What's wrong with labor unions?
06-29-2018, 02:47 PM
More divide and conquer.
We have way more in common with people running unions than we do with their corporate masters.
This is also an example of what we used to call the second foul rule in basketball, a concept where one player keeps fouling another player, the refs never call it, so the second player gets frustrated, fouls the player back, and the ref calls that foul.
I would wager there is practically nothing a union does that gets criticized that isn't in response to something fucked up that management did beforehand that was much worse.
Everyone wants to talk about how pointless and wasteful it is that only one union member is allowed to flip a light switch, or pick up a hammer in a specific situation, but the reason this things happens is that management is constantly trying to get people to do things that don't fit their job description.
I have experienced this first hand in a non union shop. I was waiting tables at a place, and after a shift waiters always have side work, like filling salt and pepper shakers and changing table cloths, basically getting his section ready for the next shift.
Managers at my restaurant, a corporate place owned by Pepsi, had the bright idea of extending side work so instead of 15 minutes at the end of the shift, it was an hour of cleaning the restaurant, the floors, washing the walls. Why? Because they have to pay janitors more than they pay waiters, so if the can get the waiters to do janitorial work, call it 'side work,' they save money.
They are always doing this cost cutting shit at the expense of employees. That being the case, can you see why unions have to come up with these hyper picky rules that that only the carpenter can nail the picture back up on the wall? It is because these become loopholes that the bosses exploit endlessly.
Even at union places I worked, they were always trying to cut corners to fuck with employees, and you felt lucky to have a union having your back. At a hotel I once worked at, the hotel had to provide a meal for employees, not off the menu, but something. So they got the bright idea to just give us leftovers from banquets, and then they didn't have to prepare anything, not even sandwiches.
I went back to get my meal and some of the cold cuts actually had mold on them. It was like the biggest fuck you you could get after working your ass off for a company. I took them food to my manager's office, showed him the food in good faith, not confrontationally, thinking he didn't know what we were getting, and he got a hard look on his face I had never seen before and said, you got a problem, go to your union.
It's like that.
We spend a fair amount of time talking about the psychopaths who run things, that tiny percentage, and you don't think that filters down and normal workers don't get shafted by corporations? You actually think the unions are the problems?
This is some second foul shit.
In the old days they didn't negotiate with strikers, they just hired thugs to come in and kill them. You won't read that in history books.
Seeing this was a public relations problem, they came up with the Mohawk Valley Strategy, which is worth Googling if you are interested. This was in the early 1930's.
The basic idea was that instead of killing unions, you destroy their reputations. This strategy was so successful that it has been adopted by businesses everywhere, to the point that much of the talking points of the Mohawk Valley situation persist to this day, and have been internalized by the public at large.
Repeated even in this thread.
We have been programmed since a young age to be hyper-critical of unions and to identify with owners.
That is the real American way, people at the bottom, identifying with the people at the top, because when their ship comes in they don't want to have to deal with a bunch of regulations.
If you have the inclination, do some research on the Mohawk Valley strategy, or The Ludlow Massacre.
We have been programmed to dismiss and laugh at unions. It is part of the intellectual air we breathe.
But if you shake a scorpion and a salamander up in a bottle, they will attack each other, because neither sees the hand shaking the jar.
“The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of its parents.”
Carl Jung