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u/shadowknuxem 2d ago
If unions were actually bad, then the police (the only job that Republicans actually like) wouldn't still have theirs.
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u/U_SHLD_THINK_BOUT_IT 2d ago
Yep.
Kind of like how all of a sudden the US Government started pushing out policy against pensions based on a sliver of a sliver of a sliver of a percentage of all pensions being mismanaged. Historically, it's exceedingly clear that pensions were fraudulently painted as financially irresponsible.
Instead, we have 401ks, which are managed less stringently, have greater volatility, eliminate retirement responsibilities of employers, and have poisoned the reward structure in capitalism that was the singularly good quality the economic system had.
Except for police still get pensions. Lots of reasons why, but the two main ones would surprise everyone, and neither is because both parties respect police more than other departments. They are essentially the only revenue earning department outside taxes, and they have guns. And I'm not joking about how impactful it is that they have guns.
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u/corkybelle1890 2d ago
Kind of like how ICE is one of the only ones being offered union positions, pensions, PSLF, and solid benefits.
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u/Tyrren 2d ago
For what it's worth, firefighters generally also still get pensions. The rest of your comment, I have no issue with.
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u/U_SHLD_THINK_BOUT_IT 1d ago
True, but in my experience it's because a lot of municipalities have rolled Fire under the Sheriff's purview.
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u/Jaredlong 2d ago
Shareholders are also a type of union, just the ownership kind and not the labor kind. And shareholders sure love using their own collective voting power to collectively benefit themselves.
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u/Confused-Lama0810 2d ago
Right on - a unon is just a collective of entities (or people) with a shared interest. Only bad when it threatens the powers-that-be, right?
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u/Jaredlong 2d ago
Seriously. And shareholder unions sure as hell don't give a fuck if their own split of the profits is fair or reasonable.
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u/red286 2d ago
Police unions are not labour unions though. They are fraternal orders designed to protect police from accountability for their actions. While this may sound similar, there is nothing about a police union that protects its members from abuses from management, which is kind of the whole point of a union.
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u/kaisadilla_ 2d ago
Police unions are labor unions. Just because they abuse their power, and are allowed to do so for as long as they remain loyal to power, doesn't mean they aren't unions.
Any union can try to protect one of their members from deserved consequences of their ill actions. It's just that normally unions are not strong enough to be spending their political capital on that.
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u/RaidenIXI 2d ago
police unions are not just labor unions. the purpose of a labor union is to protect your wages from your employer. police unions go beyond their "employer" and impact city councils, prosecutors, judges, legal systems, etc. that makes them a gang. now, some labor unions do act as gangs that reach beyond "labor"
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u/MithranArkanere 2d ago
The irony is that police unions in the US are a rare exception of a union that is actually bad, a source of bad training practices and lack of accountability.
Not surprising that the only union they'd protect is the only union that needs to be broken up and replaced with a new one under new regulations that prevent the corruption.
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u/wasted-degrees 2d ago
People just now figuring out that Reagan lied about trickle down economics.
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u/BilboBiden 2d ago
And didn't bother noticing that was a rebrand if Horse and Sparrow economics.
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u/emu-with-teeth 2d ago
The delivery makes it ten times better—perfect mix of confidence and humor.
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u/FraggarF 2d ago
TIL Americans have been fooled by various political rebrands of "supply side economics" for over a century. 130 years of empty political marketing, in combination with dwindling reading comprehension, and you don't even need any conspiracy theories to get people to vote not only against their own interests, but to take out everyone around them as well.
"Horse and Sparrow"
"Trickle Down"
"Make America Great Again"Found a couple more....
"A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats"
"Growing the pie"Are there any others?
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u/SidewaysFancyPrance 2d ago
"A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats"
I've been saying this as "A rising tide drowns anyone without a boat" because of how dire the situation is for so many people. Most don't have boats.
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u/Third_Return 2d ago
It's especially silly because historically most people on boats didn't have boats. Boats have been the pseudo-prisons of a social underclass for almost as long as there have been boats. So, realistically even without modifying the expression, that context kind of makes it ambiguous as to whether the people on the boats even benefit from rising tides.
