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Comment by archagon | Hacker News Reader

Forays into politics? Isn’t a union inherently political?

No. I am not paying $1,000s in dues for them to spend it on a rally to "End Child Poverty" (to use an example currently in my inbox; and it's a good cause, just not a good use of my dues). My union exists to represent and protect me and my coworkers. Nothing more, nothing less. ...at least thats the way in should be, IMO.

>My union exists to represent and protect me and my coworkers. Nothing more, nothing less. ...at least thats the way in should be, IMO.

This is a political issue. Your rights as a worker only make sense within a countries political apparatus.

No it isn't. It's a collective negotiation between workers and their employer.

With rules created and enforced by a legislative body called a…

Which are only upheld through political structures ...

That's it, the union: every union for themselves, no cause no solidarity, just cold hard mercenary cause of money for you! That's the true spirit of labor, I'm sure.

How about the career of the bosses of that union? You are not paying to advance them to the next step but suppo3End Child Poverty is probably well received by the people that will support them in their next job.

It shouldn't be. Of course I think sometimes it has to be. But it is supposed to represent the employees in a collective bargaining agreement. That is it. You could argue they should be involved with some politics around labor laws.

This is all literally politics.

The reason you'd need to form a collective bargaining agreement comes down to politics surrounding labor laws. Hell, your ability to form unions in the first place comes down to rights granted to you by the government.

Can you see that spending money on charities vs spending that money on collective bargaining could be both under the category of "politics" but not equivalent in their form of "political action"?

The point is that if you talk about unionization, you're talking about politics, because unions don't exist in countries where the politicians made them illegal.

Sure, but this conversation was about a union that already exists, so that hurdle has been cleared. There are still politics, but now they are different, they are the politics of "please spend the money I give you on X not Y."

I wouldn't call running a vegetable shop "politics", even though politics clearly affects the environment you operate in (tax rates, bylaws, heck some weird dystopian place could ban vegetable shops entirely!).

Of course running a vegetable shop is political. Politics is the question of who gets what. There have been countless societies across history, and still exist many, where the political formations meant the very concepts of “shop”, “business”, or even “employment” per se were foreign.

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