I'd be really curious if any anti-union person or company has ever been completely honest in public about their stance. Has an executive or owner ever come out and said "I'm against the workers unionizing because it will mean less money for me."
"But historically, as unions have developed in this country, they have mostly just been divisive. They have put management on one side of the fence, employees on the other, and themselves in the middle as almost a separate business, one that depends on division between the other two camps."
What a bunch of mendacious bourgeois drivel. Uh, no Sam, pretty sure that owners/executives created the dividing line between manager and worker.
I'm writing this a now-retired IAM member. It pains me to say it - but unions are no longer an adequate tool for most workers.
In my opinion you article is poorly-resarched. That seems harsh, but in my experience (which spans four union and non-union sites over nearly 30 years) none of the four reasons you cited heavily influences whether a worker at a site will vote for a union or not.
Here's what does: concerns about job security.
Of course management can't explictly-threaten to close down a facility that unionizes or move work to another non-union site (i.e. "Ruanway Shop") - but it's strongly implied. And here is the problem: existing NLRB regs were crafted with the intent of preventing movement of jobs from a large, unionized, vertically-integrated manufacturing site located in the USA to a non-unionized-but-otherwise-identical site in the USA. As such, those regs predate globalization and highly-sepcialized work functions. As a result, unions in many sectors simply cannot offer adequate worker protections in a globalized economic setting without additional worker protections. These currently do not exist...at least outisde of the public sector.
OK, it's not easy to offshore warehouses or coffee shops - but there is nothing that will prevent Amazon or Starbucks from employing (for example) arguments that the end of the pandemic or the rise of inflation or *something* is forcing them to close a number of their work sites - which just happen to include their unioinized sites. And the NLRB really wouldn't be able to do anything in the absence of whistleblower accounts.
“But most people don’t like to view themselves as the mean” this hits so close to home. Everyone would benefit so much from seeing the expectation of their condition based on the mean quality of life and try to raise that.
I'd be really curious if any anti-union person or company has ever been completely honest in public about their stance. Has an executive or owner ever come out and said "I'm against the workers unionizing because it will mean less money for me."
https://www.ilwu.org/history/the-ilwu-story/
"But historically, as unions have developed in this country, they have mostly just been divisive. They have put management on one side of the fence, employees on the other, and themselves in the middle as almost a separate business, one that depends on division between the other two camps."
What a bunch of mendacious bourgeois drivel. Uh, no Sam, pretty sure that owners/executives created the dividing line between manager and worker.
I'm writing this a now-retired IAM member. It pains me to say it - but unions are no longer an adequate tool for most workers.
In my opinion you article is poorly-resarched. That seems harsh, but in my experience (which spans four union and non-union sites over nearly 30 years) none of the four reasons you cited heavily influences whether a worker at a site will vote for a union or not.
Here's what does: concerns about job security.
Of course management can't explictly-threaten to close down a facility that unionizes or move work to another non-union site (i.e. "Ruanway Shop") - but it's strongly implied. And here is the problem: existing NLRB regs were crafted with the intent of preventing movement of jobs from a large, unionized, vertically-integrated manufacturing site located in the USA to a non-unionized-but-otherwise-identical site in the USA. As such, those regs predate globalization and highly-sepcialized work functions. As a result, unions in many sectors simply cannot offer adequate worker protections in a globalized economic setting without additional worker protections. These currently do not exist...at least outisde of the public sector.
OK, it's not easy to offshore warehouses or coffee shops - but there is nothing that will prevent Amazon or Starbucks from employing (for example) arguments that the end of the pandemic or the rise of inflation or *something* is forcing them to close a number of their work sites - which just happen to include their unioinized sites. And the NLRB really wouldn't be able to do anything in the absence of whistleblower accounts.
#4 especially. Thank you for this!
“But most people don’t like to view themselves as the mean” this hits so close to home. Everyone would benefit so much from seeing the expectation of their condition based on the mean quality of life and try to raise that.