[joshe]

American unions are quite different from European unions. European unions spend a lot of time running apprenticeship programs and doing things like advocating for more productivity. Like trying to figure out how to make the shop floor more efficient. American unions spend time preventing bad employees from being fired (like the NY teacher's rubber rooms and police unions fighting the firing of cops with 5 excessive force violations). Or spend time advocating for extra unneeded employees or forbidding employees from doing two different job roles. You can watch the longshoreman's season from the Wire for illustration. It's supposed to be a defense of unions, but accidentally illustrates why they are utterly broken in the US.

There is a use for unions that advocate for increased pay and clearer benefits. But as constructed and run in the US they are poison to the company. A whole layer of weird incentives the company (and workers!) have to deal with. A lot of the sinister sounding anti-union education the companies do points this out. And there's enough truth that it's very effective.

Pro union folks are always tweeting that companies spending $1 million to avoid an extra $100,000 a year in labor costs is evidence of a widespread conspiracy by the man to keep the working class down. Really the union is like adding a whole extra layer of horrible bureaucracy that costs way more than that $1 million. From that viewpoint shutting down a store or warehouse that unionizes make perfect sense.

[maximente]

i mean, yeah, is it really a surprise? most of the purpose (in terms of "the purpose of a thing is what it does" thinking) of organized labor in the US is basically countering ridiculous labor conditions: child labor, not having weekends, etc. when that didn't work, in came the police and the pinkertons (read: violence by the state on behalf of capital, or just violence via capital itself). so it's no surprise that the relationship is adversarial.

plus, i don't really buy this anti-union propaganda. there's a strong correlation between between union membership going down and wealth inequality going up. i didn't say that was causation, but is it interesting enough to warrant consideration? hell yes it is.

i'm guessing most people on this sites are of engineering mind, where they see an "unnecessary" layer of abstraction upon something as worth refactoring out. well... this ain't really in that lane, you see. it turns out that capital is so powerful in the 21st C. that they can straight up move your job to a country with worse environmental and labor regulations, and we all cheer it on in the name of "efficiency". little do we appreciate that that attack on labor is rotting the hell out of the country itself.

[joshe]

1965 was 56 years ago. Unions need to be relevant for 2021.

[6gvONxR4sf7o]

So how do we get european style unions here in america? How is it that they are able to avoid those issues and what lessons can we take that aren't "america just can't do unions right."

[joshe]

It would be great.

I sometimes think that something like a "credible threat of peace" would be useful.

"We are forming a union. If you vote for this union, we will allow workers here to chose other unions. We will never get in the way of firing someone. We will never create job roles that don't let workers move laterally or up. You can lay people off. We will not use our members money for political campaigns. Our workers can move into management without us freaking out.

We will advocate for more pay, benefits, productivity, and training."

[ianai]

Pretty sure that union would be so weak as to be worth disbanding.

[joshe]

Seek to be useful rather than powerful is good advice for people and organizations.

[Frondo]

Repeal Taft-Hartley.

[guerrilla]

"The Taft–Hartley Act amended the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), prohibiting unions from engaging in several "unfair labor practices." Among the practices prohibited by the act are jurisdictional strikes, wildcat strikes, solidarity or political strikes, secondary boycotts, secondary and mass picketing, closed shops, and monetary donations by unions to federal political campaigns. The NLRA also allowed states to pass right-to-work laws banning union shops. Enacted during the early stages of the Cold War, the law required union officers to sign non-communist affidavits with the government. "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taft%E2%80%93Hartley_Act

[bluedino]

>> European unions spend a lot of time running apprenticeship programs

Trade unions in the US do exactly that

[munk-a]

I think part of the stark difference in how unions operate is due to the societal pressures applied to them. All of those "good" unions that would help advocate for employee education and protect workers who were unjustly fired were easier to brand as socialist and ended up being broken up as they failed to devote all of their power towards politics and staying alive. This ends up contributing to that image that unions don't do anything since, in the US, they are constantly maligned by politicians and the press - and since anything even loosely connected to communism (like, here, collective bargaining) has to fight an unhill PR battle in the hearts and minds of Americans.

Unions should exist to serve their workers and the fact that most public unions gain the most power by constantly funneling money into political campaigns is a real problem that just leads back to election finance laws.