It's possible we'll see a generational wave of unionization.
I fully expect this to happen. Younger folks today are the unlucky beneficiary of years of wage stagnation and home price inflation. They have every right to be angry, and I think they are collectively starting to realize that they have a lot of power to change the status quo.
At the risk of veering into politics, I'm also not sure how this will change the current tribal political lines. Normally this kind of movement would be a strength of the left. But lately the right has become quite populist, so maybe this plays in their direction. Whoever figures out how to capture this massive constituency is set up for a powerful future.
Most unions form at places that are genuinely terrible workspaces where workers have legitimate reasons to hate the boss. As unions become mainstream at places like Starbucks I would expect folks agitating for worker power to less radical.
It's definitely possible in 10-20 years.
I don't think most people, including those that vote Democratic, have much of an illusion of the Democratic party as a friend of labor anymore.
Sure the Republicans actively try to dismantle all worker protections, but the Democrats mostly stand by and say well what can ya do?
The role of Democrats right now is to pretend to fight for normal people just enough to get the votes, then completely fail to do anything so the rich party donors still get what they want.
The Democrats in democrat states have enacted paid parental leave, paid sick leave, higher minimum wages, banned non compete, and many other pro labor laws. At the federal level, the Dems got ACA pushed through also, even though they barely had the numbers and still had to compromise a lot due to just having 50 or 51 Senators, meaning the 1 or 2 Democrats in name only can hold legislation hostage to their will.
It just happened again last year with the Build Back Better bill.
And it's not just because they suck at winning elections, but also because they actively welcome anti-labor candidates into their ranks and crush the more progressive primary challengers even in safe blue districts.
Not to mention that the executive branch has the power to go after labor law violators and for the most part just doesn't.
The Republicans have no problem getting their moderate members to toe the line on their more extreme stuff.
"Moderate" Republican party members would make their statements about "this isn't the way things are done' every time Trump did something crazy, but every single one folded and fell in line, every single time.
If it was the priority of the Democratic national party leadership to get real, actual big legislation done that benefited workers over companies and investors, then they would. They do everything they can to block, blacklist, and crush campaigns of progressive primary challengers. They could do that to the "moderate" members who don't want to pass any legislation at all, if passing that legislation was really a priority.
It's just obviously not something they care about, and it's obvious why.
The party is run by obscenely wealthy members and donors, just like the Republicans are.
Without 51 Senate votes, how?
I would rather not have politicians that “fall in line” for the party’s sake, and rather “fall in line” for the country’s sake.
>It's just obviously not something they care about, and it's obvious why.
>The party is run by obscenely wealthy members and donors, just like the Republicans are.
I think the fact that Democrat states exclusively have better worker protections and laws says a lot more about which party is run by who. Not to mention that federal Democrats actually propose things like universal pre K, expanding access to healthcare (note Republican states exclusively opted out of Medicaid expansion), and so on and so forth.
Also, Manchin is from one of the reddest of red states, so the Democrats don't really have any leverage on him.
Because the Republican party tends to line up with rural voters, they have a statistical advantage in both the Senate and the Electoral College; because of gerrymandering, they actually have a statistical advantage in most House races, too. (That last one is more complicated, but the short version is that when Democrats are in charge of redistricting they tend to favor putting nonpartisan committees in charge of drawing district lines, while when Republicans are in charge of redistricting they tend to favor drawing the lines themselves for partisan advantage.)
The upshot of that means that Republicans can and do win elections by appealing to their most partisan voters, but Democrats literally can't do that. Republicans can get rid of moderate Republicans and still win enough elections to maintain or even gain power; Democrats cannot get rid of moderate Democrats and get the same result.
So, actually, no, the Democrats can't "block, blacklist, and crush" campaigns of moderate members. They can do that to progressives in districts that are still swing districts, whose voters seem to be largely centrist. Maybe that's good, maybe that's bad, but statistically speaking, when centrist Democrats run in those swing districts they win more often than progressive Democrats do. Joe Manchin is not from a swing state; he's from a state that went for Trump by 35 points in 2020. He's a fluke, and if he loses his seat, he ain't gonna be replaced by someone who votes with Democrats nearly as often as he does -- which is, IIRC, about 70% of the time. This is something else that often gets lost: the truth is that the most conservative Democrat still votes with Democrats a majority of the time, just like the most liberal Republican still votes with Republicans a majority of the time.
Maybe this balance will change; maybe it'll change sooner rather than later. But there seems to be this pervasive idea on the Left that Democrats would be able to pass all the legislation they wanted if they just had enough strength or willpower or something, and that just isn't true, no matter how much we might wish otherwise. If you only have 51 people on your side, counting the VP, and a single one of them is determined to keep the filibuster, then you're going to keep the filibuster. There is no amount of pressure you can put on that person that's meaningful, because you will need them on your side for other battles, they know it, and you know it. And if you keep the filibuster and there is no way you will peel 10 people off from the other side no matter what the bill is, you're not going to pass anything that can't get around the filibuster. Period. Full stop.
Yep. And frankly it's something of a miracle that we ever have a Democrat in the White House, and a 50-50 Senate.