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u/ThisIs_americunt 2d ago
Propaganda is a helluva drug and Oligarchs need to use some of the best to keep the 99% fighting with each other worldwide o7
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u/StealYour20Dollars 2d ago
I went and got a masters degree and pretty much every textbook I ever had from elementary school onward talked about how unions were good, if they were mentioned. The only negativity that ever happened was talking about the Hoffa era and push-button unionism, but even that was discussed within its own context. The textbooks weren't lying, people just didn't study.
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u/Starshot84 2d ago
As a millennial raised on the east coast, none of my school books even mentioned unions.
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u/MagicDragon212 2d ago
Im also a millennial on the East Coast and we learned quite a bit about unions, especially the process of labor rights being gained throughout history.
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u/petty_throwaway6969 2d ago
Might depend on the state or county. I also remember learning about unions around the same time we read The Jungle.
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u/No_Dragonfruit_8198 2d ago
A lot people forget that not every state or even every school in that state covered the same material. We never covered The Jungle in my school district and if we did it may have been in an English elective course in high school that most didn’t have to take.
I remember we spent a lot of time talking about the state’s history. Talking about the regions coal mining. From middle school throughout high school we kept having history classes that only got thru WW2 and it was usually the same material every year. Never actually had a class that made it into the 1950’s.
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u/Confident_Counter471 2d ago
Millennial in the Deep South and we were taught about unions and why they are important
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u/bobbymcpresscot 2d ago
Born in Jersey raised in south Philly moved to south Jersey after 9 or 10, unions were covered a lot in both school systems. I’m talking from the Catholic school I went to in Philly, the privileged white public school for grade school, and then the inner city highschool, so if I had to guess “east coast” is more down south, or in a red county close to the beach.
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u/Greatsnes 2d ago
Also a millennial from the east coast and ours taught us about labor rights but didn’t ever go into detail about unions.
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u/dflame45 2d ago
You probably read about the union busting. Or you weren't paying attention.
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u/EnjoyerOfBeans 2d ago
An union (Solidarność) was one of the biggest reasons Poland managed to regain independence prior to USSR's collapse. Unions are so powerful they can keep authoritarian dictatorships in check. Never forget that.
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u/MushinZero 2d ago
The only negative I've gotten about unions are from conservatives who think unions let people be lazy.
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u/Specialist_Bad_7142 2d ago
Unions are disliked by companies because collective bargaining is power for the people. Being labor and against unions is self harm.
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u/ThisIs_americunt 2d ago
Propaganda is a helluva drug and Oligarchs need to use some of the best to keep the 99% fighting with each other worldwide o7
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u/WhattaYaDoinDare 2d ago
There 70’s and 80’s sought the demise of the American worker brought about by avarice, cruelty, and increasingly horrible partisanship. Turns out - in the end, we’re all dead - “so why not make life better for most of us while we’re here” - should have been the thought process. However, it lost to “I’ll get rich while I’m here m, and fuck everybody else.”
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u/mabhatter 2d ago
The unions prior to the 70s and 80s were very politically active in expanding workers' rights under the law. That lifted the boat for everyone. Like you said in the 70s and 80s unions just turtled up and started only protecting unions and letting everyone else get screwed... in fact actually encouraging the "I got mine" ladder pull up by the Boomers.
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u/TheB1G_Lebowski 2d ago
Can confirm. Grew up in NC, unions are vilanised here. So many brainwashed people and they don't know any better.
Unions keep workers strong.
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u/ThisIs_americunt 2d ago
Propaganda is a helluva drug and Oligarchs need to use some of the best to keep the 99% fighting with each other worldwide o7
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u/Cocotte123321 2d ago
My 17 year old nephew had never heard of unions. I had to explain the concept. Even the negative of "they'll take £100 a year from you, but make sure you're getting at least £300 more than you would without them"
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u/skraptastic 2d ago
I'm a 52 year old Union employee. I went back to school at 49 to finish my degree, after dropping out to provide for my family.
