5 ms·

The title "Unions Did Great Things for the American Working Class" does the topic a great injustice, obfuscating the origins of many modern labor unions (includ

The title "Unions Did Great Things for the American Working Class" does the topic a great injustice, obfuscating the origins of many modern labor unions (including the AFL-CIO) as functional white supremacist organizations. If you were Chinese or Indian, unions were directly responsible for your deportation. If you were Japanese, unions were directly responsible for your family's forced internment. If you were Puerto Rican, unions were responsible for the genocide that was committed against your mother, wife, and daughter. The AFL wan't shy in the least about its intentions. If you read the contemporary writings of its leaders, as well as the mass media that they produced (flyers, pamphlets, etc.), they were very blatant about their desire to protect jobs for white members by stripping naturalized Americans of Asian descent of their citizenship and deporting them. The language that was used to describe Chinese workers mirrors the exact same dehumanizing comparisons to animals that were later used by the Nazis[0]. If you dislike the current US visa system, with its draconian system of per-country quotas, you have labor unions from the 1950s to thank for that as well. It's highly unpopular to talk about this, and so I fully expect to take a hit for bringing this up, but it needs to be said. [0] They even published a pamphlet which referred to the Chinese as a "race question" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_question https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_question)

walshemj 8y ago
Yes there are those issues but I suspect you are not not 100% commenting in good faith here.
- chimeracoder 8y ago
  > Yes there are those issues but I suspect you are not not 100% commenting in good faith here. I don't even know what this accusation is supposed to mean. Could you spell out what "bad faith" you are imputing here?
  - neonate 8y ago
    I don't know if it's bad faith, but you're describing a property the entire society had at the time. Perhaps the unions were worse than most, but that's not the case you're making. Also, it's not clear how your claims and those of the article can't both be true.
    - chimeracoder 8y ago
      > I don't know if it's bad faith, but you're describing a property the entire society had at the time. Perhaps the unions were worse than most, but that's not the case you're making. It's not true that lobbying the government to enact explicitly white supremacist legislation is "a property the entire society had at the time". > Also, it's not clear how your claims and those of the article can't both be true. It's disingenuous at best for the HN headline to read "Unions Did Great Things for the American Working Class" when unions systematically discriminated against working-class Americans of Chinese, Indian, Mexican, and Japanese descent.
      - neonate 8y ago
        Society at the time was dominated by views we would now call white supremacist. That is enough to explain why the unions behaved as you describe. Since you asked above, I think this might be where the feeling of "bad faith" comes in. You're pushing this point harder than it can support and more harshly than you need to. That creates a feeling in the reader of something being off. That's too bad, because it's a good point. I found the information interesting, but because of this extra torque you're putting on it, one ends up responding more to that "off" feeling than to the informative parts of your comment.
  - NoGravitas 8y ago
    Since you're arguing against unions, we can assume that you are right-wing, politically. As such, you probably don't, actually, care very much about race relations or civil rights. But you're happy to use arguments about race relations or civil rights in order to attack unions – any stick will do to beat a dog. And as we saw in the 2016 Democratic primaries, identity politics, as a legitimately left-wing concern, are a very effective tool for right wingers attacking people promoting left-wing economic policies because they can be used to divide the base. It's possible that you are highly idiosyncratic politically and you actually do sincerely care about both of those things, but that's not the way to bet.
    - chimeracoder 8y ago
