I've seen good unions and I've seen bad ones, I don't know which this is yet.
The common portrayal (at least in the US) is that unions are evil.
That's why American unions and union activity have been almost completely squashed in the US for decades now.
This sentiment is starting to change a bit as people are finally starting to wake up to the massive inequality in this country and the enormous wealth and power of corporations and the oligarchs who control them vs the barely subsistence existence of the ever growing lower classes.
Sympathy / Support strikes by neighboring unions are not legal for example. This was what allowed unions to prevail at McDonalds in Denmark.
Yes, flipping burgers at McD is a union job Denmark. The BigMac index of Denmark is 4.4, compared to 5.67 in America.
I don't understand why union members just don't break the law and strike anyway.
A lot of the protests during the Civil Rights struggle in America were illegal (and were met with lethal force, dogs, firehoses, etc..) yet the people still protested... and prevailed.
[1] https://libraries.uta.edu/news-events/blog/1981-patco-strike
The main place I see them presented as backwards and unproductive is by common folk dealing with them and some business owners who also resent a lot of the inefficiency.
But ‘portrayed as evil’ seems to try to say that in the media and cinema, etc., they are portrayed as evil … that’s not my experience. My experience is on the ground common folk talk smack about them.
That said, if we get Unions to do the job of the Feds (FTC) and contribute to dragging them down via inefficiency a couple of notches allowing competition to viably compete, I'm all for it.
FOX News is the most successful news network in the US.
It's very much in the mainstream.
Tallest dwarf.
> between the final quarters of 2014 and 2020, paid subscribers to The New York Times’ digital only news product increased from 910 thousand to over five million.
Probably next to none.
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/559028-msnbc-says-it-wont...
MSNBC and others look after their own interests. That interest can be at odds with their ideology. They do not have to be internally consistent.
Bernie Sanders wants millionaires (and billionaires) to pay very high taxes after certain cutoff --all well and good. He's a millionaire, the IRS allows you to overpay or donate to the treasury, but despite his beliefs, he personally does not overpay his taxes.
The Soviet Union believed in workers' rights, except when it came to strategic state enterprises. Same with regard to luxury --yes, they frowned upon luxuries for the masses, but they did have dedicated "department stores" for the elites.
This is something folks love to bring up as if it's hypocrisy (see also: Warren Buffet, also literally any other prominent rich person who's called for higher taxes), but it can be completely consistent to think that a net benefit can be achieved by a policy or law that causes you (and others) a little harm, but to see voluntarily causing oneself that same harm without the collective action to go along with it, as not doing enough good to be worth the harm.
This behavior could be some kind of indication that a person's view is performative and they're in fact hypocrites who aren't serious about it—or it can indicate that they've actually thought this through and came to a reasonable position, or that they simply took the right class or two in college so they know to look out for these kinds of dynamics (where individual action does so little it's basically pointless self-sacrifice, but collective action with the exact same personal cost can be very effective).
They may believe in Unionism at large, for others to observe, like a parent steering their child from drugs, but they may see unions as antithetical to their own business. Lots of elite progressives are like this. Down with cops, defund the police, but then turn around and hire private security -see the mayor of Chicago, for example.
A local non-profit, partisan, progressive newspaper fought its staff on unionizing just as hard as it’s for profit peers. This is a paper that exists to promote progressivism.
Doesn’t make their content any less progressive.
https://dismantlemag.com/2018/12/03/sorry-bother-you-pro-uni...
They're not portrayed a ton in pop culture to begin with, and when they are it's often bad.
The heirs who do not work but expropiate dividends of profits from those who do talking about inefficiency is a laugh.
Why should the worker's creating the wealth care what the idle class owners think?
We could discuss this within for example the restaurant industry, and that could be interesting but AMZ does not fit the 'no generational wealth, just some business owners' rhetoric.
For restaurants what we find is incredibly thin margins being covered up by exploitation of the lowest rung rather than adjusting of prices, efficiencies in supply chain, focused menus, etc.
You just answered your own question. "Evil" is of course overdrawn.
But there is a common perception that they are ineffective, outdated and/or just don't do much in exchange for the money that goes to them. And in some case outright corrupt. Buttressed in some cases by the fact that high-ranking union leadership roles come with comparatively very comfortable salaries (compared to those they are representing).
Which steroetypes nearly all these companies (such as Amazon) make aggressive use of in their internal smear campaigns (it's the primary tool that they have, basically).
That said, it begs the question, why is the 'grass roots' discourse so consistently negative in America, while European and Canadian discourse on the issue seems significantly different? Would you believe there's no intentional messaging?