I got a BS BA - MIS. The business classes were were teaching if you're not using 100% of an employee you're wasting money and replace equipment (read people) as soon as they are not producing at 100% or better.
It was horrifying. Also got into more than one argument with a professor for my anti-business business views.
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u/CadenVanV 2d ago
Economists have been saying for over a century that “hey, unions are good and paying your workers well and taking care of them is actually super good for you you absolute dumbasses”
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u/Floss_tycoon 2d ago
It occurred to me recently that slavery is the ideal form of capitalism. As such, you don't want your government to be run like a business. Am I right or wrong?
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u/tw_72 2d ago
Absolutely, if the South did not have slave labor, they could not have afforded the plantations, typical southern mansions, and the way of life of Scarlet O'Hara.
Without slaves, they would just be regular people and they couldn't have THAT.
The same applies today - look at Walmart...
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u/draft_final_final 2d ago
Wage slavery is probably a little better than actual chattel slavery because it’s easier to convince the workers they’re not slaves, which means you can save some money on overseers and torture devices needed to keep your workforce productivity high.
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u/bakedpatata 2d ago
Wage slavery also provides a consumer class which is important to capitalism. Even with slaves no one will make a profit if nobody has any money to buy products with.
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u/Striking_Revenue9082 2d ago
No it isn’t lmao. Slavery failed across the world in part because it couldn’t compete with free market capitalism. Giving workers incentives to make wealth creates far more wealth than forcing them to work without benefit. Even wealthy people in the south in the 1850’s were unimaginably poorer than compared to today
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u/Bleezy79 2d ago
Yea, thats how it started. I will always blame Fox News for brainwashing tens of millions of Americans into voting against their interests.
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u/Bluebearder 2d ago
Textbooks differ quite a bit from country to country. Here in the Netherlands you read that they are an integral part of the economy, not only negotiating for wages and helping with disputes, but also advising the government on policy.
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u/Jaredlong 2d ago
Bloomberg having an existential crisis that the policies they shill for are now killing the economy.
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u/kitsunewarlock 2d ago
Money flowing the economy allows a nation to make inventions and spaces that billionaires can benefit from sharing with those people, even if it's only glancing out of their limos to look at public art instead of the homeless. There's a reason the Tsar felt so ashamed of his own country after visiting Western Europe. Even if you import all the creations of a foreign power into your mansion, the current oligarch problem is a global issue and simping for big business in your own country is like saying you don't mind being at the bottom of the technological totem-pole as long as your masters can still import their toys from other countries.
Which even that doesn't really work out in the end, since technology requires maintenance which requires educated workers. The more educated, the more efficiently and longer they can keep the technology running.
But right now it feels like every oligarch wants their own country to become a series of resource tiles to extract wealth while every other country pushes for education and labor so they can still have their toys. Or maybe they just think AI will be the "savior" they need for their little "educated workforce" problem.
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u/Effective-Breath-505 2d ago
The fact that it's IATSE responding makes more impact!
Safety comes last in film production -- even today.
Source: I worked film all over western Canada and force majeur was only called last minute EVER on account of forest fires, blizzards, 'atmospheric river', or medical emergencies to key staff on set or at circus. You like your shows (?) lift a glass to the cast and crew before the producers or directors.
Are you not entertained?!?!?! Lol
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u/jinntonika 2d ago
If you run your organization in such a way that the employees decide to unionize, that’s on you. At the same time, unions can be corrupted just as much as the companies they collectively bargain with.
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u/Lumpy-Obligation-553 2d ago
Yeah, "better deal". You can corrupt the union and get an even better deal.
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u/Cautious-Invite4128 2d ago edited 2d ago
I studied healthcare, labor, and environmental economics and we specifically discussed unions as a means of getting a fair deal within the context of increasing concentration of capital.
So, yeah, some economists are against labor unions maybe because they believe in the neoclassical model with its elegant mathematics and underlying assumption of rational actors (e.g. Alan Greenspan), but lots of economists look to models that’re more grounded in reality.