Many people (myself included, sometimes) complain about how Democrats seem to suck so hard at winning elections, but the system is so heavily stacked toward Republicans, it's pretty impressive that Democrats manage to hold majorities at the federal level at all.
Turnout is abysmal in these races. I have volunteered in multiple progressive races and it is such an uphill battle to increase turnout by even a few points. Many districts are won by brand loyalty(ie. a politician has been running for decades and so he is a known figure).
The obvious counter-example to this is John McCain's vote to preserve Obamacare and sink the republication attempt to end it. Since then, despite a 2-year period where Republicans controlled house, senate and presidency under Trump, they still could not get a repeal bill passed, due largely to their moderate members.
Manchin's a senator from West Virginia, a state that went for Trump by 39 points. Crushing him would just have McConnell not bringing any legislation to a vote again.
There’s been a lot of door #3 being chosen.
Support for deregulation (of workers rights), global free trade and an alignment with the financial class has been a bipartisan effort for a long time. Democratic policy hasn't been pro-labor in a long time. At best it's labor ambivalent but they support plenty of policies that hurt (American) labor as a direct and obvious byproduct.
1) Reclassify Marijuana as a non schedule 1 drug. (Finally a bill got through the house today to get the ball rolling but Biden could have done this day 1)
2) Declare COVID a national emergency and use that criteria to extend Medicare temporary to the rest of the country. Lets see the Republicans try to repeal that and not get beaten down to nothing.
There are many more things he could have done but does not want to. I have typed up this list so many times that it is tiring because it has been discussed to death at this point. Biden's upcoming historic losses are completely his and his party's fault.
The current Republican strategy is to run on nothing and they are pulling ahead.
The war in Ukraine could slow down and reverse a lot of globalization. Supply chain issues that we've seen during the pandemic have also been particularly. Maybe we'll start making more things in America again and perhaps the Democrats will do a better job supporting working class Americans.
We are living in interesting times. I'll guess we'll see what happens.
The big tent of the Democratic Party wouldn’t exist without the regimented command & control model of the Republicans.
Personally, I think that you’ll see party platforms shift as the current cohort of old people die off and their replacements are poorer and angrier. The parties of 1920, 1960, 2000 and 2040 are and will be different things.
Unfortunately the Boomers will cling on to power until their last dying breath. (ex. Nancy Pelosi running for re-election yet again).
You think politicians will be able to do such a thing? If they just decide to print an extra 100B or so every year, combined with allowing the yearly COLA to lag behind reality, maybe the trust fund won't run out after all.
It's a raw deal for everyone in any case, but it's also a third rail issue. Give people an choice between the abstract (deficit spending is bad) and actual changes to their benefits in the negative direction, most people will choose the former.
The reality is, and has always been, that this group (call it whatever you want) of incomes in the $150K to $400K range is absolutely necessary to include in increased taxation policies to pay for all the spending.
I saw an op-ed from a conservative magazine on this exact theme: [1]. The author basically says, "if we're claiming to be the party of the working class, shouldn't we be in favor of this?"
1: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/republicans...
The idea of the republican working class party has always been more of a clever rhetorical strategy than a reality.
(perhaps, on a more speculative note, also a reflection of the seemingly general conservative pattern of wanting to see oneself as "normal", to the point of sometimes fabricating "silent majorities" and such, even when there is overwhelming counter evidence)
I tend to agree, but then again I really don't grok the Trump thing, and I can't claim that I saw it coming or sticking around as long as it has. At this point I would not be terribly shocked to see a bit of role reversal between the two major parties.
I think this is the fundamental disconnect in left-right (economic) politics. The left, as I see it, wants some guarantee of a good outcome. The right wants liberty, recognizing that comes with risk.
unless it has to do with your education, gender identity, sexual preference, religion, voting, or women's rights, I assume
We had to drag conservatives kicking and screaming over the past 30 years to allow gays to have the right to marry and openly serve in the military, just like we had to drag them kicking and screaming 60 years ago to allow minorities the right to vote, or allow mixed-race couples to marry.
No conservatives lost liberty in any of those instances. They lost their "special" status, which is what they're really worried about and why the populist rhetoric resonates so strongly with them.
Obviously many people changed their minds since then. It is perhaps notable, though, to consider that most of the people who changed their minds since then identify as Democrat, while many more Republicans continue to hold such backward, discriminatory views.
What about the CA Prop 8 against gay marriage that was widely supported by minorities? Were you "dragging, kicking and screaming" those minorities as well?
Clearly you're trying to go for a "gotcha!" type comment, but... so what? People who believed same-sex marriage should be illegal are just as wrong as people who believed interracial marriage should be illegal during much of the last century. It doesn't matter if they called themselves Democrats or Republicans or whatever. It doesn't matter if they were part of some majority or minority. They were just as wrong regardless.
Some people -- Obama included -- changed their minds, for whatever reason. Many people, sadly, still have not. It might be interesting to look at what kind of person still hasn't seen the light on this, and what political party that kind of person is overwhelmingly more likely to identify with, but that still doesn't really matter much to the rightness or wrongness of a previous belief.
