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Comment by PM_me_your_math | Hacker News Reader

Unions are cancer. This isn't the late 19th century anymore. Unions do very little but enrich themselves and exert political power.

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The United Auto Workers union just a month ago won a 33% raise for GM workers and a 30% raise for Ford workers.

Unifor just won a 25% raise for Stellantis workers 2 months ago.

Just 2 months ago the Writers Union just won raises to compensation, health benefits, pensions, and protections against AI.

Just a few weeks ago SAG-AFTRA reached a tentative deal to secure compensation increases, benefits, improvements to royalties & residuals, and protections against AI.

So literally in the last 3 months we've seen unions win major compensation improvements for nearly 2 million workers.

Yes, however you're not thinking of the bigger picture here. How are the executives and the shareholders supposed to afford their next superyacht if they're forced to pay their underlings more!?!

Absolutely, people do not want to share.

> This isn't the late 19th century anymore.

Nope, it's the early 21st century, and inequality in this country is higher than it's been since the Gilded Age. Not exactly a comparison we should want to be making. And the trajectory is still moving primarily in the wrong direction.

How does this help reduce inequality?

https://www.justice.gov/usao-edmi/pr/former-international-ua...

If you want to change someone's mind about unions then one-off links to court cases is not going to work. You'll need to really target the idea of unions themselves instead of finding bad PR. For example, I could go find PR of "corporation bad" but it would not turn someone into a communist.

The wealthy nations with the lowest levels of inequality also have the strongest trade unions. If it is not working in the US, we need better unions, not fewer.

I'll happily get rid of unions once we also get rid of corporations ruled by wannabe-dictators. Until then, unions are a necessary counterbalancing force to keep executive behavior in check.

Exactly. And, just like governments, they themselves need checks and balances more than anything. However groups of people organizing for collective power is difficult to argue with, imo.

Sounds like those Walmart propaganda training videos got to you. I suggest doing your research on what unions are doing in the 21st century to protect employees.

Their attempt at being an edgelord.

> Unions do very little but enrich themselves and exert political power.

How does that differ from business owners? Such as private equity?

> Unions are cancer.

This is not an appropriate hacker news tone.

Come on. Don't fall for American brainwashing. Some unions abuse their power. But most don't.

But there aren't any unions here anyway - this is a federal agency that facilitates unions.

Frankly this case seems pretty silly on all sides. Some employees sent an open letter to everyone in SpaceX... what did they expect to happen? I think SpaceX was fully within its rights to fire them, and I also support unions.

But also SpaceX's legal argument here is kind of insane. It's predicated on their assertion that the president would definitely have intervened in this dispute if he could have! The law says he can't and that's apparently unconstitutional. Maybe so but it'll probably get dismissed as irrelevant because how are they going to show that the president would have intervened?

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