrants) pressured into double shifts daily (it was inferred you wouldn’t be around long in the case of non-compliance) to little things like coffee machines being available to guests and admin/managerial staff upstairs while downstairs workers had to ply their own lunchroom with instant coffee and milk.
I lasted two weeks of 13-16 hour shifts (I was always the last to leave after volunteering for clean-up with the boss’ son every day) and was promptly fired after taking my own leave for lunch one day after going 8 hours without eating. The standard procedure for breaks there was a manager walking around and choosing at whim one or two workers to go when it best suited the production schedule.
Suffice it to say I’ve never viewed unionisation (or newly immigrant workers in “first world” countries) the same since!
…and there is a point that is all too often missing from these discussions.
Yes, unions can be corrupted. But whose interests are served by corrupting them? Who pays the bribes?
Complete agreement there. glances pointedly at company provided laptop and cell phone with enabled hot-spot Although the current boss is a firm believer in ‘if you have to do work off hours, you get time in lieu/comp time/early out/etc. for your efforts’, which is more than I can say about the [unprintable string of profanity in dead languages] that he replaced.
For a while, I felt that the best way to develop a strong negotiating position with my employer was simply to do great work. That was effective for almost a decade. Then a new boss was hired, and my past performance put a target on my back. He didn’t just fire me - that would have set off alarms at levels higher than him. He just re-assigned me to tasks further and further away from my expertise, and put more unreasonable deadlines and scope to my work. It took a couple of years, but by the time he was ready to lay me off, even I wondered, just a little, if I was incompetent.
Of course he also couldn’t deliver on his performance targets and was demoted off into a negligible position in the company, but that didn’t help me any. If I would have had a union behind me, I could have challenged his shenanigans much earlier, and someone would have actually paid attention when I put the paper trail of evidence in front of them.
My favorite was the Danny McBride line from “Eastbound & Down”:
“There’s no ‘I’ in ‘team’, but there is a ‘u’ in ‘cunt’.”
So, what then? We all go to our little individual nation-states and shoot at anyone approaching us? What is the alternative to creating larger scale human projects that benefit us all?
That sucks. I’m sorry you had to deal with that. I’ll also add, the better your work, the more they wish to exploit you. I’ve seen this in action as well. People are regularly punished for competency in the work place.
We aren’t people, with lives, loves, individuality, etc, we are cogs in a machine that if they could, they’d work till we’re used up and then thrown away. Given that there are starting to be attacks on programs like medicare now (and social security will be next, if Ryan gets his way), the people who have already worked their entire lives are about to have their retirement protections pulled out from under them, meaning that their children will have to step up and financially support not only their own children, but their parents as well, undermining the abillity to build up enough wealth that they are going to need for their retirement. that means even less people will be able to retire in their 60s, and those jobs will not be freed up for their children and grandchildren. This is the real road to Serfdom…
We’re fucked unless we undo this shit. Unions, especially the post-war corporate unions that were common in the US are not the perfect solution by any stretch. But they provide a bulwark against the worst of the corporate/government alignment in favor of capital.
What do you think of @anon73430903’s idea of these sort of pop-up unions as a solution to the cronyism of the big corporate unions? Or is the solution to take over the big corporate unions and replace the leaders with people willing to fight? Does that only reinforce the problem - the problem really being the structures - or can human beings rise above such corruption? Or is there to much of a focus on corruption, as there is no way to not have corruption in a system built on capitalism? Of course, there was/is also systemic corruption in any system - not the Soviet Union was a paragon of virtue itself.
So I don’t know. Is the problem capitalism or humanities inability to build larger scale institutions that actually do serve us all, instead of us becoming subject to the institutions themselves?
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It’s likely that the venture was indeed not currently profitable, and he had been going to close the business anyway, but he leapt at this particular point in time to both close it and wave the bloody flag of his political beliefs at the same time.
They can… 
They do. 
We let them… 
Why not both? 
I tend to the view that most of the established unions have got too big and too cosy. Organisations like Unison for example cover so many different kinds of workers in so many establishments that with the best will in the world, they simply can’t provide the sort of local effort and expertise that they should.
Given the laws restricting ‘sympathy’ strikes (in the UK at least) (and the unions’ willingness to abide by those laws), there isn’t really much benefit to these giant unions and a lot of downside given their accreted internal bureaucracy and general lack of agility.
For example Unison likes to advertise with “One is a lonely number. Join Unison and you’re one in a million.”
Fine but since you can’t/won’t actually use the million to help the one, so what?
Probably better to start from scratch and rebuild a new union movement every now and again. A union where the 100 might at least try to help the one.
I don’t know either. I think the current economic hierarchies directly restrict humans ability to build institutions that serve us well.
Unionising power (generally) seems to justify it’s own problems with power in my mind so long as it’s sheltering and supporting the vulnerable and oppressed.
I don’t think I’ve ever been on a continent without some history of people being killed outright for trying to unionise! But in the end I think it’s always been a band-aid fix for fundamental problems with neo-liberalism and modern capitalism.
I guess there will always be some corruption wherever there is money and large “power-over” structures. The only way I’ve seen modern corruption reasonably minimised is when people’s needs are met to the level that they don’t feel tempted to rip of others e.g. workers being paid very well - it doesn’t seem to limit corruption much for those at the top!
To that end I’m a big fan of the idea of a Universal Basic Income (UBI). It seems to cut through so many immediate structural problems with wage-slavery and people feeling forced to undertake employments they know are harmful to the planet yet feel forced to continue to meet their basic survival needs.
Basic economic equality would make it so much harder to take advantage of others - we’d all have to share the shitty jobs or work to make them a lot less shitty!
Yeah I read the libcom links and I guess I think workers should take any support they can get until the pyramid changes. As long as people continue to be forced to rent themselves out just to make ends meet we’re gonna see people, as Thoreau worded it, “contract themselves into a nutshell of civility.”
Can’t argue with the accuracy of that statement.
Sure. But the capitalist economy brings both good and bad developments. Even Marx noted that the bourgeoisie revolution was wide ranging in nature, and brought about new material abundance. I guess it goes back to that quote by (I think it was) William Gibson, about the future being not evenly distributed yet? It also comes down to whether or not you think that the “future” is worth having in the first place. Plenty of people don’t feel it is, and think that the only sustainable mode of living is completely abandoning modernity for primitive existences. That has consequences and most of us aren’t in that camp. We want the modern living with a more equitable system of distribtuion that is far less alienating, more fulfilling, and less toxic to our environment. The question always comes back to whether we can have both or not.
Yes. I think there are two different phenomenon here. Elite corruption has more of a chance of replicating the system on a broader scale, while corruption lower in the class system can be, but isn’t always aimed at sustaining one’s position in the hierarchy. It’s the hierarchy that’s the problem in the first place, and it gets socially and culturally replicated through hegemonic ideas that we rarely question.
I’m still on the fence. If the problem at the heart of it all is money (as we currently understand it, the primary mode of exchanging value), then the solution needs to be more radical. I think the UBI is a great short term solution, but it’s just another band-aid and an individualized one at that. I don’t think it changes the pyramid, since this will mean that corporations are going to be able to hoard just that much more money because they will radically cut their employees wages with a UBI. I’m not sure what leverage that actually gives us over corporations, who are the problem here, I think.
