5 ms·

> Forming a union is a great tool—for marginalized workers. Unions are historically intended to protect vulnerable members of society, Is this really true? Eve

• cranky_coder 8y ago
  I think this is just management cynically reframing some popular “social justice” rhetoric in a way that allows them to paint their opposition as a “progressive” position to take. But maybe that’s a cynical reading of their language too...
  • michaelchisari 8y ago
    It's both cynical and accurate, it seems.
• tfehring 8y ago
  I don't have a great intuition for this, so I looked it up. It looks like Black workers are more likely than White workers to be union members, while workers of other racial minorities are less likely [0]: > Among major race and ethnicity groups, Black workers continued to have a higher union membership rate in 2018 (12.5 percent) than workers who were White (10.4 percent), Asian (8.4 percent), or Hispanic (9.1 percent). But it's possible that the story is different for construction workers or for other individual sectors. [0] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.htm
  • exolymph 8y ago
    I'm sure that it varies somewhat by industry. But also, the absolute populations of white and black people in America are pretty different, so it matters how you measure this. A higher proportion of blacks could be union members, and still the absolute number of white union members could be larger.
    • niij 8y ago
      How else would you want them to measure it besides ratios? What would absolute numbers mean in this context?
• freewilly1040 8y ago
  I read “privileged workers” = workers for whom there is competition to hire, as opposed to workers who don’t have much mobility or (good) choices in employers
• dragonwriter 8y ago
  > Every union building site I see has mostly white guys Doesn't seem that way to me. https://www.seiu.org https://www.seiu.org https://aflcio.org https://aflcio.org https://teamster.org https://teamster.org https://cwa-union.org https://cwa-union.org https://unitehere.org https://unitehere.org
• UweSchmidt 8y ago
  Other ethnicities may be so vulnerable so that they can't even form an union. Note that labor activists have always seen racism as a threat to a unified workforce and left-wing ideology has always described a global caste of workers to be united.
• hangonhn 8y ago
  Depends on the union but historically some unions have also been fairly anti-immigration and even racist. In response racial minorities formed their own unions. That said, the statement in and of itself isn't incorrect. There has and still are vulnerable members of society who are in the racial majority. In fact, some historians have argued that racism was promoted in the US as a way to separate the vulnerable whites from other vulnerable groups. Before slavery became self perpetuating in the US (as in child mortality rate among slaves was high enough that slave had to be shipped in from other places), racism towards Africans was actually less pronounced and interracial marriages between Africans and white weren't outlawed. Once slavery became self perpetuating, laws were passed and attitudes changed to ensure that vulnerable whites won't mingle with African slaves and endanger slavery.
• Futurebot 8y ago
  New York City’s unionized workers are mostly minorities, for example: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/04/nyregion/new-york-citys-unionized-workers-are-mostly-minorities-a-study-shows.html https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/04/nyregion/new-york-citys-u... "White men account for less than one-fourth of the city’s union members, according to the study, written by Ruth Milkman, a sociology professor at the CUNY Graduate Center, and a colleague, Stephanie Luce. Fully 60 percent of all union members in the city identify themselves as either black or Latino; women who do not identify themselves as black or Latino make up an additional 17 percent of the city’s union members."