It would be nice.
Most of my complaints about unions are:
- Seniority is a terrible system to build a foundation from. It just is. I don’t give a fuck who got there first, seniority systems grow complacency, punish competence, and lower labour mobility. I was in a union as a teenager, the company offered lump sum payments for the older union members to literally sell out the younger ones with delayed wage increases, and they all voted for it since it was harming someone else.
- There are many unions that are just greedy pigs. You pay dues in, the union gets fat, but they spend all their time defending the wrong people.
- Unions can add a lot of extra process to things that don’t require it
However, that does not mean we shouldn’t have unions. We should maybe try to improve how we do them, so they work better for everyone.
I just want a union that looks out for unfair labour practices, forced unpaid overtime, keeps the company competitive on salary and benefits, and is willing to fight for workers who are unduly fired or sidelined.
Yea it’s almost like American politicians on the right have run a 40 year long campaign to weaken unions, turn people against them, and even attempt to outlaw them.
Nothing works if the government doesn’t, I hate to break that to people but politics is life.
My main problem with this line of thinking is that you and your co-workers are your union.
Unions are just like the government. The more that you tell yourself it’s someone else’s problem to figure out, the less you will actually be represented by it.
Yeah whatever people work a lot, nobody wants to be responsible for their own power, etc.
But you get the union that you fight to build and the contract that you vote to accept.
Yes, exactly, and people are so dogmatic about the topic it makes space for mismanagement and corruption like any other organization. I became an engineer, so we are ‘forbidden’ to join a union and that was fine with me for a long time.
That mindset was based on my personal experiences with unions working as a teenager and throughout university, as well as from watching my blue-collar parents get fucked by their unions and companies equally, over and over and over my whole life. As I’ve become old and learned the role of OG unions in the creation of most of the rights as a worker I take for granted today (ex. weekends exist), it has been difficult to reconcile.
Having unions is not only good, but required, but they have to be held to a higher standard than they are today, and they shouldn’t be immune to criticism from workers.
100%
Anything we as humans choose to be a part of, we can choose to improve. Unions included. Nothing needs to stay the same if it isn’t working.
I worked IT in public service, so I did have a very powerful union. Private sector coders love to lick those boots.
I’m surprised to hear the staff resisted unions.
DevOps, here. Union. I came from an union DevOps job to this one. I vastly prefer it over dotcom merc jobs since they can’t just fire everyone after a bad quarter.
The rest is about the same: good or bad managers, lazy or awesome peers, loafer or champ; same in either environment.
I mean we’re seeing at least the gaming industry, after decades of abuse, start to unionize so that’s a good sign at least.
Also anecdotal but at my place, as the older generation retires, the younger one are a lot more open about welcoming unions. Still the whole “white collar” label has a strong pull.
