7 ms·

Wait, where and in what circumstance are they portrayed as evil? The main place I see them presented as backwards and unproductive is by common folk dealing wi

• pmoriarty 5y ago
  They're portrayed as evil in conservative media and by conservative politicians... which, as we know from Trump's election, are a hugely powerful and effective influence on American politics.
  • mc32 5y ago
    So, not by the mainstream media, right? So in some circles they are portrayed in a bad light. I think it's an exaggeration to say they are (implied universally) portrayed as evil. My experience with regard to negative opinion against them is from people who have to interact with Union employees.
    • pmoriarty 5y ago
      "So, not by the mainstream media, right?" FOX News is the most successful news network in the US. It's very much in the mainstream.
      • mc32 5y ago
        Great. And what is the frequency and ratio of their mentioning unions and unions _EVIL_?
      • rayiner 5y ago
        Fox is the single largest one, but all the other ones put together are left leaning and bigger combined than Fox. You’re just making a point about consolidation in conservative media (okay?) not about the total impact of liberal versus conservative media.
      • nebula8804 5y ago
        Thats really the wrong metric to look at. Yes they are the largest but the median age of their viewer base is 70 years old. They are mainstream only in a few circles but don't really represent the mainstream of America. In fact along with MSNBC/CNN(median age 65) they have declining viewership numbers. This is why all these networks are making a big push(failing) into streaming.
      • parineum 5y ago
        > In prime time, Fox averaged 2.3 million viewers, including an average of 374,000 within the industry's coveted 25- to 54-year-old demographic. Tallest dwarf. > between the final quarters of 2014 and 2020, paid subscribers to The New York Times’ digital only news product increased from 910 thousand to over five million.
  • brimble 5y ago
    They're also largely ignored by the supposedly-not-conservative parts of the media. You get a very different impression of unions (mainly, that they're not very active and/or barely exist) listening to NPR, versus Democracy Now.
    • pmoriarty 5y ago
      How many Americans even know what Democracy Now is (much less listen to it), compared to the millions of FOX News viewers? Probably next to none.
      • brimble 5y ago
        Yeah, totally, I'm reinforcing your point. Fox News and conservative AM radio (which has many programs with a larger listenership than Democracy Now, I'm sure), not to mention places like Breitbart or OAN, portray unions negatively or not at all, while other mainstreams sources mostly just ignore them. You've gotta go pretty fringe-left to find anything that treats labor action outside of maybe the AFL-CIO or a few Hollywood unions and guilds, as worth consistently covering at all.
    • dfxm12 5y ago
      Even MSNBC management made their workers jump through extra hoops to recognize their union. I continue to have no idea how people criticize the media as being "too liberal" with a straight face. https://thehill.com/homenews/media/559028-msnbc-says-it-wont-voluntarily-recognize-new-union-effort/ https://thehill.com/homenews/media/559028-msnbc-says-it-wont...
      • mc32 5y ago
        This does not disprove anything. MSNBC and others look after their own interests. That interest can be at odds with their ideology. They do not have to be internally consistent. Bernie Sanders wants millionaires (and billionaires) to pay very high taxes after certain cutoff --all well and good. He's a millionaire, the IRS allows you to overpay or donate to the treasury, but despite his beliefs, he personally does not overpay his taxes. The Soviet Union believed in workers' rights, except when it came to strategic state enterprises. Same with regard to luxury --yes, they frowned upon luxuries for the masses, but they did have dedicated "department stores" for the elites.
• brimble 5y ago
  The Wire? A bunch of stuff mentioned here: https://dismantlemag.com/2018/12/03/sorry-bother-you-pro-union-movies/ https://dismantlemag.com/2018/12/03/sorry-bother-you-pro-uni... They're not portrayed a ton in pop culture to begin with, and when they are it's often bad.
• VictorPath 5y ago
  > business owners who also resent a lot of the inefficiency The heirs who do not work but expropiate dividends of profits from those who do talking about inefficiency is a laugh. Why should the worker's creating the wealth care what the idle class owners think?
  • mc32 5y ago
    I'm talking mostly small shops --not generational wealth that you imagine.
  • xboxnolifes 5y ago
    Thinking of business owners as only wealthy heirs is a laugh.
    • pempem 5y ago
      Small businesses are not usually hiring union busters for multiple hundreds/hour. We could discuss this within for example the restaurant industry, and that could be interesting but AMZ does not fit the 'no generational wealth, just some business owners' rhetoric. For restaurants what we find is incredibly thin margins being covered up by exploitation of the lowest rung rather than adjusting of prices, efficiencies in supply chain, focused menus, etc.
      • xboxnolifes 5y ago
        Absolutely nowhere in the thread chain you are commenting on did someone mention "hiring union busters".
• akhmatova 5y ago
  My experience is on the ground common folk talk smack about them. You just answered your own question. "Evil" is of course overdrawn. But there is a common perception that they are ineffective, outdated and/or just don't do much in exchange for the money that goes to them. And in some case outright corrupt. Buttressed in some cases by the fact that high-ranking union leadership roles come with comparatively very comfortable salaries (compared to those they are representing). Which steroetypes nearly all these companies (such as Amazon) make aggressive use of in their internal smear campaigns (it's the primary tool that they have, basically).
  • mc32 5y ago
    The common man and woman having a bad opinion about something is not a concerted or framed _PORTRAYAL_. That's the common take, opinion, the reality, rather than a portrayal (as implied). So? lots of common folk think of unions as overall having a negative impact --that's grass roots.
