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I joined my union somewhat by accident, and it's opened my eyes to a lot of what you're talking about. (My workplace is not usually the kind of place that's known to be unionized in the US, so when I showed up I was surprised to hear it was a thing. I did my due diligence and decided to join.) I'm of an age and socioeconomic stratum where union membership is not only not really done - people don't even really know what unions do or how they work, and I was essentially just as ignorant. > I could say my money is better but it’s nowhere near as secure and dependable, and although it looks so much better paper, I’d be spending a huge amount to get the same benefits privately. The real epiphany moment for me came when I understood that my lifelong fixation on salary, into which I, as an upper-middle-class person, was socialized from a young age (along with everyone else I know), is a form of sleight of hand: in a society like ours, with a gutted social safety net and enormous inequality, no one tells you in middle school the point you're making here: a metric ton of that fancy six-figure salary is going to go to making up for the absence of benefits and services that could be provided in many cases much more efficiently and cheaply in a less reactionary developed country. And this effect gets worse as you age and have kids, of course. So these days, after getting a tiny whiff of these dynamics in my somewhat modest (meaning not high-status) but fairly-compensated union gig, I find myself wondering, if given the choice between a $200k salary in Idaho or a $100k salary in, say, Sweden, which would I choose? And a second doesn't pass before I smell pickled herring and lingonberries. > I don’t believe unions are universally perfect. I don't either. I'm not blindly ideological about this, and like any human system, human beings can fuck up unions to the detriment of everyone else, too. But man, as someone low on the totem pole in my organization, it's nice to know that a group of competent people with (some) real power actually have my back. |
I disagree with the factual assertion and the framing here. The money that you make is not “intended to ma[ke] up for” benefits and services that could be provided in some hypothetical. The money that you’re saving is to provide for yourself in retirement because you’re the one who doesn’t want to die of exposure or become a burden on someone else when you stop working.