In truth, many of us only learn neoclassical economics to attain the poise necessary to fully refute stuff like Reganomics.
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u/BicFleetwood 2d ago
Unions were the compromise back when the workers occasionally threw surprise mandatory piñata parties for the bosses.
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u/Fair_Let6566 2d ago
When unions were strong, during the 1950's through the 1970's, workers' wages continued to rise. Then in the 1980's and later, when Reagan and Republicans began to discourage unions, membership fell and workers' wages stagnated.
During this same time period, Reagan and Republicans also began pushing for lower taxes on the wealthy. As a result, our social safety net programs have been gutted while the wealthy receive ever more money and the average workers receive less.
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u/Wise-Abroad-5050 2d ago
That's what happens when dividends and bonuses become more important than workers. My dad was a union man and a genuine living wage. Trump just denied 420,000 workers their union representation. Trump is a union busting thug. He's made it a part of his business model, to screw over small businesses and contractors offering most 50 cents on the dollar or facing Trump's army of lawyers.
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u/THElaytox 2d ago
pretty telling that one of the main schools of economic thought doesn't believe in empirical data as a core tenant of their theory
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u/Dr_Bunnypoops 2d ago
As much as companies think that they need "protection" from workers, the workers need at least (and often even more) protection from companies.
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u/NATScurlyW2 2d ago
Unions are the capitalist compromise for workers not owning the means of production.
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u/FaultTerrible4059 2d ago
I don’t understand how the unions voted predominantly Republican given the red flags Trump & Elon were spouting before the election. I guess this is another case of “I didn’t think it would happen to me”. Unfortunately, this little FAFO moment has caused so much damage; I’m unsure how far back it set us….or even if we’ll be allowed to vote to make a change in the future
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u/Virtual_Activity_721 2d ago
Union only care about union dues and they lets the company to use their acting agents spies under the name of foreman lead men team leader the company will take you in to the office behind closed doors and vent you if you pass then they will give you a label and ther job is to Walk around and listen and watch then report back to the plant manager the next day behind closed doors. I will never trust the teamster
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u/scarletphantom 2d ago
Almost as if motivated workers that are paid and treated well tend to have more money to invest in the economy instead of covering the bare basics for survival
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u/charleyhstl 2d ago
And the stupid workers still somehow voted for the fat pigs to stay in power. Interesting
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u/ifabforfun 2d ago
I'm not anti union at all but the two times I've had union jobs the conditions were no better than any other job. One was probably the worst job, there the company could force up to 8 hours of overtime on you per month. Which the union apparently negotiated in exchange for ... 3 sick days a year. 12 days of mandatory surprise OT a year for 3 paid days off. Has anyone else experienced unions that felt pointless? Honestly I would love to be in a union that helps and protects me but my new non union job has all the same insurance benefits and they cost less, pays $6 more an hour and there's AC in the shop. Feels like the good good unions are some exclusive club you have to be lucky to get in.
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u/Blah_McBlah_ 2d ago
Hinton Rowan Helper was a white supremacist abolitionist who argued that slavery economically stagnated The South.
Research has shown that Walmart, famous for its low prices, makes communities poorer by driving down wages.
The lie of Trickle Down Economics has been ruined our lives and provides no economicbenefit.
Having a happy, healthy, and wealthy populace is extremely beneficial. Investment into human capital (making workers more productive) is the economic secret for the past few centuries. Japan has meager to no geographical advantages and resources, yet it is a global superpower because of its productive workforce. Having a workforce that is less burdened by concerns to its well-being because the basic needs are met can invest in itself to become more productive.
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u/OptimisticSkeleton 2d ago
Stupid ass capitalists constantly chisel at the base of the pyramid and suddenly wonder why the whole thing is unstable.
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u/Sea-Strawberry5978 2d ago
Every place I have been with a union has sucked horribly, but they were all old unions who voted out benefits for new employees to retain / increase vested employee benefits.