My comment was more about calling out a group that doesn’t actually exist or at least has no formal definition based on OPs opinion.
You didn’t answer the question. You agree Obama was a conservative. So is he still? Not “more or less”, you either are or you aren’t.
> Not “more or less”, you either are or you aren’t.
This is not true. This is both fallacy and a lie. This is also refusal to see worls as it is, insisting on comfortable dichotomy.
Then you and I agree on the exact same point. The OP was wrong to say "We had to drag conservatives kicking and screaming..."
There are no "conservatives", there are "conservative views".
These people call themselves conservative. They read what other self described conservatives write or listen to their talkshows. They alter their own views to conform to what those talkshows say.
These people hated Obama. Obama did not shared all that many views with them.
It is hard to know whether you are trolling or genuinely ignored politics and culture from wherever you got born.
So again, is Obama a conservative? If you say no, then how many conservative views must one hold to belong to the group?
> If you say no, then how many conservative views must one hold to belong to the group?
When you proclaim proudly "I am conservative" and share 70% of conservative opinions or more. Or, when you talk about liberal snowflakes. Same thing, really.
So the question is, "how much risk is acceptable?" Are we okay with the idea that getting sick can ruin your entire financial future? Are we okay with child labor? Personally I lean towards providing a social safety net, and I think most people actually want _some_ version of that as well -- but perhaps have not thought deeply about where exactly the balance is for them.
The right are proponents of right-to-work legislation that force unions to represent non-dues paying members for free, and nullifies their private contracts. That's not exactly liberty, and it minimizes risk for owners.
Those union members are perfectly free to create was is called a members only union, which only represents its own members who voluntarily join the organization.
Doing that avoids any of those conditions that you are talking about.
Then you don't understand what "bargaining rights" are. It is absolutely fully legal for a members union to negotiation on behalf of its members, if those members consent to it.
In the same what that it is fully legal for me to hire a lawyer friend of mine, to bargain on my behalf.
What it can't do, is force everyone else, who is not in the members only union, to go along with that bargained contract.
So please, do not say that their bargaining rights are taken away. Instead be honest and say that their ability to force everyone else to have their bargaining rights taken away, and given to the union, against the wishes of those employees, is being removed from them.
Unless you're suggesting someone in this position should have to retrain for a different industry. Which, sure, ok, I guess, but the cost to do so might be quite high to the point of being life-ruining.
And then workers who prefer the union, can join members only unions that are not forced to represent people not in them.
Well, I am talking to you here though right? And there is context here, to this subthread that you are ignoring/missing.
If you want to say "Non union members cannot force 3rd parties to work with them, if they don't want to" Then yes I agree.
But the context of this subthread was about the idea of who is or is not forcing people to do things.
So, to get back to the point of all of this, I was initially responding to someone else who tried to claim "That's not exactly liberty".
But it is liberty. Liberty is the idea of consenting parties, not being forced to do things. So yes it is liberty to say that people can join non-members unions, but that those non-members unions cannot force other people to do certain things.
Do you understand the point and context of this all? It was about whether that is "liberty" or not, which just means who is or is not forcing others to be in the group, or forcing people to work with your group.
I think it's more that the left believes government has a responsibility to guarantee equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome in what is assumed to be a fundamentally inequitable system. The big philosophical difference to me is in what each side believes the proper role of government should be. The right (tending to be the side that supports the military, police, harsh criminal penalties, etc.) believes government's only legitimate purpose is enforcing the laws and defending the borders, in other words the exercise of violence, whereas the left also believes the government has a duty to provide for the social welfare of its citizens in exchange for the power granted to it by social contract.
And when the right says it wants liberty, what it tends to mean is that it wants liberty from the social obligations that the left tend to want government to support.
I think you're close here, but I don't think that's the root of it. That difference in position is important, but it comes from even deeper philosophical differences. I think this boils down to the argument over positive vs negative rights (freedom to vs freedom from).
A worldview built on negative rights has to have a much smaller legitimate role for the government than one built on positive rights. In the former, the government can never make anything better, only potentially rectifying wrongs (usually via punishing the offender). Within that framework, the goal of the government becomes to rectify the worst of the wrongs while disturbing things as little as possible. A worldview built on positive rights inherently leaves a bigger space for the government to behave legitimately, because this worldview sees the government as having a role in making things better.
Of course, there are very few people who adhere 100% to either of these, so reality is a bit more complicated.
People who support police when police breaks laws are not pro-enforcing laws. People who make it increasingly hard to prosecute and investigate cop when those are suspect of breaking law are not pro-enforcing laws. People who make it legal for police to use escalating aggression are not pro law enforcement either.
These people are pro state violence people. Simple as that. Whether it is happening in Russia, America or elsewhere.
There is a section of the left-right spectrum that believes in equality of opportunity, but that it’s certainly not the leftmost people in that spectrum. The left pole is not “equality of opportunity for all” and how far left you are is defined by how strongly you believe in that.
I think it’s more the middle of the spectrum who hold the view and the left extreme is much closer to equality of outcome.
But for catastrophe prevention... you don't have to think the government will care as much about your family as you do to want there to be a support system in for your family if you die, become unable to work, etc...
