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> I have also spoken to people not in a union, who didn’t want a union, who were shocked to find out their bonus was Applebees gift cards and who indicated they

> I have also spoken to people not in a union, who didn’t want a union, who were shocked to find out their bonus was Applebees gift cards and who indicated they should be compensated more for their hard labor. > Humans are tricky. This made me chuckle! Reminds me of the frog in boiling water adage: If you put a frog in cold water and gradually raise the temperature, it will be imperceptible to the frog. They’d gladly boil to death. However, if you turn up the heat quickly - they’ll jump out. A long winded way of saying - with time, we become comfortable in the status quo and expect things to stay a certain way. Any gradual shift is imperceptible to us, until many changes accumulate and reach a tipping point. And that is when we become disillusioned.

cogman10 4y ago
There's been a steady anti-union drum beat both from corporate media and the work place. Unions are almost always portrayed as expensive, worthless, and corrupt. Yet our current labor rights are almost entirely from unions setting strong standards and employers/politicians falling in line. Propaganda works, if it didn't, Walmart and amazon wouldn't be spending so much money on anti-union propaganda. Nothing terrifies them more than the thought of multiple stores, warehouses, or development centers unionizing.
- dehrmann 4y ago
  > Yet our current labor rights are almost entirely from unions setting strong standards and employers/politicians falling in line. But the big wins were almost a century ago.
  - runarberg 4y ago
    This may be true in the USA where union membership is in an all time low, however in the rest of the world unions are still landing deals which guarantees more labor rights, this includes longer parental leaves, more sick time, longer vacations, more benefits for part time workers, more enforcement against violations, more education and guarantees for at-risk groups (such as foreign workers), equal pay certificates, 36 hour work weeks, 32 hour work weeks, anti-harassment guarantees, etc. etc.
    - lostcolony 4y ago
      It also misses (well, leaves out; not sure the intent of the comment) the fact that unions have been gutted heavily in the US compared to where they were a century ago. When the US was an industrial, workers were treated poorly, unions began to form, fought for worker protections. As the US has transitioned into a knowledge/service economy, creating industries that didn't historically have unions, and industrials have been on the decline, unions have also declined. And where the US was once at the forefront of worker protections, we are sadly more like a third world country than a first world at this point.
      - dehrmann 4y ago
        > unions have been gutted heavily in the US compared to where they were a century ago. The red line isn't normalized by workforce size, but it suggests the big gains (five-day work week, 8-hour workday) were before unions really became powerful. Unionization was only a 15-year trend, then it stalled-out. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3e/United_States_union_membership_and_inequality%2C_top_1%25_income_share%2C_1910_to_2010.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3e/United_S...
        runarberg 4y ago
        This is a really unfair interpretation of this graph. Unions had a big impact on these rights, but unions back then were nothing like the Unions today. In the 19th century, Labor unions functioned more like activist group then unions in the modern sense. There were quite a few of them, they often included members across businesses and even industries (of these IWW still exists and still functions like this). There were no protections for collective bargaining so there was no need for unions to mass enroll whole businesses, what was important was organizing for every event, and build a solidarity across workers, rather then unionizing whole workplaces. The union’s job was to organize direct action and build up solidarity around them. A successful strike had union members and non-members alike striking in solidarity. A very successful strike crossed many and diverse workplaces. As you can imagine these often turned violent when scabs refused to participate (as they were allowed to), or when unions with conflicting ideologies were competing for members and propaganda. This changed in the new deal era, particular when the Wagner Act (National Labor Relations Act; NLRA) was enacted in 1935. And you can see the uptake in union memberships on your graph. This act legalized collective action and protected workers in labor unions. This formed the basis unions as we know them today. From then on it became more important to organize each workplace, rather than each direct action, and the protections would only apply for members, not participants. So memberships suddenly became more important than participation. Comparing memberships between these two eras is effectively comparing apples to oranges. While today membership count is an indicator of effectiveness, this was far from truth prior to the New Deal.
