The agenda of the left

The GOP won that culture war, bigtime. It turned workers against each other with its incessant union attacks. Even the voters of New Jersey, generally a lefty bunch, hopped aboard, drooling in delight as the buffoon known as Chris Christie attacked teachers.

So now, as you write, even the ridiculously obvious is neither acknowledged nor discussed. Unions help workers in their negotiations with management. Unions help everyday people make higher wages. Anybody who claims to be against income equality, and for the working class and middle class getting a larger share of American wealth, should support unions and reject union bashing.

But they don't. They giggle when the buffoon humiliates people at town meetings.

It's not a culture war like the flag culture war. It's an attitude culture war, wherein the GOP has invited the majority (non-union) to join it in mocking and ostracizing the minority (union members). And people who should know better accepted the invitation. They became the cool kids, smirking at the losers. But who is the loser now?

 

Unions also contributed to their own downfall. Race based protectionism in some cases. Corruption in other cases. And wading too deep into politics at times. Should have resisted becoming a proxy for the Democratic party.

Going back to the race issue, the old timer blue collar union white guys need to understand that there is no growth for them anymore out in whitelandia. If you want to grow you need to come into the city where black and brown people live and offer union trade apprenticeships to bring in new young blood. If you look around the country the membership success stories are almost always in sectors that have large minority segments.

 

For the union part, let's hop into the Wayback Machine and look at how St. Ronnie handled the air traffic controllers and the effect it had on organized labor. As I've said before, this country and especially the middle class has never really recovered from the "Reagan Revolution"

When PATCO went on strike in 1981, Ken Moffet was the chief federal mediator. He says the union wanted a shorter work week and higher pay. Moffet says the strikers believed if they were gone, the safety of the flying public would be at risk. But that wasn't entirely the case.

Moffet calls the strike a "calamity," not just for the fired air-traffic controllers, but for unions everywhere. Back in 1981, labor negotiations centered around the size of workers' raises. Subsequently, management began going after all unions for concessions and laying people off, he says.

Georgetown University historian Joseph McCartin is writing a book about the PATCO strike. Prior to PATCO, it was not acceptable for employers to replace workers on strike, even though the law gave employers the right to do so, he says.

The PATCO strike eased those inhibitions. Major strikes plummeted from an average of 300 each year in the decades before to fewer than 30 today.

"Any kind of worker, it seemed, was vulnerable to replacement if they went out on strike, and the psychological impact of that, I think, was huge," McCartin says. "The loss of the strike as a weapon for American workers has some rather profound, long-range consequences."

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5604656

 

Another big difference is that before the 70s you could count the number of private sector lobbyists on K street on two hands. Not to say that CEOs didn't influence policy before, but today we have an entire sophisticated ecosystem of private sector influence groups. That just dilutes any political influence unions had. Today almost no politician in the US is afraid of unions. Scott Walker is a perfect example of a traditionally pro union purple state governor taking on the unions and surviving unscathed.

 

But that's only indirectly related to the K streeters. I mean, the lobbyists fund the politicians who bash unions, and they pay for anti-union propaganda, but ultimately it is the Wisconsin voter who permits Walker to kick the unions in the teeth.

That for me is a classic case of divide and conquer. Get the working class to eat its own, rather than unite against the ruling class. Which I write while acknowledging that yes, the unions certainly contributed to their own downfall via some bad actions. No question about that.

 

Timely article in Slate

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_...the_chance_to_virtually_destroy_american.html

On Thursday morning, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Janus v. American Federation, a case that could permanently hobble public-sector unions in the United States. There is little doubt how Janus will come down. In 2016, the court deadlocked 4–4 on a virtually identical case. At the time, Senate Republicans were holding Justice Antonin Scalia’s vacant seat open so that another conservative justice might be nominated should a Republican win the election. Now that President Donald Trump has put Justice Neil Gorsuch on the bench, he is almost certain to provide that fifth vote to deal the death blow to public sector unions, setting American back four decades.

...
Abood has been the law of the land for 40 years. Over the past half-decade, however, the Supreme Court’s conservatives, led by Justice Samuel Alito, have launched a campaign to overturn the decision. In the 2014 case Harris v. Quinn, the conservatives signaled that they were ready to kill Abood at the next opportunity, which would turn every state into a partial “right-to-work” state in one fell swoop. The next year, anti-union activists brought a case that would allow these justices to finish the job. But then Justice Antonin Scalia died and the court deadlocked 4–4, leaving Abood—and public-sector unions—to survive another day.