And "liberty" alone is so undefined as to be meaningless for these purposes. Is "paying less taxes so that the disabled don't have as much help" an example of liberty? For you? For them?
Right. It's weird to me to see so many people framing it in the ensures-good-outcome sense.
A "safety net" is literally a thing that catches you when you fall. That's it. It doesn't push you higher in general; it just helps you avoid the lowest of the low.
But, you know what really gives people freedom and liberty? The freedom to fail without worrying about how they're going to keep a roof over their head and a meal on the table. Without worrying that they're one medical emergency away from losing everything they've worked for.
You want people creating small, lifestyle businesses? Give them a safety net and let them take that step without risking everything.
https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Economy/Micr...
I'm looking for a better source still, so if you find one please post it here.
EDIT: I found this. Numbers are a bit old (2007), but it shows self-employment rate per capita on page 4, which is exactly the metric we're interested in discussing.
https://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/small-business-2...
So, based on those two sources, your assertion seems straight up incorrect.
[0] https://cdn.advocacy.sba.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/0512...
Who tend to leave for countries where it's easier to run a business and where they don't have to pay for the safety nets, but that's besides the point.
As for freedoms, I don't know. Not that much of a difference between US, UK and Germany from what I can tell.
More generally though, relying on outliers for your argument is perhaps not the best approach.
Venture capital? An awful lot of the venture capital comes from foreign investors.
Monolingual? The global business world runs on English.
Outliers? When it's all of them, the idea it is a coincidence starts getting pretty unlikely.
I'm not convinced that this is the case. Like, the US market is cheaper to operate in relative to other markets the same size (e.g. the EU) because you have an over-arching system of laws, contracts and (most importantly) language.
If your theory is correct, then one would expect the US to remain the largest source of profitable companies globally. If my theory is correct, one might expect China/India to take it's place. Come back in 20 years, I guess?
> Venture capital? An awful lot of the venture capital comes from foreign investors.
Can you point to some sources on this. A quick Google didn't reveal much information, and I really would like to know. Modulo Softbank, I suspect that it's mostly US based institutions giving VC's their money.
> Monolingual? The global business world runs on English.
All of the big companies you mentioned sell to consumers, not businesses, so the global language of business is kinda irrelevant. My point was that the US is a relatively integrated, large market with one language. Most startups begin in their home company. While a startup from Greece would likely have to hire more people to scale across the EU (20+ languages), the equivalent US based startup can scale happily without worrying about languages for a much longer period.
> Outliers? When it's all of them, the idea it is a coincidence starts getting pretty unlikely.
FAANG are 100% outliers, I don't see how you can believe otherwise.
However, Europe has produced SAP (uggghhhh), Spotify, and a bunch of second-tier fintechs (but given the regulatory advantages of the EU in this space, I suspect one of them will conquer the world).
No, but I've heard it many times. I've also seen plenty of talk about the trade deficit not being a deficit at all, as the balance is foreign investment in the US, which is not counted.
> so the global language of business is kinda irrelevant
Attend a trade show. They're in English, even in foreign countries. Every single one I've attended.
The bottom line is, which companies do you invest in?
Just guns?
This doesn’t track. No politician from either side wants to limit themselves out of a job.
It's a naieve mindset to think it's all or nothing.
It's a sliding scale between security and freedom. Every bit of security you want means giving up a corresponding freedom.
Also, most people do not include "freedom to harm others" when they're talking about freedom. I've never heard of anyone carrying a sign saying "FREEDOM" and meaning they want to be free to hurt others.
With "free" government health care, you're not only paying more for it, but you no longer get to choose what health care you get. You get what a government bureaucrat says you get.
I've never made the claim that privatized health care is more efficient. I have claimed that free market health care is more efficient. If you've got evidence that government health care is more efficient, let alone overwhelming evidence, I'd like to see it.
From what I've seen from high school economics, they can laugh at me all they want. But they don't know anything as they are taught by high school teachers who don't have any training in economics and have never held a private sector job or run a business.
Here's a reference for you with plenty of evidence that contradicts your claims. Read it and get back to me.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/09/how-ame...
BTW, you made one of my points for me. You just said that having the government force a plan on you is better than you picking your own plan. You gave up your freedom for security. Exactly what I was talking about.
You're making several basic mistakes thinking about freedom, because once again you're not even familiar with basic knowledge of the topic. In particular:
- Confusing the quality and quantity of choices. Free healthcare increases freedom because it increases overall quality of choices people can make - if you'd even encountered the concept of the capability approach to human welfare (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_approach) you wouldn't have made this basic mistake.
- You're conflating capitalism with freedom, when in fact capitalism is built on top of property law, a very anti-freedom system. Property is the biggest government program their is, and is enforced with violent anti-freedom, liberty-destroying government force.
In other words, you're so ideological you're not even wrong (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong).
BTW, the Soviet Union didn't allow people to own property, and had free healthcare. People were so free there they had to build a wall around it and shoot people who tried to escape. Ditto for every other communist country.
And where do those freedom-loving people want to go? The US. So many, in fact, that the US had to build a wall to keep them out.