      > But you're happy to use arguments about race relations or civil rights in order to attack unions – any stick will do to beat a dog. If you are so committed to the belief that unions are inherently good that you will out-of-hand dismiss anyone pointing out the ways that they have advanced white supremacist structures historically, and accuse them of false-flag concern trolling, you don't get to pretend that you care about "race relations" (ie, racism). > Since you're arguing against unions, we can assume that you are right-wing, politically. As such, you probably don't, actually, care very much about race relations or civil rights. Thanks for this absurd conclusion, I appreciated the laugh.
      - dang 8y ago
        Could you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN? It damages the container here, regardless of how right you are or how wrong someone else is. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        chimeracoder 8y ago
        I'm not sure I understand - what do you mean by flamewar-style in this case? If you're referring to my tone, I understand that this might sound frustrated. At the same time, I was pointing out and explaining why the HN title specifically (not the article title, as they were different) is offensive to people of several ethnic backgrounds, including my own. And in response, I was met with one person accusing me of speaking in bad faith (with no further comment on what they meant) and another accusing me of being racist and disingenuous for explaining why the submitted title was offensive. So if I sound frustrated by the end and deflect the personal attacks levied at me, please understand it's not a reaction that comes out of nowhere.
ataturk 8y ago
Not sure why downvoted. While I object to "everything I don't like is racist" bullshit, this one is actually true--unions are not only xenophibic, by misogynistic. The union my Dad was a member of bragged about how it ran women out, usually via overt sexual harassment. Everyone thinks unions are some great system but they suck in actual practice. The absolutely suck--it's just more egos and personalities in the way of you making a living. The best thing about tech is the low barriers to entry--that is populist, not unions. If you are good you succeed, if you are not good, you become an architect or a manager or leave.
- chimeracoder 8y ago
  > . The union my Dad was a member of bragged about how it ran women out, usually via overt sexual harassment. Yeah, the AFL-CIO didn't allow women to join either. Sexual harassment is a huge problem within unions, because harassers (as members, and oftentimes members with power within the union) are able to use their power to silence victims' complaints. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/19/us/ford-chicago-sexual-harassment.html?_r=0&smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/19/us/ford-chica...
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
mcphage 8y ago
The article addresses racial injustice directly, although not in the direction that you think: > [Freeman and Medoff] showed that contrary to popular belief, unions actually decreased racial wage disparities. > A recent paper by economists Henry Farber, Daniel Herbst, Ilyana Kuziemko and Suresh Naidu concludes that unions were an important force reducing inequality in the U.S. [...] The authors find that as unionization rises, inequality tends to fall, and vice versa. Nor is this effect driven by greater skills and education on the part of union workers; during the era from 1940 through 1970, when unionization rose and inequality fell, union workers tended to be less educated than others. In other words, unions lifted the workers at the bottom of the distribution. Black workers, and other nonwhite workers, tended to benefit the most from the union boost.
- chimeracoder 8y ago
  > The article addresses racial injustice directly, although not in the direction that you think: First, the claim that this benefited "black and other nonwhite workers" is completely unsubstantiated by the actual Farber paper. But secondly, that is not "addressing racial injustice". The people who weren't deported and didn't have their land forcibly seized by union members[0] benefited economically, yes, but that was never the question. And pretending it is misses the entire point. [0] which was permitted under California law, after the Exclusion act

