[flagged]

Unions are a poor solution to a worse problem. It's like if your roof was sagging, so you propped it up with a rotten log. You might be tempted to remove the rotten log, but that just means your roof caves in. Unions exist to antagonize company owners to keep them from indulging in their worst excesses when it comes to abusing their employees. Removing the union just means unleashing that unchecked power. A better solution isn't to disparage unions, it's to champion corporate structures that grant direct ownership to their employees, to move away from the outdated feudalist structure and towards a democratic structure. This makes unions obsolete.

▲

busterarm 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Or don't move into a house with a sagging roof. Most of the companies that I've worked in my adult life were perfectly fine places without any collective bargaining or ownership.

And I made orders of magnitude more money as an employee in those situations than I did otherwise. The average salaried employee's work grievances are petty to annoying and outside of that either wouldn't be solved with collective bargaining (or ownership shares) or would be solved via the legal system.

▲

kibwen 2 hours ago | parent [-]

It is in the nature of gravity and entropy that every roof starts sagging eventually. Congratulations on your good fortune, but the vast majority of people are not and will never be in your position.

	▲	busterarm 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		well over half of us workers report being satisfied with their job. Also, it's a job. It's not servitude. you're trading your labor for money.

▲

bobthepanda 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think more so the issue with the union rhetoric is that it’s all or nothing. Yes there are bad unions. But also, collective bargaining can form a safety net, and there isn’t much of an alternative when things go south in an industry.

	▲	busterarm 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I agree. But I'm drawing the parallel between situations where people like a certain work culture that they have never experienced because it conforms to their larger worldview. It's mostly projection and doesn't meet with reality. There's a lot that I like about aspects of Japanese work culture but I'm sure that I would find it stifling.

▲

djeastm 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I'd be interested in hearing your experiences. Are we talking mob association? Arm-breaking thugs?

▲

busterarm 5 hours ago | parent [-]

What is this, the 1970s?

No, far more basic negligence and corruption. Negotiating deliberately bad contracts and collecting bribes. Diverting hours and cushy roles to union reps and their personal friends. Overwhelmingly siding with management against employees (which is what you think they're going to be there NOT to do). The kind of day to day petty shit that over time makes your job intolerable.

Oh and that one time in the retail baker's union (BCTGM) when they defended and successfully reinstated an employee who was terminated for _literally urinating in the cake batter every day for months and feeding it to people_ because it wasn't explicitly stated in the contract that they could use video evidence to terminate people.

If your union is protecting people who commit literal fucking crimes and dangers to public health, no, just fuck you and your union.

▲

seabass-labrax 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Your example is exactly the same problem as "admissible evidence" in a court of law. In the USA, it's very common for evidence to be rejected because the collection of that evidence was itself illegal - this is intended to protect the integrity of the system in general, no matter how heinous the alleged crime in a specific case.

So I'm sceptical: was the union really defending that specific employee, or were they trying to prevent a precedent from being set that could be used against other, more upright employees?

	▲	busterarm 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Termination for criminal activity is covered in the CBA's "just cause" clause. The union could have let the termination slide without setting any kind of precedent. Instead the union defended the employee as a flex. The union knew that they had sympathetic arbitration and it was the early years of retail store surveillance being used against employees rather than common criminals (this was decades ago). I doubt a similar case would go the same way today.