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A union could also put an end to crunch time, a union could ensure better pay (or pay at all, to hear some salaried people talk about it) for on-call time, a un
by Frondo 7y ago
A union could also put an end to crunch time, a union could ensure better pay (or pay at all, to hear some salaried people talk about it) for on-call time, a union could protect politically unpopular people from arbitrary firing (i.e. they could be fired, but it would have to follow a process), a union could give workers a seat on the board (codetermination, as it's called), a union could establish a slimmer pay gap between workers and management/shareholders.
A union does not mean: pay/rank based solely on seniority, that you can't plug in your own equipment on your desk, that do-nothing people stick around forever. These are a few of the popular disparagements of unions that are not a built-in function of a unionized workplace.
- Kalium 7y agoBetter pay, better conditions, and protections against arbitrary firing are all reasonable pitches. Why has nobody I've worked with ever thought that far? Rhetorical, I suppose. Probably too many DSA meetings. Seniority pay, strict work rules, tenure, and more are all products of the incentives around contract negotiation. Those incentives can easily turn toxic. They're the results of needing to have something to bring back to the membership as a victory over Management, producing the equivalent of pork barrel spending. As you say, these are not built-in. They're just failure modes of a particular political system.