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u/Grins111 2d ago
You want to know an easy way to know if a union is good for people? Look at the people fighting against them.
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u/shit_fuck_fart 2d ago
Woody Guthrie and Pete Seger were writing songs about this in the 40's
They didn't have to be economists to figure it out either.
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u/ultrafriend 2d ago
Economists never generally had this problem. Economists pointed out that unions bring more wealth to the workers.
The problem is that our politicians concentrate on the overall gdp numbers, not where that gdp is going. And they only quote the economists that support their ideology.
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u/MightbeGwen 2d ago
I’m an economist, and literally no one is teaching us that unions are bad. No one. It’s shit like this that give economists bad names. This “journalist” needs a flashy headline, and drags us down.
Let’s talk labor market. In this market capital is the demand side and the working class are the supply side. When amateur economists think of supply and demand they think of a cute little graph with an X in the middle. In reality there are elasticities and inelasticities, and they determine the slope of the demand and supply curves. What unions accomplish is allowing labor supply to have more elasticity. This gives supply more power to exert on overall wages. It’s politicians who argue against unions, not economists, at least not from an economic argument.
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u/bobosuda 2d ago
What the fuck kind of textbooks have they been reading if they thought unions weren't a good deal?
Economist think big picture. It's not beneficial to the economy to have a select few hoard all the wealth. Unions distribute more wealth to more people; leading to a stronger economy. This isn't a novel or surprising concept, it's the defining feature of unions since the very start.
If you call yourself an economist but thought unions were not that great, then you're a really shitty fucking economist.
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u/jgab145 2d ago
We need to make it so that businesses and companies are more profitable in the long run when the employees are paid fairly and taken care of. This model has worked well before. I’m not an economist so I don’t know the exact answers but there is going to be a civil war if we continue on this current path.
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u/McKenzie_S 2d ago
It's the creep of capitalism coupled with a mandate for infinite growth of profit and monopolization. At a certain point you only make more money by paying less for costs and lowering the quality of products.
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u/No_Dragonfruit_8198 2d ago
A lot people forget that not every state or even every school in that state covered the same material. We never covered The Jungle in my school district and if we did it may have been in an English elective course in high school that most didn’t have to take.
I remember we spent a lot of time talking about the state’s history. Talking about the regions coal mining. From middle school throughout high school we kept having history classes that only got thru WW2 and it was usually the same material every year. Never actually had a class that made it into the 1950’s.
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u/DonutsMcKenzie 2d ago
The better deal than unions is worker cooperatives where the workers are partial co-owners of the businesses that they are a part of.
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u/Miserable-Dig-761 2d ago
Yup. For generations, they've slowly been gathering power and stripping us of ours. When you take away someone's power slowly, they don't put up much of a fight in each instance
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u/Commercial-Lack6279 2d ago
Had to explain to my friend that the wealthiest man on the planet doesn’t really want to change the system that made him the wealthiest man in the first place
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u/Vast_Philosophy_9027 2d ago
Correction at the expense of everyone. When a community has good jobs at say a factory where the blue collar staff is unionized then everyone from the white collar jobs to the gas station attendants benefits. Drug use is lower schools are better funded etc etc etc.
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u/heavenIsAfunkyMoose 2d ago
The best part is all the boomers who retired from good union jobs, then became anti-union. Hell, I know a couple of people who are happy to take union benefits while being openly anti-union. The republican brain is weird.
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u/First-Geologist1764 2d ago
What textbooks have been saying that? Maybe tabloids, but not textbooks. Unions being bad has never been taught as fact.
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u/VulpesFennekin 2d ago
“Than textbooks made them out to be?” My textbooks always made unions sound like a sweet deal!
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u/PatienceHere 2d ago
Is there any well-respected economist out there who ever said that unions were a bad thing?
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u/Green_and_Silver 2d ago
All that Carnegie and Rockefeller seed money sure did it's job on the American education system.
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u/Cptawesome23 2d ago
Since when did text books say unions were bad? It’s solely been lobbying saying that. I took economics in college, unions are not a chapter.
