| > Rules against firing someone for being gay or a different religion are a great example of something a union would negotiate Except they're not, that's what our existing laws are for. > Why do you see 'working conditions' as unrelated to these topics? Because in my reading of this it doesn't sound like they're going after things like vacation time, pay, IP rights, you know, day-to-day stuff that a union would really be concerned with. Instead it sounds like they want to define a shared set of principles that tech workers should believe in and then through sheer numbers said workers would convince their employers to be more socially conscious. So again, I'd be shocked if the results of this were anything other than "A real tech worker believes in the right to an abortion, a real tech worker believes in gay marriage", etc. instead of, say, "a real tech worker believes in a minimum of four weeks paid leave" and similar statements. tl;dr it's gonna be a bunch of touchy-freely Bay Area stuff. |
> Except they're not, that's what our existing laws are for.
Ironically, unions are allowed to terminate memberships for reasons that would be illegal to use as grounds for firing someone[0]. In a closed shop, terminating a membership is tantamount to firing someone, so that literally means employees covered by a closed-shop union contract have less recourse if the union decides to fire them than they would if they never had a union contract to begin with.
Also, a democratically-elected body will (in theory) represent the majority of people whom it governs. If a majority of people want to target a minority religion or race or ethnicity, a democratically-elected body representing them will do just that. Unions actually have a long history of lobbying for unbelievably racist laws throughout the 20th century in order to protect their majority-white members[1].
I know this is unpopular to say here, but as someone belonging to a group that was explicitly targeted by these unions as a scapegoat, and who had their US citizenships revoked and property seized due to successful, xenophobic lobbying by those unions, I'm really sick of the pervasive assumption that unions will inherently protect minorities, or even minority members.
[0] This includes retaliatory termination
[1] The AFL is the most well-known of these, but they weren't the only ones.