What do all those people know that you missed?
Or, in other words, to have the freedom to self-actualize, you must have security in your basic needs.
Some safety net without the negatives would be nice. But where will the money come from?
https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2019/04/08/us-workers-a...
In my new home. I have better access to medical care, the outdoors are better funded, voting is simple and easy.
Both parties want control over the populace. The idea one party is advocating for more “liberty” is a reductive way of viewing politics
Also, golden handcuff means enough money so that you don't want to leave. I don't think such high govermental support exists all that often.
Why did the republicans bail out the banks then?
The right wants you to think you should be responsible but the guys at the top will happily give and take govt money.
Always? No. But certainly since the 1970s.
So based on recent voting patterns, I vote Democrat.
It’s not obvious. Take a corporate tax loophole, is that spending and or a form of economic control? Foreign ownership of US companies compounds this, is it giving money to foreigners or good economic policy etc.
Tax policy you disagree with isn't a loophole.
A loophole is using a thing (a loophole) for something it is not supposed to be used for but is advantageous (entry).
In fact, you could better call this exact tax policy being discussed as a backdoor for rich people in the tax code.
This is an oxymoron.
While yes, it is true that a "loophole" is something that is unintended but allows some subset of people to benefit, when it comes to "tax loophole", that has colloquially come to mean "any means by which a special interest group gets to avoid taxes". "Tax loopholes" can be intentionally added to the tax code, even if "loophole" implies something unintentional.
Remember that English is a living language, and meanings change to suit how people use words, not how the dictionary may have once defined them.
You're wrong. You just have been using the term wrong and listening to people who do as well. Loopholes are unintentional. The things you are referring to are intentionally placed in the tax code for people to take advantage of.
Do you consider the solar credit a tax loophole for people with solar?
>Remember that English is a living language, and meanings change to suit how people use words, not how the dictionary may have once defined them.
Great but this doesn't apply to "loophole". You're just wrong and doubling down.
>tax loophole
>A provision in the laws governing taxation that allows people to reduce their taxes. The term has the connotation of an unintentional omission or obscurity in the law that allows the reduction of tax liability to a point below that intended by the framers of the law.
The classic double Irish with a Dutch sandwich was emergent behavior based on how US, EU, Irish, and Dutch tax codes all intertwined.
But nevertheless the original point stands - the state may be handing out advantages but it is not a form of spending. Not taking stuff is different to handing something out even if in some models they have equivalent effects.
Often things are written so exactly one company benefits when they agree to build something like a sports stadium in exchange for zero property taxes for N years. If that subsidy isn’t large large enough they may also hand out cash.
A subsidy is a payment to the person.
If a farmer lost money one year, the tax break does not financially benefit him.
Money I have left over from paying taxes is not a "subsidy".
“subsidy is a benefit given to an individual, business, or institution, usually by the government. It can be direct (such as cash payments) or indirect (such as tax breaks). The subsidy is typically given to remove some type of burden, and it is often considered to be in the overall interest of the public, given to promote a social good or an economic policy.” https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/subsidy.asp
“A subsidy is an incentive given by the government to individuals or businesses in the form of cash, grants, or tax breaks that improve the supply of certain goods and services.” https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/knowledge/ec...
That’s literally the first two definitions from searching DDG, here’s Wikipedia.
“A subsidy or government incentive is a form of financial aid or support extended to an economic sector (business, or individual) generally with the aim of promoting economic and social policy.[1] Although commonly extended from the government, the term subsidy can relate to any type of support – for example from NGOs or as implicit subsidies. Subsidies come in various forms including: direct (cash grants, interest-free loans) and indirect (tax breaks, insurance, low-interest loans, accelerated depreciation, rent rebates).[2][3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidy
A more common example is to pay nothing and also get a rebait to avoid paying taxes in the future.
The $1400 stimulus payment was not a tax break nor was it income.
Some nonrefundable tax tax credits cap at zero or the AMT for that year.
Other nonrefundable tax tax credits can get rolled over into future years, so people with actual incomes can still pay zero in some years. Aka they go to zero and roll over savings to next year.
However refundable credits mean an actual check even in years you paid zero taxes: American opportunity tax credit, Earned income tax credit, Child tax credit, Premium tax credit. Aka they go to zero then send you a check.
It not that common for people to get a check for the full amount, but it does happen.
I find this a funny criticism considered when Trump won a big swath of non-college graduates (presumably blue collar workers) he was ridiculed for having the “dumb” vote.
He said he loves the “poorly educated”, he never said “dumb”, you did, which I think says more about you than Trump.
You introduced "dumb" as a euphemism for poorly educated. You did that in this discussion. The poster than quotes directly Trump saying he loves the poorly educated, and then you presumably feign being upset at the use of the word "dumb" that you introduced.
That speaks volumes about you.
And regardless, clearly Bilal_io was accusing Trump of something negative or why else share that clip? He literally sad "Trump was ridiculed" and shared that clip. So he agrees Trump was ridiculed for loving the "uneducated vote", which was entirely my point.
You either missed that or are intentionally trying to gaslight me.
Then please share the quote from a legit source (and not joe schmo on the internet).