walshemj 8y ago

Yes there are those issues but I suspect you are not not 100% commenting in good faith here.

chimeracoder 8y ago
> Yes there are those issues but I suspect you are not not 100% commenting in good faith here. I don't even know what this accusation is supposed to mean. Could you spell out what "bad faith" you are imputing here?
- neonate 8y ago
  I don't know if it's bad faith, but you're describing a property the entire society had at the time. Perhaps the unions were worse than most, but that's not the case you're making. Also, it's not clear how your claims and those of the article can't both be true.
  - chimeracoder 8y ago
    > I don't know if it's bad faith, but you're describing a property the entire society had at the time. Perhaps the unions were worse than most, but that's not the case you're making. It's not true that lobbying the government to enact explicitly white supremacist legislation is "a property the entire society had at the time". > Also, it's not clear how your claims and those of the article can't both be true. It's disingenuous at best for the HN headline to read "Unions Did Great Things for the American Working Class" when unions systematically discriminated against working-class Americans of Chinese, Indian, Mexican, and Japanese descent.
    - neonate 8y ago
      Society at the time was dominated by views we would now call white supremacist. That is enough to explain why the unions behaved as you describe. Since you asked above, I think this might be where the feeling of "bad faith" comes in. You're pushing this point harder than it can support and more harshly than you need to. That creates a feeling in the reader of something being off. That's too bad, because it's a good point. I found the information interesting, but because of this extra torque you're putting on it, one ends up responding more to that "off" feeling than to the informative parts of your comment.
- NoGravitas 8y ago
  Since you're arguing against unions, we can assume that you are right-wing, politically. As such, you probably don't, actually, care very much about race relations or civil rights. But you're happy to use arguments about race relations or civil rights in order to attack unions – any stick will do to beat a dog. And as we saw in the 2016 Democratic primaries, identity politics, as a legitimately left-wing concern, are a very effective tool for right wingers attacking people promoting left-wing economic policies because they can be used to divide the base. It's possible that you are highly idiosyncratic politically and you actually do sincerely care about both of those things, but that's not the way to bet.
  - chimeracoder 8y ago
    > But you're happy to use arguments about race relations or civil rights in order to attack unions – any stick will do to beat a dog. If you are so committed to the belief that unions are inherently good that you will out-of-hand dismiss anyone pointing out the ways that they have advanced white supremacist structures historically, and accuse them of false-flag concern trolling, you don't get to pretend that you care about "race relations" (ie, racism). > Since you're arguing against unions, we can assume that you are right-wing, politically. As such, you probably don't, actually, care very much about race relations or civil rights. Thanks for this absurd conclusion, I appreciated the laugh.
    - dang 8y ago
      Could you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN? It damages the container here, regardless of how right you are or how wrong someone else is. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      - chimeracoder 8y ago
        I'm not sure I understand - what do you mean by flamewar-style in this case? If you're referring to my tone, I understand that this might sound frustrated. At the same time, I was pointing out and explaining why the HN title specifically (not the article title, as they were different) is offensive to people of several ethnic backgrounds, including my own. And in response, I was met with one person accusing me of speaking in bad faith (with no further comment on what they meant) and another accusing me of being racist and disingenuous for explaining why the submitted title was offensive. So if I sound frustrated by the end and deflect the personal attacks levied at me, please understand it's not a reaction that comes out of nowhere.

ataturk 8y ago

Not sure why downvoted. While I object to "everything I don't like is racist" bullshit, this one is actually true--unions are not only xenophibic, by misogynistic. The union my Dad was a member of bragged about how it ran women out, usually via overt sexual harassment. Everyone thinks unions are some great system but they suck in actual practice. The absolutely suck--it's just more egos and personalities in the way of you making a living. The best thing about tech is the low barriers to entry--that is populist, not unions. If you are good you succeed, if you are not good, you become an architect or a manager or leave.

chimeracoder 8y ago
> . The union my Dad was a member of bragged about how it ran women out, usually via overt sexual harassment. Yeah, the AFL-CIO didn't allow women to join either. Sexual harassment is a huge problem within unions, because harassers (as members, and oftentimes members with power within the union) are able to use their power to silence victims' complaints. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/19/us/ford-chicago-sexual-harassment.html?_r=0&smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/19/us/ford-chica...
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

mcphage 8y ago

The article addresses racial injustice directly, although not in the direction that you think: > [Freeman and Medoff] showed that contrary to popular belief, unions actually decreased racial wage disparities. > A recent paper by economists Henry Farber, Daniel Herbst, Ilyana Kuziemko and Suresh Naidu concludes that unions were an important force reducing inequality in the U.S. [...] The authors find that as unionization rises, inequality tends to fall, and vice versa. Nor is this effect driven by greater skills and education on the part of union workers; during the era from 1940 through 1970, when unionization rose and inequality fell, union workers tended to be less educated than others. In other words, unions lifted the workers at the bottom of the distribution. Black workers, and other nonwhite workers, tended to benefit the most from the union boost.

chimeracoder 8y ago
> The article addresses racial injustice directly, although not in the direction that you think: First, the claim that this benefited "black and other nonwhite workers" is completely unsubstantiated by the actual Farber paper. But secondly, that is not "addressing racial injustice". The people who weren't deported and didn't have their land forcibly seized by union members[0] benefited economically, yes, but that was never the question. And pretending it is misses the entire point. [0] which was permitted under California law, after the Exclusion act