  - heavyset_go 4y ago
    Right, union workers were shot at and bombed fighting for the rights that we take for granted today. Another way to look at this is that there hasn't been much progress in the labor market over the last ~50 years. Wages have been stagnant for that long, states introduced legislation that neutered unions and organization is at a comparative low. Given the trend of replacing employees with contractors who have less rights and benefits, you can even say that we're taking steps backward compared to where we were not too long ago.
    - dehrmann 4y ago
      > there hasn't been much progress in the labor market over the last ~50 years The open question is whether this is the cause of effect of the decline of unions. I can make a case for either.
  - eyelidlessness 4y ago
    Which is a pretty great testimonial for unions. They’ve been so effective that their lasting impact has sustained a century of adversarial counter efforts and half a century of decline in active membership. In contrast, the actual concentrations of wealth and power can’t seem to go more than a few years without flailing into crisis so severe everything stops to apply a temporary salve so it can all happen over and over again.
- coryrc 4y ago
  I'm not allowed to plug in an electrical strip at a trade show. I'm not allowed to pick up an item sitting twenty feet away on the loading dock. (Both the above personal experience) They make public transit too expensive: https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/mta-track-increase-number-subway-trains-conductors-article-1.410489 https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/mta-track-increase-numb... Let's not pretend it's all sunshine and roses.
  - Frondo 4y ago
    I've done about a dozen trade shows and have done both of those things, from personal experience. (This anecdote comes up frequently in these discussions and I always wonder where from, because it's not anything like I've seen...)
    - AlbertCory 4y ago
      Where does it come from? I saw it myself at the 1981 NCC in Chicago. The Xerox trade show staff person with a roll of $100 bills for paying off the unions. Granted that was a while ago.
      - Frondo 4y ago
        Yeah, I guess things might have been different then. I was 3 at that time, and in doing occasional trade shows for the last 7 or 8 years (so, from mid 2010s on), I've just never experienced it; not in Seattle, San Diego, Baltimore, nor a handful of smaller cities in NY and DE. Maybe the world has changed in the last 42 years, and it'd be helpful to qualify stories like these (where the original poster says he is not allowed, present tense) with where and when they've happened.
        AlbertCory 4y ago
        Can't argue with that. OP definitely used present tense.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- deltree7 4y ago
  Unions are cancer. Serve two bosses instead of one? Mathematically Unions are there to serve the bottom 20% of the members while severely hampering / hindering top performers. If you want to Union then please buy products / services from only Union shops and hire your local gardener, plumber from Union Number of Firms that provide exceptional product/service with 100% union : ZERO Number of Firms that provide exceptional product/service with 0% union : 1000+ The only people who are brainwashed are the progressives / liberals
  - heavyset_go 4y ago
    Number of blockbuster film studios that gross hundreds of millions/billions of dollars and pay unionized A-list movie stars millions of dollars: All of them. Number of top performing athletes, with million dollar contracts and unions, that entertain hundreds of millions of people: All of them. Number of tech companies with offices in the EU that also hire unionized employees and haven't cannibalized themselves: All of them.
jessetemp 4y ago
Not disagreeing with the general complacency of humans, but the frog thing is a myth. They only stay in the water if you remove their brain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
- inkywatcher 4y ago
  Ah, so the American worker analogy remains accurate.
- akiselev 4y ago
  > In 1869, while doing experiments searching for the location of the soul, German physiologist Friedrich Goltz demonstrated that a frog that has had its brain removed will remain in slowly heated water, but an intact frog attempted to escape the water when it reached 25 °C. Now we need a religious version of the "In Mice" meme [1] that just ends "IN FROGS." John 3:6: That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit... IN FROGS. [1] https://twitter.com/justsaysinmice https://twitter.com/justsaysinmice