And again, it's not clear if you know what you wrote. Bila_io didn't accuse Trump of something negative. You again said:
> Trump won a big swath of non-college graduates (presumably blue collar workers) he was ridiculed for having the “dumb” vote.
You specifically introduced Trump being ridiculed. Do you again not see that you introduced this concept to the discussion and yet are accusing the other person of doing it? You both wrote "dumb" and the concept of "ridicule" and are assigning responsibility to both of those to the person who responded to you. You introduced both of those in the context of Trump.
Google it, plenty of articles with headlines like this “Now there's proof: Trump's voters lack "cognitive sophistication," often believe Bible is literal word of God”
https://www.salon.com/2022/03/23/new-research-on-voters-they...
Or maybe "Trump Won Because Voters Are Ignorant, Literally" which includes "Donald Trump always enjoyed massive support from uneducated, low-information white people."
https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/11/10/the-dance-of-the-dunces...
Happy to provide another dozen similar articles if you’d like.
I introduced nothing. I quoted articles (like the above). Sure you can be pedantic and nitpick over “cognitive sophistication” or "low-information" or "ignorant", but you know exactly what they meant - "dumb".
And what did Bila_io say? "No, he was ridiculed for [loving] the dumb vote, because he said so." I would read that as agreement that he was ridiculed for loving the "dumb" vote, the only argument being made was that Trump agreed they were "dumb" (which the clip doesn't support in the least).
And if Bila_io wasn’t accusing Trump of something negative, what was the point of the reply? Just sharing a random clip for fun?
But they don't really mean it and have never meant it. The Republican party, at least in modern history, has never been pro working class in any real sense. The opposite in fact, probably far more hostile to working class than Democrats.
Much of the "pro working class" rhetoric is largely just conservative values like abortion or region. Maybe a better way to phrase it is "pro rural white conservative working class values".
Of course, it is more likely for the Republican Party to talk like it's moving into that territory, but not actually do anything. But, for example, Trump's emphasis on "America over trade" is something that could actually help workers.
No one in this subthread is talking about the millions of Republican voters out there. The people being talked about is the much smaller group of people who set Republican policy. And we don't need to read their minds; we can look at their policy platform and directly witness what they support.
A typical conservative would say something like: what do you call the boss of a small window cleaning firm? Is he a capitalist or a member of the working class? The left generally ignore questions like this because they can't answer them. But they do spend lots of time trying to tell everyone that society is simple and "conservatives" are one big blob that all hate "workers".
Generally conservatives are anti-union, because historically unions have been very tied up with communism, very aggressive/violent and very anti-competitive, all of which are antithetical to what libertarian conservatives believe yield the most socially beneficial outcomes. That is, they're anti union because they think unions are in fact worse for the "working classes" - to the extent such a concept makes sense at all - than not having them.
Republicans hate social programs like welfare because it's so much easier to prey up on John Q Factory Worker when John is paycheck-to-paycheck and terrified of losing his job.
Ditto for universal health insurance. With medical bills are the top cause of personal bankruptcy, tying a basic human need/right to employment is just yet another way they get to hold a workforce in fear.
there will lots of change and crisis until things balance out
>Here’s my standard: When the conflict is between working Americans and a company whose leadership has decided to wage culture war against working-class values, the choice is easy — I support the workers. And that’s why I stand with those at Amazon’s Bessemer warehouse today.
Was there a large ground swell of popular conservative outlets against this?
I’ve been in a union and workers rights often aren’t the priority.
This assumption that you've smuggled in begs the entire question
There's a reason people living in small standardized modular pods in extremely dense skyscrapers is a staple of cyberpunk dystopias.
To go on a bit of a tangent, this is what bugs me so much about the housing conversation. People take fragments of thoughts and stitch them together into belief systems that are trivially incoherent. I'd be happy to live and let live if these people didn't also vote....
Most cities have a downtown core, and even some high-density housing in that downtown core, but so little of it that you can walk the whole thing in a few minutes.
Only higher wages make it possible to have taller apartments in some idealized frictionless capitalist system!
(In the real world, we can and should build taller not matter what, but certainly unionization doesn't hurt with this.)
Unionization is a mixed bag. The UAW has been in the news recently for a seemingly never ending parade of union leaders being sent to jail for corruption.
It seems like people always come out of the woodwork to explain how rising wages aren’t helpful and are solution must always seem to involve paying for more things (this cases houses).
https://econofact.org/why-and-where-are-housing-prices-risin...
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/mortgages/homes-for-sale-hit-...
https://www.barrons.com/articles/may-housing-starts-51623796...
Supplies are hitting record lows.
There will always be millions of temporarily vacant homes in a country the size of the US as people move in and out of homes.
Nobody is asking developers to build only "luxury condos". Where did you get that from?
He did not say that though... He commented that many got built, but withouth any indication of why. You read it as him claiming that 'someone is asking them'. I read it as a reflection on the uneven distribution of wealth (which unions can help with).
> are solution must always seem to involve paying for more things (this cases houses)
If the towns no one wanted to live in anymore were 100% occupied, that would be very bad! It would mean more people were stuck.