Oh wait it's not. The very idea that 'the grass roots hates unions' is itself a false portrayal: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/09/03/majorities-...
The States has a VERY long history of union busting, and media is very much involved. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02685662
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-p...
And so on.
Canadians largely consume the same media as the US --so it looks like it's not coming from there.
Grass roots is the actual vox populi and people just don't have a good experience when they interact with Union folk, so they talk bad about them. If people talk smack about WalMart, do you go ahead and then claim, "oh, well, that's a PORTRAYAL, it may be distributed but it's still a negative portrayal perpetuated by the grass roots and the media"?
People have a right to opinions based on experience --too bad if those opinions go against a particular vested interest.
To address your second point; If Walmart was consistently discussed negatively in conversation, on social media, in the news, etc. I'd say that they were portrayed negatively, yes.
That said, my second link is explicitly about media portrayals, indicating that corporate media intentionally over-represents negative elements of unions, so even excluding the semantics regarding whether or not 'word of mouth' portrayals count as portrayals, the point stands.
The higher paying jobs I was pursuing didn't have a union at all and I wouldn't have to pay that supposed 10% either (or whatever the union dues really are), and I didn't plan on being in any particular high paying job for more than 1-2 years before hopping for an even higher paying job, and there is no such thing as pensions or long term benefits from being married to a job, so the association for me was blue collar worker unnecessarily milking a system. It wasn't relatable to me at all, and not relatable or relevant to my perception of the tools available to me in the world, or my ambitions. "Ambitions" only when looking through the lens of the comfortable-enough lifelong 9-5'ers that were surrounding me at the time, until I could finally switch up my surroundings. So far thats been an accurate assessment of unions as well as how my career would go, even though my view is much more pro-union now.
The correlation of who joins unions is still heavily there, but I recognize it doesn't have to be and can include even highly paid software engineers given the size of the organizations they work for now (multiple multi-trillion dollar company, really?), although even these new union pushes are just on the blue collar side. Thats just how its panned out, for now.
Regardless that was just on the seemingly desperate-than-other worker side, on the "evil union" side, it was also reinforced by examples where the union tried something that didn't benefit employees at all. Like when the union tried to get wages raised at some cereal company but it was too much and the company just declared bankruptcy, firing 30,000+ people. It was like how out of touch was the union on the health of the company, and all the employees were also this out of touch too? Or maybe all 30,000 weren't out of touch but just had to toe the party line? But even the non-union workers were effected in this mass layoff because now nobody is employed! Sure, even if it was some vulture private equity firm playing all the fiddles, it just reinforced how powerless the unions actually were. All perceptions leading to the conclusion of "irrelevance of an annoying gang".
Anyway, my view has evolved substantially on this. I'm in favor of some future form of collective organization and collective bargaining of even highly-paid, job-hopping, white collar personnel. I feel like there was a time period where I wouldn't even need that distinction. I want this collective organization to have a board seat or two with some forms of employer, by law. But I've basically gone from one extreme to another extreme (unless my view catches on, of course).
It fomented nepotism and all sorts of other "land grabs" where people would be on a wait list and their plan was to get in, stay in and coast the rest of the time like the other senior Union members.
This does not deny that they may be a necessary inefficiency in some industries and that in the past they did contribute to better labor conditions and are part of labor's patrimony, but are in many sectors of the economy anachronistic.
The average ANNUAL union dues are $400, or 2 hours of pay per month. [1]
1. https://anh.com/the-cost-of-unions/#:~:text=The%20average%20....
I’m repeating what I heard and now know that I don't trust hearsay
This is a chronology of my experience, no more no less, as some people have a different experience, the person I responded to didnt even know some people had a negative view of unions, so its worthwhile to break down what people experience along with the hearsay they experience.
This hearsay was a factor in my perception and decisions at the time.
Higher wages tend to be ignored as it is vague. Harder to fire is tainted by police unions protecting cops from their own actions.
You end up with the benefits being vague and the problems being obvious. Dues are frustrating and any bad union leaders get tons of attention.
For better or worse everyone tends to assume the things unions work for are a given. So the only real talking points become the bad things. Not that this is unique to unions lol.
Some time in the past I had a mildly critical system in a remote office go down. A technician would have to simply replace a part. However, because it required a Union guy to go in there to remove a screw first, it had to wait over the weekend --meaning the company now had to take modest losses over the weekend.
The guy couldn't sneak in a screw driver as that could potentially end up costing the company more money.