    • ABCLAW 5y ago
      Your reply elsewhere saying that unions are full of nepotism etc is a portrayal. A distributed portrayal is still a portrayal. That said, it begs the question, why is the 'grass roots' discourse so consistently negative in America, while European and Canadian discourse on the issue seems significantly different? Would you believe there's no intentional messaging? Oh wait it's not. The very idea that 'the grass roots hates unions' is itself a false portrayal: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/09/03/majorities-of-americans-say-unions-have-a-positive-effect-on-u-s-and-that-decline-in-union-membership-is-bad/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/09/03/majorities-... The States has a VERY long history of union busting, and media is very much involved. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02685662 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02685662 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-political-science/article/abs/organized-labor-as-the-new-undeserving-rich-mass-media-classbased-antiunion-rhetoric-and-public-support-for-unions-in-the-united-states/6CF19F2860C07ABAF0B7C787D8731A0C https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-p... And so on.
• vmception 5y ago
  At a different time in my career, my view of the available unions were that they had the most unambitious people desparately co-dependent on their marriage to a job for life in the most nepotistic way and it would have been 10% of my paycheck for nothing. I was earlier in my career, making less and that 10% would have been much more consequential compared to when I would theoretically be making a comfortable amount due to the union in perhaps 20 years. Except my timeline of working for someone else didn't involve 20 years, or not 20 consecutive years, and not out of necessity. So far, this was an accurate assessment. The higher paying jobs I was pursuing didn't have a union at all and I wouldn't have to pay that supposed 10% either (or whatever the union dues really are), and I didn't plan on being in any particular high paying job for more than 1-2 years before hopping for an even higher paying job, and there is no such thing as pensions or long term benefits from being married to a job, so the association for me was blue collar worker unnecessarily milking a system. It wasn't relatable to me at all, and not relatable or relevant to my perception of the tools available to me in the world, or my ambitions. "Ambitions" only when looking through the lens of the comfortable-enough lifelong 9-5'ers that were surrounding me at the time, until I could finally switch up my surroundings. So far thats been an accurate assessment of unions as well as how my career would go, even though my view is much more pro-union now. The correlation of who joins unions is still heavily there, but I recognize it doesn't have to be and can include even highly paid software engineers given the size of the organizations they work for now (multiple multi-trillion dollar company, really?), although even these new union pushes are just on the blue collar side. Thats just how its panned out, for now. Regardless that was just on the seemingly desperate-than-other worker side, on the "evil union" side, it was also reinforced by examples where the union tried something that didn't benefit employees at all. Like when the union tried to get wages raised at some cereal company but it was too much and the company just declared bankruptcy, firing 30,000+ people. It was like how out of touch was the union on the health of the company, and all the employees were also this out of touch too? Or maybe all 30,000 weren't out of touch but just had to toe the party line? But even the non-union workers were effected in this mass layoff because now nobody is employed! Sure, even if it was some vulture private equity firm playing all the fiddles, it just reinforced how powerless the unions actually were. All perceptions leading to the conclusion of "irrelevance of an annoying gang". Anyway, my view has evolved substantially on this. I'm in favor of some future form of collective organization and collective bargaining of even highly-paid, job-hopping, white collar personnel. I feel like there was a time period where I wouldn't even need that distinction. I want this collective organization to have a board seat or two with some forms of employer, by law. But I've basically gone from one extreme to another extreme (unless my view catches on, of course).
• Guvante 5y ago
  As you can see from this very topic the pros of unions tend to be ignored while the pain of them is repeated. Higher wages tend to be ignored as it is vague. Harder to fire is tainted by police unions protecting cops from their own actions. You end up with the benefits being vague and the problems being obvious. Dues are frustrating and any bad union leaders get tons of attention. For better or worse everyone tends to assume the things unions work for are a given. So the only real talking points become the bad things. Not that this is unique to unions lol.
  • mc32 5y ago
    Not just police, but teachers unions are also well known for protecting bad teachers.
    • emidln 5y ago
      Union protected programmers made me decide against pursuing a career doing tech for the Illinois EPA. It was impossible to get people who couldn't actually write software out of the way.
      • mc32 5y ago
        Kind of an aside: Some time in the past I had a mildly critical system in a remote office go down. A technician would have to simply replace a part. However, because it required a Union guy to go in there to remove a screw first, it had to wait over the weekend --meaning the company now had to take modest losses over the weekend. The guy couldn't sneak in a screw driver as that could potentially end up costing the company more money. This is where unions earn some of their great reputation among stiffs.
        • cool_dude85 5y ago
          A union shop where no 30-year vet wanted to get a 4-hour minimum OT to drive out and unscrew a screw? Or the company didn't want to pay OT for it? I'll leave it to the reader to decide which is more likely.
• sam0x17 5y ago
  There is substantial lobbying and corporate media effort that goes into suppressing and silencing talk about unions and spreading bad sentiment wherever possible. This happens even at schools with young children.
  • mc32 5y ago
    No one, well, with exceptions, claims that schools are not indoctrinating kids.
    • sam0x17 5y ago
      Yeah there was a Vice where they ask school children in rural america what they know about Unions and it's all standard media bs
      • mc32 5y ago
        Just look at tolerance for addictive activities. Compare 1970s vs 2010s and later. Or the desire to coddle vs steering kids in the right direction. Schools completely drive what kids find acceptable and not acceptable socially. It changes over time depending on what the school district finds appropriate. Even US presidents, 10 years ago Washington, Lincoln were unblemished, today they are complicated figures with defects. But I think you can look to the USSR as well. One day someone is a hero, the next they are counterrevolutionaries and schools follow the dictum.