We now know how this story will end. Senate Republicans held Scalia’s seat open for many reasons, but one had to have been the tantalizing opportunity to overturn Abood. When they confirmed Gorsuch, they essentially sealed unions’ fate. The justice’s ideology and jurisprudence strongly indicate that he will provide the fifth vote to kill Abood and kneecap public-sector unions. Republicans will get what they paid for.
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Gonna disagree with the premise that the death of unions is what contributed to income inequality. OECD states with strong union membership have seen growing income inequality, too.

Therefore, not our cause.

It's possible - just possible - that the entry of 2-3 billion new workers worldwide into the manufacturing labor force, coupled with technologies allowing the rise of truly multinational corporations, might be the real problem here? The union can negotiate for better pay and such, but if the company moves the factory to Vietnam, the union's worthless.

 

Good points too. This isn't a one-item tale. But union bashing has a role in the story.

 

Union-bashing is at the very least an excuse for "right-to-work" laws that don't guarantee rights to working.

 

Looks like it.

 

Part of that is just showing the decline in employment in sectors that have a big tradition in unionizing. Like coal or other mining jobs, steel mills, manual factory labour etc. in highly industrialized countries. Also you don't necessarily have to be in an union to still profit from union work. In Germany for example 20% of non union workers still get a contract that has basically been fought into existence by unions working in that sector. They don't have to pay and still get the same benefits at least in their minds. Of course unions would have much more bargaining power if that 20% would be in said unions but oh, well... if the critical mass is to low at some point they are all going to get ********ed over.

It's also interesting to note, that Scandinavian countries like Denmark, Sweden or Finland are all still above 60% unionized. Not sure why it's so different there, would be interesting to know.

 

Can I get a free pony?

 

You need a letter of recommendation from your local sharia council, and then text #welfarequeen on your Obamaphone.

 

That is the end result, of course.

The phrase "right to work" really pisses me off as it is so incredibly misleading.
It has nothing to do with the "right to work".
It is a way to bankrupt unions by allowing workers in union facilities to opt out of the union, but will still receive the protections bargained for by the union.

I heard a good definition of it and I will adopt it from now on:

They are "Freeloader" statutes, as they allow workers to freeload on the backs of the union members.

See Janus v. AFSCME, up before the Supreme Court.
If this case goes for Janus, public unions will basically die, and, with it, the benefits of unionization.

In Illinois, public employees in unionized jobs can "opt out" but pay fair share fees to public employee unions even if they are not union members, since they receive many of the benefits of the union.

Bruce Rauner wants to destroy all unions, all organized labor and anything that is not completely and totally "business friendly" things like public education.

That will inevitably lower wages, benefits and pensions in the long run and should (but probably will not) lower government spending and lower taxes.

 

I'm the kind of person who should be extremely pro-union. I walked a picket line as a kid when my dad, Q*bert Jones Jr., was on strike. I'm a looney leftist and Bernie Bro. I like soccer.

I've worked in union and non-union shops. Some of the union places were demonstrably better. Some weren't. Some of the non-union places had better benefits and salary and worker/management relationships. Some didn't. The worst place I ever worked was a union shop (where I got reprimanded and threatened for restarting my computer after it bluescreened...that was Tech Support's responsibility and I was supposed to sit there for an hour and wait for them to get off their smokebreak to help .)

Intellectually, I get why unions should be stronger. But my field is very post-industrial and until unions can show me that they consistently make things better for workers, I'll continue to be ambivalent.

My field has moved almost 100% to the gig economy* and I'm not certain what role (if any) unions have to play in that environment.



*Yours will too.**
**This is a huge issue that the Left should be embracing but isn't.

 

Julia Louis Dreyfus gives shout out to unions in announcing breast cancer diagnosis:

 

Wait now. Scandanavian countries per the above post are 60% unionized, and those countries aren't running their economies on steel production.

 

And my point is that the Nordics have the same type of economy, yet appear to have very different employer-employee relations. I don't see why we couldn't do what they are doing.

Well I do see why, it's because the GOP and Chamber of Commerce would prevent it, but setting political resistance aside ...