once unions disappeared in america, the working man lost wages, political representation and so on.
I've worked the same role in union shops and non-union before. Non-union paid more and had less deadbeat co-workers to navigate around. Depends on your profession and skills, honestly. Probably a benefit for amazon pick and drop workers.
Really sucks at mixed union and non-union tech companies, though. At my current company programmers aren't even allowed to move our own computer between desks because only union people are allowed to do that, and getting the union people to do it will take over a week and be done at an inconvenient time interrupting work.
This is also likely an insurance limitation as well. Where I work most employees are insured for basic injuries on site. Only those required to move equipment have the add on that they might move equipment weighing 50 lbs or more.
So if I move a desk that weighs 51 pounds and throw out my back, getting work to pay for it might be difficult because I should have gotten facilities to do it as they have the heavy weight add on.
It feels like you're trying to blame the union for pretty standard practices at established companies.
I think this was a case where no reconfiguration was involved.
The two big arguments I see against unions are
1. lazy workers
2. corruption
And in the case of 1., I mean come on. Lazy workers are everywhere union or no. In the case of 2., yes this happens. Wage theft from the worker by management happens probably a lot more, on the other hand. It impacts at least 1/3 of minimum wage earners in cities like LA and Chicago, and for those who have experienced a pay violation on average they loose out on 12.5% of their actual paycheck (1). Just look at the second page of this report and see the horrors for the working poor in our country who are under very little labor protections; all of these issues would have been stymied by a union protecting labor.
At least with a corrupt union you have some recourse where you can drum up internal support among similarly exploited people, and change your organization via vote. As a nonunion worker, in contrast, you can't do anything to enact change if management isn't playing ball with labor, short of quitting your job and losing any and all your benefits like healthcare in the process.
1. https://irle.ucla.edu/old/publications/documents/LAwagetheft...
Wage theft is serious, but has enforcement paths independent of the presence of a union and if reform is needed, it should start there.
I am sympathetic to the plight of the poor but they can be harmed by labor practices supposedly friendly to them.
Sometimes people end up in the "yes I can do that" status group.
Could be they have union representation and contract rules that give them considerable agency coupled with low cost and risk.
Could be they are untouchable for some other reason too, principle friend, family, lover, child, sibling... Or, could be they have secured it through various relationships, power, leverage.
Unions do not cause this.
Poorly functioning workplaces can permit it to happen, and any workplace, union or not, can be poorly functioning for a ton of reasons, legal, contractual, managerial, financial...
Where that agency exists, sometimes people exercise it, simple as that.
It's completely plausible that unions are bad for both employers and employees.
While you try to find some bad example of unions and show us how they ruined some companies consider that I will respond with similar examples where the CEO and the board did even worse stuff - so maybe we skip the examples comments and we can conclude that there can be bad unions and bad CEOs (or board/whatever), the main difference is that one group controls a lot of money and can create a lot of PR to present the other group as evil.
CEOs also control a lot of money and create a lot of PR, so don't try to paint them as always the good guys.
Statistical multiplexing is the only thing that makes unions viable to my understanding, and I may be wrong on that, as warchests may be partitioned by workplace, I can't confirm whether or not that is the case.
This is also one of the reasons why I'm not sold on the illegalization of secondary strikes. Labor should absolutely exploit network effects to make up for the fact that the capital class will pretty much by default.
Classic. But historically, advances in wages and advantages tightly follow the economic curve: Employers increase wages when skills and economic development gets better. Not correlated with unionization, even when the union is here when the paper is signed and brandish it as a success (looking at you, Congé Payés in France in 1936, many companies were already doing it when the union gathered with the bosses to say “We do it”).
Except that hasn't been the case since the 70's
I think your perspective does not match the reality of the last 50 years or so. We are not in the 1800's or early 1900's, when unions were super important in shaping our labor laws and actually helping workers. Nobody can deny that.
Since then?
To reuse a phrase: The huge sucking sound you've been hearing are jobs --union and otherwise-- going to China by the millions. Unions, and their aggressive anti-business stance in the US, have been a part of this exodus. I know people who forcefully retired from a number of union jobs as their unions decimated their respective industries and their jobs went to China.
Sure, of course, reality isn't a single variable problem and we can't just blame unions for the erosion of our industrial base. There are many factors that led to this, including our incompetent politicians and their never ending quest for party power rather than what's good for the nation.
Unions in the US have become distinctly different from their European counterparts. Our unions use the threat of destroying a business as a way to get what they want. European unions have somehow reached a balance where they understand protecting the business is just as important as protecting workers. It's a far more symbiotic relationship rather than a brutally adversarial one.
No love lost of Amazon here. I just think it is important to understand history so we don't repeat our painfully-learned mistakes. The US and Europe are out of time. We can't make more mistakes. We have been helping China achieve the rank of second economy in the world for fifty years. How much more self-harm is enough?
I desperately want to go back to having manufacturing in the US as an option. Today, that option does not exist but within very specific boundaries. Anything "union" is dead, whether they know it or not. Save this message and read it again in 10, 15 or 20 years.