Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/11/25/if-blue-collar-workers-want-be.html
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Unions need to support the same good deal for all workers in their bargaining unit. Not continuation of existing pay and benefits for current members, while newly hired workers get much less.
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The IWW is experiencing a sudden growth spike, as most radical left groups probably are right now.
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My union would love to. My employer is…less keen.
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And your union is doing what about it??
I would guess bargaining. That’s how bargaining works: One party gets some of what it wants, and the other party gets some of what it wants, and sometimes that’s the best you can do.
Or are you advocating that the workers seize the means of production? 
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Bargaining, trying to get what they can.
They have gone out on strike in the past.
Of course, as you note, if they can’t offer the same benefits to all, when those benefits are next on the chopping board, the new members won’t vote to protect them, because they already don’t have them. Divide and conquer.
But all the union can do is to try to hold back the tide as much as possible.
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Trickle Down Economics is trickle piss into the faces of US workers.
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A union member on this thread has it exactly right:
Union after union has done the same thing. If the current members won’t strike to protect future members, the union is committing slow motion suicide.
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But the company can “just” move to a right-to-work state if the workers get too uppity.
It’s a race to the bottom.
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Not only blue-collar and service industry workers, especially in 2016. Corporations are constantly coming up with ways to extract unpaid work from or to intrude into the personal lives of white-collar and knowledge industry workers, too. Those workers also need good unions, but a kind of snobbery makes those shops almost impossible to organise.
Also, it’s important to emphasise unions, plural. One solution beloved of right-wing populists is to replace independent unions with state/corporate-dominated mega-unions that, despite their rhetoric, aren’t primarily concerned with the rights of their workers (who in some cases are actual slaves).
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Unions? Pah! President Trump is going to bring all the jobs back, somehow!
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Pretty much - oddly in Trumpistan the biggest card companies use (move production to mexico/china) may not be available …
Who am I kidding?
Get rid of Nafa? The day he locks Hillary up and drains the swamp!
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Yup,
Right-to-work needs to go. Card check needs to come back. Trade deals need to have labor protections so workers in other countries can organize…
For some reason none of that was brought up in the general election.
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Jesus wept, what a con job.
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The people in my family that are in a union all voted for Trump. They live in Illinois, so it didn’t really matter, but still…
I’ve been trying to figure out why Trump was so appealing to them and I think it’s his immigration stance. They don’t want to have to compete with people willing to work for 1/4 of what they get paid. Turn off free trade, close the borders, renegotiate deals with Gina - all things that resonate with them.
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Unions … but socialism … corruption something something
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He’ll never drain the swamp - it’s the one time he’s an environmentalist. Why destroy his own habitat?
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I worked with a guy who was a union electrician in New York. He said his union paid all its members to picket non-union job sites one day every two weeks, and that the non-union job sites were staffed entirely by immigrant workers. You better believe those unions weren’t trying to get the immigrants to join up.
I guess unions don’t like competition any more than corporations.
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