This is where unions earn some of their great reputation among stiffs.
Or the company didn't want to pay OT for it?
I'll leave it to the reader to decide which is more likely.
Talk about waste of resources, fuel, etc., etc.
Oh, Oh, Oh! I know, if they let this one time slip HERE in THIS INSTANCE is where the SLIPPERY SLOPE applies, but, obviously no where else, especially in politics.
That attitude pervades the public sector an infuriates the people they are supposedly serving.
Also, the library is open during school hours, so does the teacher not teach during that time? The school has replaced the lost librarian but is effectively short a teacher now.
And who makes the hiring and firing decisions at this library anyway? The union is to blame for management not hiring a replacement?
I put in the request and about 3 weeks later, two people came to move the desk. I'd already unplugged any wiring, so one guy simply picked it up and rotated it. At that point, I found out my network cable (this is in the days before WiFi) for my PC was too short to reach the new desk location. I had to put in another request for wiring, and had to wait a week and a half for someone to come with a longer cable. During that time, I sat on the floor, with my monitor sitting on my chair. While installing the new cable, he asked if I'd unplugged the previous cable before the desk move. When I told him yes, he told me not to worry and that he wouldn't note that, but that I shouldn't do it again.
While I totally understand work rules that exist to ensure that workers aren't being made to perform duties that they're not contracted for AND to prevent companies from simply doing end-runs around them, when things reach this level of absurdity, it really sours things. Of course, the nature of "contract" is that common sense is hard to dictate and it does open the slippery slope. "I was just moving the desk in my cube" becomes "I was just moving the desk to the cube next door" to "I was just moving it on the same floor" etc.
Both categories of unions have problems and benefits, but they don't overlap 100%.
Private sector unions really depend on the industry and the union itself. they can be good, they can be bad. the only time inreally have a problem with them is when they arent voluntary.
Or the desire to coddle vs steering kids in the right direction. Schools completely drive what kids find acceptable and not acceptable socially. It changes over time depending on what the school district finds appropriate.
Even US presidents, 10 years ago Washington, Lincoln were unblemished, today they are complicated figures with defects. But I think you can look to the USSR as well. One day someone is a hero, the next they are counterrevolutionaries and schools follow the dictum.
I'm confused by this. There are many notable large workgroups in the US with powerful unions. Police, for example. Pilots, Teachers, etc.
>That's why American unions and union activity have been almost completely squashed in the US for decades now.
But the public favourability hasn't declined (at-least as per this poll)
https://news.gallup.com/poll/241679/labor-union-approval-ste...
Unions themselves and the reality that so much work is no longer well suited to unionization are responsible for the decline.
Unions served a purpose and in somce cases still should but their long history of corruption and their own oppressive tendencies are what drive people away from them. Nevermind that few people want to pay for the priviledge of having less say about, and in most cases less power over, their own futures and employment.
The only place unions thrive are in the public sector whoch itself is an obscene abuse.
So yes historically unions have been a mixed bag, but it is worth considering how much of the negative aspects of unions were created through changes to laws that ultimately destroyed unions (in the USA).
Is this an established trend? How might I go about observing this?
> I've seen good unions and I've seen bad ones, I don't know which this is yet.
I've seen good FUD and bad FUD. I don't know which one this is yet.
A lot of the "bad" reputation with private sector unions likely originated with the corruption associated with the pension funds investing in shady deals. And we all have horror stories about bad teachers protected by the union or "lazy" workers.
But, without unions the employer has a near-monopoly on the power in the relationship. I think it's generally an improvement to have two sources of power competing with each other - even if both are imperfect - instead of one source of power that's unilateral and unchecked.
It's an American thing because of lax labour laws missing protections from being fired and missing social security.
The company wants to close an unprofitable branch? The union prevents it, because the workers will fall into a hole when their job gets taken away.
Currently in Germany Nordex is closing down a plant and the union is demanding that the plant is sold faster, so there will be new jobs for the workers.
I don't know how to get that. So, I'm more likely to support unions. But I fear it moves further from the better answer.
How about corporations damaging unions?
> The common portrayal of unions as good and corporations as evil is over simplistic and often backwards
One has the workers who created the wealth keep the wealth they created, the other expropriates surplus labor time from workers, sending it off to the idle class heirs who inherited shares in the corporation.
But yes, they can go awry quickly enough.
But even if they screw it up, and even if they are dissolved, they may very well have succeeded in moving the needle on a bunch of critical things.
It'd be great to see them take on Walmart.