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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

what I'm astonished by is the degree to which American firms are allowed to sabotage unionisation efforts despite, as I understand it, the US actually having similar protections for workplace assembly as other Western countries.

If you tried interfere with unions here in Germany you'd run up against the law, the media and so on very, very quickly, it's one of the things you don't want to screw with.

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It isn't surprising once you reframe the issue. These unions are successfully suppressed for the exact same reason that people are inclined to form them. The labor class in the US simply doesn't have (or perhaps more accurately doesn't yield) the political power that the labor class does in many other countries. The forming of unions will help them get more power, but the act of creating a union already requires a certain level of power which many US workers haven't yet achieved.

That is by design, really. The working poor in this country have been ideologically divided by moral wedges such as abortion for decades now. Few poor republicans and poor democrats would like to admit that they are in the same economic boat, and as a result typically the former votes against their own economic interest on the grounds of their moral principles.

For the wealthy in this country, the political footballism is the perfect machine to ensure their position on the economic ladder remains at it's lofty heights, and inequality continues to widen by the year. I really don't think republicans like Mitch McConnel care at all about an issue like abortion, they just use it to drum up votes from their base in order to further their economic policy goals.

> Few poor republicans and poor democrats would like to admit that they are in the same economic boat

They might agree that they're in the same boat, but they'll disagree with why they're there.

Poor democrats will blame corporations for keeping wages low and sending jobs to China and lack of government assistance programs. They think the solution is to increase taxes on the rich to provide better social programs.

Poor republicans will blame illegal immigrants for stealing their job, or they somehow think the government is in their way. They think the solution is to cut taxes on the corporations to create jobs (regardless of the fact that this never works).

The labor class has tons of power. The labor class just doesn’t care much for unions in the US.

I'm not, most politicians receive large campaign contributions from large corporations and lobbying groups. It's a largely quid pro quo system that's one step away from legalized bribery.

There's a long history here. The American labor movement secured a lot of those protections in the early and mid-20th century, and they were strong for several decades. It was a hard, violent fight. People died at strikes for those protections.

As we entered the 80's and 90's with the rise of Reaganism and then neoliberalism, however, US businesses as well as the federal and state governments started chipping away at them. Now, between insufficient oversight, "right-to-work (spare me)" laws, lack of NLRB enforcement, and a robust cottage industry of private-sector union-busters, labor has less power in America than it's had in a long time.

It's good to see it start to change.

> It was a hard, violent fight. People died at strikes for those protections.

Just a personal anecdote, my biological grandfathers trunk was firebombed by the Philly Roofers Union (UURWAW) due to a dispute with them. The K&A gang in that area is well known to be tied into the union[0] and was known to fairly regularly engage in violence like that to prevent "scabs". My point being, the violence was omni-directional and this fact is often omitted by those in favor of unions.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%26A_Gang#Roofers'_Union_corr...

Lots of states in the US have "right to work" laws which make it much harder to workers to organize unions.

Entirety of EU has right to work laws, that isn't the problem. The problem is that you even need to vote for a union in US instead of just letting workers join them as individuals.

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