That jumped out at me too. My reading was the implication that if there was a union, you would lose that. It seems like a common anti-union talking point, from what I've seen at Walmart and Whole Foods.
I work under a union (though I'm not a member yet). Obviously every union is different, and every contract is different, but this sounds completely insane to me.
My first point of contact is always my team lead. If they ask me to do something unsafe, for example, I just say so. If it's not resolved there, I'd go to my job steward. The job steward exists to be the on-site worker advocate. I've spoken to my job steward about an issue maybe once ever.
I can't imagine how not having an advocate would ever be beneficial for me. It's simply an alternate path of escalation for issues which doesn't end at management saying "shut up and do the job".
The simple answer to not wanting to get sued for speaking with your manager is to have your union not write a #@&!*ing contract that allows workers to get sued for speaking with their managers. (Duh?) I'm sure that clause has existed somewhere, and I'm sure they had a reason for it, but my experience is that 99.99% of the time it's just like any other job, but with better pay and working conditions. If your manager is reasonable and listens to your grievances, then the day-to-day is literally no different than non-represented work.
It truly depends on the context. Can this type of siloization be detrimental to quick fixes? Absolutely. But are quick one-off sweep-under-the-rug fixes the best thing for less-vocal workers if there is a likelihood that similar problems may be occurring for them? The devil is in the details, and suing a member would hopefully be a last resort in case of a member knowingly stepping on the heads of others. Now, I’m not naive enough to think that all unions are rationally run. But having an environment that is hostile to them on principle doesn’t help.
Unions have sued their own members for speaking with managers about grievances.
When someone did an end-run around the agreed-upon way of handling conflict, and thought they'd go leverage their personal friendship with the manager to get what they want? Yeah, I could how that might happen, that's one of things unions often try to prevent.
What sort of grievance here I would normally expect a worker to first use the standard grievance procedure (in most cases) before coming to me.
Or is it "Hi Boss we come from the same village / clan /race how about you put me on that sweet work detail/shift".
I have (in the UK) personally overheard a guy working at a well known company say this - Also Fords at Dagenham had a scandal where white workers monopolised the better jobs.
My guess would be that it would be because the member is trying to cut an individual deal on a group problem. This is how the capitalist class practices divide and conquer.
> Modern capitalist societies—marked by a universalization of money-based social relations, a consistently large and system-wide class of workers who must work for wages, and a capitalist class which owns the means of production [....]
I expected another definition in the context of that comment, but fine. According to that, it's anyone who owns the means to production, and is thus the most open class possible. Rather strange to say they're dividing and conquering when anyone can join.
Anyone who owns the means but does not actually do the work of production. This is in contrast to a worker-owned structure. It leads to concentration of power, since the profit from many workers goes to one or a few owners. Each owner is more powerful than any one worker, so workers have to act collectively to have leverage.
Owning a few shares isn't really what's meant. If your way of life still depends on earning wages for the bulk of your adult life, that's usually not what people mean by the term "capitalist" (or "capitalist class"), since it'd be a pretty useless definition.
As always I'm divided on comments like this. The first half is entirely accurate - it's trying to keep individuals from cutting their own deal and undermining the value of the collective bargaining process. I just don't know if we should start using a framework of class conflict to go along with it.
I feel like the point could easily be made without mentioning the "capitalist class", which seems to weaken the argument. But I don't know if the particular word choice terminology has no value? Should a point be inflammatory for those who oppose it? For some people putting it like that, using the ideas of class conflict conflict has value, but it seems to further divide the conversation. Is it more important to tell it like you think it is, or to try and make a point that the most people will agree with? I don't know what the solution is.
If capitalist class were replaced with managerial class? Or just management?
That's how I read it as I'm not sure capitalist class makes a whole lot of sense to me in the context, and I'm sure the commies used exactly the same tactics anyway.
It's just the use of clearly something that's very meaningful to the author, but I wonder if it gets lost or just serves to exacerbate people who aren't viewing it from their same angle, causing the point to be discarded.
Unions have sued their own members for speaking with managers about grievances.