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Come on. You can be pro union and also recognize that many unions have had extremely poor, corrupt, self-serving leadership and that changing them isn't trivia

by x0x0 3y ago

Come on. You can be pro union and also recognize that many unions have had extremely poor, corrupt, self-serving leadership and that changing them isn't trivial. Eg look at what happened to the hilariously corrupt UAW when Fain got in and actually did his job. While in theory union employees can change their leadership, in practice, that appears to be extremely difficult, and I don't think you can make a case that the UAW was serving the needs of its members for at least the 20 years preceding Fain. That's not to say unions are bad, but it's a more complex picture than you're painting.

autoexec 3y ago
> in practice, that appears to be extremely difficult, and I don't think you can make a case that the UAW was serving the needs of its members for at least the 20 years preceding Fain. I can't say that I'm intimately familiar with the UAW although on the whole it seems to have been an extremely successful union. Was there a large effort to oust Rory Gamble before the corruption scandal came to light? There's no denying that union leadership was corrupt and that members were hurt by that. The last 20 years saw some major concessions to the auto industry, some of it due to self-serving leadership that was caught colluding with industry executives and some of it due to the failing industry itself which needed a massive government bailout in that same time period. I will say that all of that didn't stop many people from claiming that the union was being far too good for the employees, so good that the workers were supposedly "highly overpaid" and responsible for driving the industry into the ground. Even trump complained at the time of the bailout about autoworkers getting raises ("They get their little five percent. They get another two percent. They get another three percent, four percent ... and all of a sudden they're making more money than the people that own the company.") Even a union at its worst and weakest is still too good for some people I guess.

by x0x0 3y ago

autoexec 3y ago

> in practice, that appears to be extremely difficult, and I don't think you can make a case that the UAW was serving the needs of its members for at least the 20 years preceding Fain. I can't say that I'm intimately familiar with the UAW although on the whole it seems to have been an extremely successful union. Was there a large effort to oust Rory Gamble before the corruption scandal came to light? There's no denying that union leadership was corrupt and that members were hurt by that. The last 20 years saw some major concessions to the auto industry, some of it due to self-serving leadership that was caught colluding with industry executives and some of it due to the failing industry itself which needed a massive government bailout in that same time period. I will say that all of that didn't stop many people from claiming that the union was being far too good for the employees, so good that the workers were supposedly "highly overpaid" and responsible for driving the industry into the ground. Even trump complained at the time of the bailout about autoworkers getting raises ("They get their little five percent. They get another two percent. They get another three percent, four percent ... and all of a sudden they're making more money than the people that own the company.") Even a union at its worst and weakest is still too good for some people I guess.