You can’t touch a single police officer without them throwing a hissy fit and shutting everything down.
When I talk to people they seem most upset that unions don’t work for them. They feel a part of something so large that it doesn’t care about them.
People aren’t opposed to unions because they think unions aren’t powerful, they’re opposed to unions because they’re powerful.
It is the rich and powerful who are opposed, the public is just afraid and brainwashed out of their own power.
That’s not true though. I’ve talked to plenty of working class people who hate unions and hate dealing with union workers due to perceived laziness, bad work ethic, and the inability to fire bad workers.
Also plenty of unions are full of rich and powerful people: pilots unions, doctors unions, actors unions, sports athletes unions.
When workers unions are in arms, they are very effective too
i dont think police unions count, they are gang/mafia that can browbeat a city to giving what it wants(they can refuse to actual do anything about specific crimes if they so chose), its fully supported by the gop and dnc, because they can use to keep the general population at arms length. it was discussed many times on subs, how they arnt like voted on or have grassroots upbringing.
This can be countered by having non local cops in the mix, having frequent transfers of cops.
Yes these can be seen as union busting.
Unions are good and they work. But just as any good things in excess it becomes poison.
What other unions protect their members from murder charges?
Wow. That’s insane.
HMMMM, I wonder why police unions were allowed to exist, but all the others were decimated and neutered?
interesting. In some place and time, they won’t. And cops were not allow to vote too.
People parroting this are falling for the capitalist propaganda. Unions work so well that the ruling class has employed a mass campaign against unions. That isn’t weakness.
We the working class keep our society running, we can shut our society down, and this scares the shit out of the ruling classes who while wealthy in assets, are weak in number.
The countries I know of where employers have decent vacation etc and don’t hate the employers, all have strong unions.
If unions doesn’t work, then maybe you are doing it wrong.
AFAICT not really true for Austria (where I live), we get 5 weeks of vacation, yet I don’t hear very much about unions and am not myself a member of one
Honestly Austria is probably one of the exceptions to the rule. You’ve got a weird history with labor and economic systems post WW2 and even before that causes you guys to just kinda be doing your own thing. Hell I’m pretty sure Austria is the only occupied territories the Soviets just kinda allowed to leave their bloc.
These things are subject to cycles. Things are shit, people unionize, things become a bit less shitty, people stop unionizing, things start getting shitty again, rinse and repeat. Most of Europe is ending the part of the cycle where people thought they didn’t a union anymore.
Unions are for states (Nations) which are run for pure profit growth governments that focus on corporate health over humans.
Countries which have this baked in at the Government level typically don’t need Unions because the government is the union.
That is not, and never has been the case in the US.
The only issue with Unions is a corporate system that has spent decades on a campaign of misinformation and vilification.
Never forget that its unions that gave you a five day work week, 8 hour days, and child labour laws.
Nothing is given by a corporation out of the kindness of their heart. And nothing makes them more gleeful than listening to people repeat their anti-union screed.
Especially the police unions in Massachusetts, where they have a stranglehold on public works. Need to dig up a sidewalk to repair a water main? That’ll require a 2 person police detail for a minimum of 6 hours, and it’s all overtime pay.
Bet you can’t find civilian flagged anywhere in the state.
Unions aren’t possible at my company.
1/3 speaks Spanish, 1/3 speaks some African dialect only they understand, and the other 1/3 speak english, and the entire culture aims eachother’s hate at eachother.
This is America.
Ashley Furniture btw. Full on bodyslam under the bus.
This is how immigration is used to divide the workers.
Wish you the best.
As for Ashley furniture… garbage and overpriced furniture. Never again.
Aren’t they the new wayfair?
Wayfair is based in my city and notorious for treating their employees like absolute crap and doing the ‘up or out’ business model that only rewards people who work 80hour weeks
Unions work depending on how ‘in it together’ you feel.
If you resent the people standing around doing nothing they start to fail. If you resent the people who do worse work than you for the same pay they start to fail. note that on an assembly line the above isn’t possible in the first place - which is why they work great there. (Bus drivers and police are also not really measureable like that)
To me, this is an area where some unions could really make up some ground with conservatives and liberals. The instinct to rally around members can be detrimental to the overall goal of the union when that member has been proven to be a bad employee. I’ve never been in a union, so I’m guessing the stereotype of lazy union workers is probably overblown; but I’m sure there are examples that reinforce it.
one of the biggest tools used in america to break unions is creating a 2-tier workforce (incentivizes one group deciding to work less-hard, which builds resentment) and by purposefully lowering hiring standards. lotta unions in the US really are complacent, seemingly having forgotten that these same capitalists they regularly fail to bargain with have literally attempted to murder them multiple times within living memory.
when all you know is the farm…you don’t realize just how much better it could be, i guess.
I suspect that some of the ‘lazy union worker’ stereotype is workers following their contract and refusing to do non-contracted work, which is, of course, essential to maintaining the value of that contract. Pride in your own work/trade doesn’t mean cleaning up after the other trades; professionalism in your own work doesn’t mean unpaid overtime to fix someone else’s fuckup.
In a capitalist world unions will always exist because there will never be any laws to protect the producer of capital (the worker). Imagine how much union dues could go back into the worker’s pocket if they were protected by their government?
In a capitalist world unions will always exist because there will never be any laws to protect the producer of capital
so we’re living in the real world here
And they only got there by striking and work actions because the nature of their positions gave them the leverage needed to be effective. The NYPD can’t ship the factory to another country or bring in immigrant labour to do policing. If they aren’t policing, property rights won’t be enforced for businesses. Leverage. The police are the mechanism that break labour strikes and protests on behalf of capital. There is no such mechanism to break a police strike or protest, except the feds or the military which won’t be used.
Most labour jobs do not have this kind of leverage because technology shrank the world and business has negotiated trade deal that give them the freedom to undermine worker leverage. Workers have no leverage to force capitulation. Labour has long lost any control they had to influence business practices and fight for themselves. Labour actions would have to be across the entire company to effectively force capitulation and that is next to impossible because labour ain’t a community anymore thanks to anti-commie fear mongering. Every union is isolated, every location is separated, every company the corporate owns is independent from each other. Labour is too divided to stand united and united is the only way it effectively works. A group can’t fight individual power with individual power, it must fight with collective power and for that, it needs to be united first.