If the cities people want to live in were 100% occupied, that would also be very bad! It would mean there’s no such thing as a move-in ready home to terminate your search. You’d only be able to move by swapping with someone, or else everyone in the connected component of moves would need to move on the same day (some cities actually used to do that).
In general, vacancy is good for buyers and tenants; it gives them both liquidity and leverage over sellers and landlords.
Raising wages in places where housing is in high demand, but short supply, will just serve to increase home prices further. That doesn't mean we shouldn't raise wages, it just means the real problem housing-wise is the lack of supply.
About 16M units unoccupied [1].
> How many luxury condos are being built
Quite a few! New construction is almost always targeted at the high-end, which has been true throughout history. Low-end housing, outside specific government projects, tend to be the high-end housing of the past
> and sit unoccupied?
Very, very few. The idea of luxury housing being built only to sit empty for some unspecified "investment" reason has been a persistent myth that has never been backed up by data.
Another way to look at it is that if workers have more money they might be able to better compete with the bankers that are buying houses to rent them out.
Yes, and the pandemic brought a brief moment of dignity (but not safety) to the low paid service workers who make our society operate. They went from the butt of cruel jokes to “essential workers” and “heroes” overnight. It is very, very hard to force people back into undignified circumstances once they’re had even a taste of being treated like a person.
Veering into my own pet theories, I think that the social aspect of who is and is not allowed to be treated like an actual person is a highly underrated factor of unionization pushes. It often costs companies little to nothing financially to treat their employees like actual people, but it feels good to those on top of the office hierarchy to abuse and belittle those they see as their social inferiors. They ignore the risks of this behavior at their own peril.
It really depends on how things play out. E.g. what the extra union dues' payments will be in relation to the extra benefits received from union representation. Or maybe Amazon responds with a "business decision" to close JFK8 fulfillment center.
So it can have the opposite effect. The strong union at the Boeing factory in Seattle WA negatively influenced the Boeing workers in South Carolina. The SC workers voted in 3 different elections to reject the union. The last voting count was 74% against the union.
We have to wait and see what the union can "win" from Amazon.
Given the current labor market, that union could probably bulk sell its labor to someone else willing to come in and pick up where Amazon left off. This is another, less-mentioned benefit of collective bargaining: it aggregates labor.
Because they can't. Not easily, not certainly.
If you've been given direction to quickly deploy a warehouse, being able to sign a single agreement and know you have your work force is valuable. (The alternative involves creating a hiring pipeline, staffing it, running it and lining all of that up with everything else. If you're a scaling company that's a lot of non-core B.S.)
Put another way, all business is bundling and unbundling. A recently-fired union is a bundle of labor. That isn't valuable to everyone. But it's definitely valuable to at least some labor buyers.
Alabama lost a Toyota plant to Ontario because literacy is so poor they would need to translate their documentation into Ikea-like pictograms.
https://www.motortrend.com/news/suv-shuffle-mdx-production-m...
The Toyota RAV-4 decision was made back in 2005. In don’t think education has improved in Alabama since. Also, IIRC, the higher Canadian wages were partially offset by not having to provide health benefits.
I cite it as I’m somewhat familiar with it as a friend and colleague worked for a supplier pricing out a in-region facility.
SC has the lowest union membership in all 50 states - there's a lot of ingrained bias against unions there, and I'm not sure I see the connection to the Seattle, WA plant or workforce.
Just trying to provide some detail.
>SC has the lowest union membership in all 50 states - there's a lot of ingrained bias against unions there,
>South Carolina has anti-union laws [...] the least unionized state, works to prevent workers from organizing there,
Anti-union bias does not fully explain the South Carolina Boeing factory rejection vote because the workers did previously have a union.
Fyi... The original South Carolina aircraft factory (formerly Vought doing subcontract work on Boeing fuselages) was unionized in 2007. Then in 2009, they voted to decertify the union as they no longer wanted IAM (International Association of Machinists) to represent them for collective bargaining. (75% voted to get rid of the union.) This happened around the time Boeing acquired the Vought factory. For various reason(s) (see below), the Vought/Boeing workers didn't feel the ~$1000/year union dues were worth the benefits the IAM union negotiated for them.
Since being being voted out, IAM has repeatedly tried to re-establish union membership at SC but multiple elections have voted against it by wide margins. The last 2017 vote was 74% against. In 2018, IAM tried a new approach of establishing a "micro" union of 175 subset of employees instead of the entire ~3000 employees. The IAM won that micro vote but the Labor Board invalidated the micro union as a collective bargaining unit.
Boeing workers' (current) anti-union stance is based on their real-world experience and not ignorance. The SC workers already know what collective bargaining benefits they had with the union. They got rid of the union anyway. Maybe someday, factors will change and Boeing workers will vote for union representation again.
> Do you have evidence to support that the strong union in Seattle negatively influenced the SC voters?
>, but in your calculus "The strong union at the Boeing factory in Seattle WA negatively influenced the Boeing workers in South Carolina"
No, not my calculus. The SC workers reported it. One example: The workers in South Carolina didn't like the IAM directed union strike in Washington. Excerpt from https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boein...:
>Another sore point that affected Thursday’s vote was that many in the Charleston [South Carolina] work force were laid off last fall during the two-month IAM strike in the Puget Sound region due to the lack of production in Everett.