cogman10 4y ago

There's been a steady anti-union drum beat both from corporate media and the work place. Unions are almost always portrayed as expensive, worthless, and corrupt. Yet our current labor rights are almost entirely from unions setting strong standards and employers/politicians falling in line. Propaganda works, if it didn't, Walmart and amazon wouldn't be spending so much money on anti-union propaganda. Nothing terrifies them more than the thought of multiple stores, warehouses, or development centers unionizing.

dehrmann 4y ago
> Yet our current labor rights are almost entirely from unions setting strong standards and employers/politicians falling in line. But the big wins were almost a century ago.
- runarberg 4y ago
  This may be true in the USA where union membership is in an all time low, however in the rest of the world unions are still landing deals which guarantees more labor rights, this includes longer parental leaves, more sick time, longer vacations, more benefits for part time workers, more enforcement against violations, more education and guarantees for at-risk groups (such as foreign workers), equal pay certificates, 36 hour work weeks, 32 hour work weeks, anti-harassment guarantees, etc. etc.
  - lostcolony 4y ago
    It also misses (well, leaves out; not sure the intent of the comment) the fact that unions have been gutted heavily in the US compared to where they were a century ago. When the US was an industrial, workers were treated poorly, unions began to form, fought for worker protections. As the US has transitioned into a knowledge/service economy, creating industries that didn't historically have unions, and industrials have been on the decline, unions have also declined. And where the US was once at the forefront of worker protections, we are sadly more like a third world country than a first world at this point.
    - dehrmann 4y ago
      > unions have been gutted heavily in the US compared to where they were a century ago. The red line isn't normalized by workforce size, but it suggests the big gains (five-day work week, 8-hour workday) were before unions really became powerful. Unionization was only a 15-year trend, then it stalled-out. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3e/United_States_union_membership_and_inequality%2C_top_1%25_income_share%2C_1910_to_2010.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3e/United_S...
      - runarberg 4y ago
        This is a really unfair interpretation of this graph. Unions had a big impact on these rights, but unions back then were nothing like the Unions today. In the 19th century, Labor unions functioned more like activist group then unions in the modern sense. There were quite a few of them, they often included members across businesses and even industries (of these IWW still exists and still functions like this). There were no protections for collective bargaining so there was no need for unions to mass enroll whole businesses, what was important was organizing for every event, and build a solidarity across workers, rather then unionizing whole workplaces. The union’s job was to organize direct action and build up solidarity around them. A successful strike had union members and non-members alike striking in solidarity. A very successful strike crossed many and diverse workplaces. As you can imagine these often turned violent when scabs refused to participate (as they were allowed to), or when unions with conflicting ideologies were competing for members and propaganda. This changed in the new deal era, particular when the Wagner Act (National Labor Relations Act; NLRA) was enacted in 1935. And you can see the uptake in union memberships on your graph. This act legalized collective action and protected workers in labor unions. This formed the basis unions as we know them today. From then on it became more important to organize each workplace, rather than each direct action, and the protections would only apply for members, not participants. So memberships suddenly became more important than participation. Comparing memberships between these two eras is effectively comparing apples to oranges. While today membership count is an indicator of effectiveness, this was far from truth prior to the New Deal.
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  Right, union workers were shot at and bombed fighting for the rights that we take for granted today. Another way to look at this is that there hasn't been much progress in the labor market over the last ~50 years. Wages have been stagnant for that long, states introduced legislation that neutered unions and organization is at a comparative low. Given the trend of replacing employees with contractors who have less rights and benefits, you can even say that we're taking steps backward compared to where we were not too long ago.
  - dehrmann 4y ago
    > there hasn't been much progress in the labor market over the last ~50 years The open question is whether this is the cause of effect of the decline of unions. I can make a case for either.
- eyelidlessness 4y ago
  Which is a pretty great testimonial for unions. They’ve been so effective that their lasting impact has sustained a century of adversarial counter efforts and half a century of decline in active membership. In contrast, the actual concentrations of wealth and power can’t seem to go more than a few years without flailing into crisis so severe everything stops to apply a temporary salve so it can all happen over and over again.
coryrc 4y ago
I'm not allowed to plug in an electrical strip at a trade show. I'm not allowed to pick up an item sitting twenty feet away on the loading dock. (Both the above personal experience) They make public transit too expensive: https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/mta-track-increase-number-subway-trains-conductors-article-1.410489 https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/mta-track-increase-numb... Let's not pretend it's all sunshine and roses.
- Frondo 4y ago
  I've done about a dozen trade shows and have done both of those things, from personal experience. (This anecdote comes up frequently in these discussions and I always wonder where from, because it's not anything like I've seen...)
  - AlbertCory 4y ago
    Where does it come from? I saw it myself at the 1981 NCC in Chicago. The Xerox trade show staff person with a roll of $100 bills for paying off the unions. Granted that was a while ago.
    - Frondo 4y ago
      Yeah, I guess things might have been different then. I was 3 at that time, and in doing occasional trade shows for the last 7 or 8 years (so, from mid 2010s on), I've just never experienced it; not in Seattle, San Diego, Baltimore, nor a handful of smaller cities in NY and DE. Maybe the world has changed in the last 42 years, and it'd be helpful to qualify stories like these (where the original poster says he is not allowed, present tense) with where and when they've happened.
      - AlbertCory 4y ago
        Can't argue with that. OP definitely used present tense.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
deltree7 4y ago
Unions are cancer. Serve two bosses instead of one? Mathematically Unions are there to serve the bottom 20% of the members while severely hampering / hindering top performers. If you want to Union then please buy products / services from only Union shops and hire your local gardener, plumber from Union Number of Firms that provide exceptional product/service with 100% union : ZERO Number of Firms that provide exceptional product/service with 0% union : 1000+ The only people who are brainwashed are the progressives / liberals
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  Number of blockbuster film studios that gross hundreds of millions/billions of dollars and pay unionized A-list movie stars millions of dollars: All of them. Number of top performing athletes, with million dollar contracts and unions, that entertain hundreds of millions of people: All of them. Number of tech companies with offices in the EU that also hire unionized employees and haven't cannibalized themselves: All of them.

jessetemp 4y ago

Not disagreeing with the general complacency of humans, but the frog thing is a myth. They only stay in the water if you remove their brain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog

inkywatcher 4y ago
Ah, so the American worker analogy remains accurate.
akiselev 4y ago
> In 1869, while doing experiments searching for the location of the soul, German physiologist Friedrich Goltz demonstrated that a frog that has had its brain removed will remain in slowly heated water, but an intact frog attempted to escape the water when it reached 25 °C. Now we need a religious version of the "In Mice" meme [1] that just ends "IN FROGS." John 3:6: That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit... IN FROGS. [1] https://twitter.com/justsaysinmice https://twitter.com/justsaysinmice