No doubt it’s related to all that ‘rugged individualism’ bullshit.
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McGovern dammit.
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I read that as “instead of going out to vote.”
That’s part of it. And I know you said you didn’t read through the rest of the thread but we got to it. We have public sector unions. And unions for other things (some restaurant workers, casino workers, construction trades, trucking, public transportation, the entertainment guilds etc). The public sector unions are currently the US’s largest block of union employees. So they currently stand as the sort of back stop on union erosion.
So like I said there’s a feed back loop. Its not a surprise that the major success in the GOP destroying unions started under Reagan. The 70’s American manufacturing collapse reduced the influence of the Unions. Together with Reagan’s success in flipping just enough of union support to the GOP. That let them start gutting Union directly, but also the legal frame work protecting them. Thus further reducing the number of Union members. When and where the dems came back into power, you now had a less influential voting block. It was less important to the DNC coalition, and there had been an overall rightward political swing nationwide (including within unions). So less effort was put into protecting and embedding Unions. Which allowed membership to continue to erode. Which allowed the attacks on unions and labor to continue and so forth.
The overall framework of laws, enforcement trends, and public disinterest that comes out of that. Makes it very hard for unions to penetrate the sort of industries that now fill in the working class and the middle class. And its not neccisarily public sector work that’s done that. Its things like retail and restaurant work at the low end. And various sorts of tech and office work above that. Active attempts are ongoing, and have been for decades to unionize these industries. And there has been little success. But there’s been precious little effort to unionize in the white collar space in this country.
And as a couple former and current members of unions up thread have pointed out. Many of the traditional Unions are ridiculously old fashioned. Corruption in Unions here is fairly endemic too. The Teamster’s association with the Mafia isn’t just something you see in the movies. I know some one who had an opportunity to join one of the major construction trade unions. Which is considered a major thing, union construction jobs and contracts pay a hell of a lot more, and members never want for work, even when the business slows down. Then he found out how it worked. To get assigned to a union job. You have to go to the Union hall and pass a bribe to a particular person. Until you get sufficient seniority to automatically get placed on the crews for the best paying jobs. The bribe is big enough that you make less than you would as a non-union worker. So he passed on the opportunity.
Its not a one cause kind of thing.
Canada is a different country with completely different dynamics.
Weren’t there a hell of a lot of bribes involved in that or am I remember something else with the Teamsters?
It seems like something that comes up among white collar workers from time to time. Depending on the field. I feel like that might be more likely in the game business because similar entertainment industries (TV, Film, Stage, parts of the Music business) are thoroughly unioned up. But it seems to be more of a workers mulling the idea. What you don’t see is actual unions or union organizers spear heading the idea. Organizing it. Reaching out and targeting white collar industries that could benefit from union representation.
What you also don’t see as often you used to is extent unions attempting to organize more people who are already in their purview. There’s been an overall pretty big collapse in the job market for TV, Film, Radio/Audio based work. But there are a lot more industries hiring people with those skillsets, and that collapse created a big giant group of active freelancers in creative fields. The entertainment Guilds have made almost no effort to recruit or represent these people. As it stands joining a Hollywood guild still involves getting sponsored by an existing member. And dues in the tens of thousands of dollars. Its pretty much impossible to join if you don’t already have a job lined up for a major, Union contracted entertainment company.
Another flaming-hot take from the rhetoric hot house. Unions left the Democratic party, not the other way around, because of the same freak-out all comfortable middle-class white people had in the mid-70s. “Oh unions, can’t be racist and sexist”, you say, “No True Socialist forgets about the importance of Solidarity among the subaltern!” Let us take a look back to the one of first successful union-backed laws in the US, the Chinese Exclusion Act.
Sounds familiar huh? Almost like a recent time where a demagogue leveraged race to convince people to vote against their immediate interests, and everyone points fingers at the Democratic party? This has happened before, and will probably happen again.
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Exactly so; “triangulation”/“The Third Way” has failed us all miserably.
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Here’s a take from an actual labor historian:
http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2018/01/democrats-let-unions-die
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ive never had the luxury of joining a union, since i started working in my teenage years. The fabrication shop where i worked was decidedly “non-union” and very proud of it, and every freelance and staff job ive had since has been non-union.
There have been a few attempts to unionize my field, which is made all the more difficult by the fact that most of us are freelance workers. There is, however, a freelancers google group in which we discuss companies that are very late to pay (Net210 in my friends case), legal troubles, lawyers, and even divorces now.
The spectre of unionization is always conjured up to no effect, ive heard a bunch of different pleas for it in the 10 some years i have been at this trade. maybe someday we will have 401k and healthcare options… for now we are on our own, living job to job in an industry where the next job is never guaranteed
Except this is true in any organization. You enter an organization with the lowest pay and work your way up, by proving your talent or worth. It’s not like unions are unique in that.
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Yes, probably plays a role, or at least that’s what I’d argue. It’s also what unleashed the current era of hyper-capitalism and globalization.
The other tactic is to emphasize corruption cases. I cannot understand why people believe that organizations must be “pure” in order to have their support. Organizations are run by people, so they will be forever disappointed if that’s their measure of worthiness.
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The general framework now is that you work your way up to better pay by moving to a new job, rather than staying. If you start underpayed, HR will make sure you stay that way, no matter how good you are, and the only time you have the leverage to negotiate is when you move to a new job.
When I switched careers to engineering a few tear ago, at my first full-time job, I started with a masters. A couple years later, I’m the person who is training PhDs fresh out of school, with no experience at what we do. I told my boss I thought I was worth as much as a fresh PhD (about 20% more than I was making) and despite his best efforts, he wasn’t able to get that from HR. He got me a promotion, so I had a higher rank than a new PhD, but the raise that came with it meant I was still making less. I started looking for jobs, and the second place I applied to offered me a >40% raise, so I know it wasn’t unreasonable to ask for 20%, it’s just that the HR department’s job is to screw employees.
The idea of staying at one company and working your way up is pretty much dead.
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And that doesn’t make anything I said untrue, either. Loyalty to a company going the same way as labor unions or any sort of collective action - the way of the dodo. This is the extreme end game of individualism demanded of capitalism. And the more individualistic we are, the more corporations will be able to easily fuck us over again and again, even as some individuals manage to game the system and carve out some benefits.
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. . . comparing counties that cross state lines, with one half in a ‘right-to-work’ state and the other in a state that protects unions . . .
Cory, counties don’t cross state lines.
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I’m not cory? Did you just mean to reply to the entire thread instead of to me?
i was puzzling over that detail as well
You’re probably cleverer than I am.
Which is also why so many of the minority Democrats were not fans of the “Let’s focus on class issues, which are the real inequality, and all the rest will take care of itself!” approach of Bernie and a lot of his supporters.
There’s a lot of historical precedent for the white unionists, suffragettes, feminists and other progressive / leftist groups selling out the PoC as long as they get what they want.
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That whole “its really about class” argument frustratingly ignores the fact that race is a class. You really can’t genuinely address one without the other.
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