I don’t have a dog in the fight, but it certainly seemed like the situation with our PNW union sites did not boost support down here.
src https://www.fitsnews.com/2021/10/17/more-boeing-blues-for-so...
It's quite possible. They'll need to unionize several more Amazon facilities in that region to prevent that outcome. Not sure how many more are in process.
It’s currently… 47% pro-union to 53% no-union in Alabama, with over 15% (400+ ballots) challenged by both sides. It could go either way, but “more than 10%” is not backed by any metrics.
South Carolina has the lowest unionization rate in the US, a country that itself has a 6.1% private unionization rate. A Boeing executive said to the Seattle Times Boeing was opening a production line in South Carolina to avoid unionization and strikes. South Carolina has anti-union laws that Washington does not.
Boeing purposefully moves to the least unionized state, works to prevent workers from organizing there, but in your calculus "The strong union at the Boeing factory in Seattle WA negatively influenced the Boeing workers in South Carolina".
Hold it there, sparky.
Management (now in Chicago to put distance between them and the unionized workforce) established the South Carolina facility to try to escape the union, and as a result, saw such a sharp drop in Quality over and above what was going on because of the financialization of Boeing entire nations refused to take delivery of aircraft from that facility.
Given the specifics at hand here, that would likely be seen as a retaliatory move to discourage unionization in other branches, which is illegal. There's actually precedent in some cases for forcing an employer to reopen a branch if it was found to be closed as retaliation for union activity.
I would like to see a wave of unionization, but I’m skeptical that unions as currently structured can actually deliver for workers. In the last few decades, as private sector union membership has declined, unions have lost influence within the larger left. They find themselves as followers rather than leaders within the Democratic Party. Even a couple of decades ago lots of workers like my father in law griped about the unions not delivering benefits that justified the dues. That’s only gotten worse as unions increasingly get enmeshed in generic progressive causes the workers themselves often don’t support.
It doesn’t appear that Amazon Labor Union affiliated with one of the big national unions, which is a positive sign. If they can deliver real benefits for workers, other locations may unionize too. But they’ll have to be laser focused on benefitting Amazon Workers and resist the urge to get over their skates.
One can only hope. Collective bargaining is the most powerful tool to dismantle income inequality and corporate greed.
Now worker representatives in boards, that would be very beneficial.
It seems like anti-union proponents will remind you of the bad times when unions had too much power, and union supporters will remind you of the bad times when the employers had too much power. These days we actually see a lot more of the latter. Will we swing back and forth indefinitely? Probably.
MAYBE you could in Europe, where in 1980s there was some decline in private sector investment concurrent with lower profit rates, but that never happened here.
But that's not what we're talking about here. If I am making $8 an hour at my current job and Amazon is willing to pay me $15 an hour but the union says no, first of all we insist on $20 an hour and second of all we decide who gets those jobs and your name isn't on the list, that isn't worker rights, is it?
It's not worker rights or employer rights, it's union rights. Wise up. There's a long history here - certainly on Staten Island - about how this all plays out and where the money goes.
BTW, the way you characterise unions are interesting. Very different from how they work here in Northern Europe. I wonder if American unions really are as corrupt and screwed up as the Internet makes them sound.
I didn't elect a union. If I want to work for a company and they want to hire me, how does a union have the power to tell me I can't work for them and the company can't hire me?
I understand unions have caused problems in the past. They've caused huge problems, and have had to be scaled back. But that's exactly the balance I'm talking about. We're just swinging on the pendulum towards workers rights at this time. I'm 100% sure if more unions spring up, we'll be hearing horror stories about work stoppages and companies shutting down product lines. But we hear plenty of horror stories about companies mistreating employees right now. We're just riding the free market pendulum.
It doesn't exactly get me out of my seat to think that Amazon might have to make a little less profit, or pay their executives $50 million less next year, or hell, even that prices might rise a little, if it means the free market is actually at work. In an ideal world the pendulum would stop swinging, and we would be in the middle forever. That should theoretically be the job of our government. But I don't see that happening any time soon.
That might have been true of Walmart stores, which are relatively small and cheap to build, but I do not think it’s true for Amazon. The cost of relocating a warehouse is high, the number of places they can put a replacement warehouse is low, and the risk of another unionization push is non-trivial. Especially since Amazon is already beginning to hit head count issues; treating people as disposable drones doesn’t work when you need so many workers in a hot job market. They are probably making their unionization problems worse due to the way they view and treat their warehouse workers.
To be clear, I think they’ll try. What we’re seeing from Amazon is a real inability to react and innovate to new labor markets. I just don’t think it’ll work out as well for them as it did for say, Walmart.
So there might be a lot of, or a least enough to make a difference, overlap in the hiring pool, depending how far they relocate.
And is precisely why Amazon fought so fiercely (and underhandedly) to derail a similar effort in Alabama around this time last year.
The more things change…
That stupid system will still be there after all of those jobs are automated away.