I know for many people the main condition is that their work wouldn’t be cool with it so would lose income or threaten job. in union strikes, a huge part of our dues goes towards a strike fund to make sure people get income when striking so i think i would like to see some crowd funding general strike fund or some sort of union type thing but anyone in working class can join & point of it is to organize and fund assistance, legal help, anti-retaliation.
I’d be down to general strike though, some massive positive changes in history have been via general striking since wealthy class freaks out.
what do y’all think?
Unions have earned their bad reputation in the US. Union management is more evil that corporate management, and corporate management is not very good.
Yes corporate management isn’t always good, but they are not nearly as bad as union management makes them out to be. Meanwhile I’ve seen the sillyness that unions enforce (I can’t plug in a network cable - that is a union job) and I want nothing to do with them. Unions need to clean up their own act before trying to get me to join. I’m not against unions, but the way they work in the US I’m very against. Start looking in the mirror and seeing what the real world is like and not your strawman vision of what you think my issues are!
Unions in other countries work very different. If you live in Europe, you have no idea what unions in the US are like, so stop.
Be the change that you want to see. You point out all these things they are doing wrong, have you tried running for a union leadership position and changing the things you see they are doing wrong?
I’m not in a union. Once in a while unions try to convince me I should organize, but everything I see says if I vote to organize it will not be a new union that I could have power in. Instead I will be forced into one of the large existing unions that I will be a tiny player in and unable to get a high leadership position in.
Besides, I’m an engineer. I can lead people, but that isn’t what I want to do. Thus even if I could run for a leadership position I find that a thankless job that I don’t want. I have only so much time on earth and so I have to choose what I spend my time on.
Are you? Are you actually a Professional Engineer who is in a position of authority within the business and has the leverage of a license stamp to compensate for the lack of a union? Or are you a glorified technician who, like so many other “engineers,” absolutely needs a union but doesn’t believe it because your engineering degree inflates your sense of rugged individualism?
I am not legally a professional engineer. However I do have a degree from my universities school of engineering. I could go through the paperwork to get that professional engineer certification, it just hasn’t been a useful thing for me to do. (professional engineer doesn’t really cover computer science topics even though my code can kill just as much as a bridge collapsing could kill)
I can respect some aspects of that. Not everyone is meant to or even cut out to lead. Good on you for realizing that about yourself.
What I don’t understand is how you see the obvious benefits of a union, and how a small portion of your pay check could go a long way to making your own benefits better including increasing your overall pay so that union due are less of a burden on your budget. No one said you had to be in charge. Find one other person who agrees that unions can be/do better and get them to run, because not ever person out there wants to be a greedy mob boss style union leader. A union is about to be the only thing standing between you, and that CEO thinking you’re little more than slave labor, because this administration is dismantling as many consumer and worker protections as it can.
What I don’t understand is why you don’t see the obvious downsides of unions. The small cost to my paycheck is nothing. However the focus on seniority over objective who is better at their job, and refusing to allow tracking metrics (I legally probably shouldn’t even say that much about the contract I’m thinking of: to those who want evidence I’m not allowed to give it) about he is better has always bothered me.
The union is not the only thing standing between me and the CEO. I can find a new job. I have done it before. Overall I find my company treats me well - not perfect, but better than other places I’ve worked. My power to walk away and find a new job gives me a lot more power than the union would. (in fact in many unions I’d have less power because then I’d be required to work only for that union and so if the union has a mod boss I can’t do anything about it)
More power to yah, my friend. I imagine you can only point to anecdotal evidence to support any of your claims. Let me know if you need me to do some research for you on all the studies that show unions have an overall positive effect for all it’s members, and non members who just complain. I get that some union leadership might suck, but I would point you back to the first post where maybe you should do something about it.
I won’t even make you pay dues for the first link
https://www.epi.org/publication/unions-and-well-being/
How do you think unions in other countries gained the reputation and power that they have? Being in a union is the first step to have a better union.