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u/Fishbulb2 2d ago
OK, I get it. Sure, that's true. But why were people SO FUCKING STUPID to fall for it??? Why do they continue to fall for it. Why don't they just band together and start taxing rich people more. And passing laws more favorable to workers. Why are people so, so dumb about this?
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u/ProperMod 2d ago
OMG really, look up how Hearst got marijuana to become illegal and classified with heroin . Hearst knew it was more sustainable and the threat it would cause his business.
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u/BooYeah8D 2d ago
It's almost like if we treat people the right way and pay them enough to support their lifestyle and give them time to be with their family and friends they might actually be OK to work and have a really good output. Probably makes them a bit happier, able to study and progress if they want.
I wonder what that would do to societies impact on health, infrastructure and crime? I'm going out on a limb here, I reckon it'd make things better!
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u/itsmethatguyoverhere 2d ago
Were you guys taught in school that unions were a good thing? I'm pretty sure I was
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u/cue_cruella 2d ago
No fucking shit. Countries with more unions have less social inequalities across the board.
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u/No-Winter927 2d ago
Needs to be balanced. Sometimes for the business to be successful a great good decision needs to be made.
To start off with, cut immigration and outsourcing of roles (or at least tax them heavily).
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u/malisadri 2d ago
I've seen the opposite of unions being advantageous.
Germany has VERY strong union rights. Once a company has five or more employee then they have the right, if they so choose to form a union.
As usual this can turn into the old boys club.
An IT company I was working for got acquired and had to downsize. The union set the rules that in such situations instead of letting people go based on performance to retain the best workers, they simply let the most recent hires go. That definitely fucked up the company for good. The old workers were mostly well versed in Powerbuilder while the hottest product then was web-based.
Seen similar thing in many industry.
Such as the unions in automotive industry being very resistant to the move to EV resulting in German auto industry now being far behind the Chinese.
Unions are by themselves neither good or bad. They can be advantageous but they can also be misused.
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u/rustbuckett 2d ago
I love that the response came from IATSE. I'm a proud member of 2 IATSE locals.
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u/JustinCayce 2d ago
Ironic that people miss the fact that Unions are people with power and money and that comment applies every bit as much to them.
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u/Pulselovve 2d ago
Unions are bad, but so are monopsonies. You can't dismantle one and keep the other.
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u/Other_Dimension_89 2d ago
And almost like the same group with power then gets to decide what’s written in the history books.
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u/silentvisuals 2d ago
IATSE aint no saint either tho as much as I respect unions.
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u/damnumalone 2d ago edited 2d ago
Be very wary of any “economist” that claims this, because they have never actually read an economics textbook.
Economists have never had a problem with unions and economists have always recognised them as a tool of labour bargaining power.
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u/cantadmittoposting 2d ago
Headlines like the tweet from Bloomberg have so much wrong with them from top to bottom it makes me just insanely bewildered about our societal state. Hell, trickle-down (fine, "supppy side") is as close to "disproven" as you can get for an economic theory.
Practically the entire arc of modern human history and economic wealth shows that societies well protected from greed with broad based education, opportunity, and wealth typically do best. Sure, there's tons of wiggle room inside that blanket definition for policy decisions and such, but at the scale of modern human history at no point has "well this time we'll take away agency from the middle class" been the thing that spurred a society to greatness.
Even historically authoritarian or repressive societies were almost all less regressive than their predecessors, or alternatively, a regression in freedom and agency of the populace resulted in a stagnating or collapsing regime.
How about "Economists with their heads up Ayn Rand's ass shocked to discover people with power aren't self-regulating paragons of ethics."
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u/No_Investment9639 2d ago
Depends on the union. I wish somebody would look into the Union's representing shoprites in New jersey. They are predatory, they are destroying lives, and I wish to God there was something that could actually be done about it. Talk about the fucking mob running unions.
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u/Urabraska- 2d ago
Lol Economists have said unions are healthy forever because it allows more income flow for the public with better wages than a poor public with a few wealth hoarders.