Talk:Trade union

From RationalWiki
Jump to: navigation, search

The following is a block of text from the article:

With the rise of the "me me me" and "I'm alright Jack" cultures as a result of Thatcherism in the UK, union membership and power has greatly diminished to the point where most young workers (in whatever profession) are happy not to belong to a union and prefer to bend over to the powers that be and then beg them, teary eyed, to at least spit on it first before sticking it in. Despite the good work that unions have done for the workforce in the past, many of the iPod generation see them as an anachronism and worse yet, as a hinderance to THEIR CAREER. This plays right into the hands of employers who are happy to mete out useless titles and irrelevant wage increases to these people ( a technique known as stroking).

It's almost as bad in the United States, where widespread corruption (including but not limited to massive organized crime infiltration) in the largest unions such as the Teamsters has reduced unions to something of a necessary evil, making it very easy for anti-labor propagandists to convince workers that they don't need a union; in fact, in some industries such as the recording industry, the very organization set up to protect the financial interests of their talent (SoundExchange) is controlled by the industry itself rather than the musicians.

But let's face it, we live in an age of globalism, iBooks, blogs and cool. Who would need a union now we're all masters of our own destiny?'

Shouldn't this be an essay?--Bob_M (talk) 04:01, 31 July 2007 (CDT)

  • I don't know. It's analysis, anyway, and the issue of organized crime involvement in the US labor is well-documented -- you can't talk at length about the Mafia without the Teamsters coming up a couple of hundred times. The fact is that unions do have a somewhat negative image in 21st century America, and it's a real problem as corporate interests continue to squeeze costs and roll back labor relations to the 1880s. Don't forget, in a lot of white collar jobs, salaried workers don't get paid overtime, and yet are expected to work it anyway. Unions were created to eliminate exactly that sort of exploitation. EVDebs 11:50, 3 August 2007 (CDT)
The original text of the article/screed that I threw up probably requires a lot of improvement as it was pretty much me venting whilst drinking after a typical workday! I work in an industry with a reasonable trade union but deal on a daily basis with people who would have benefited from actually joining but for a range of reasons, chose not to. I tend to deal with them when they are informed that they are "surplus to requirement", not an enviable position. HexspecimenIt's an X 13:00, 3 August 2007 (CDT)

[edit] Objectives

Of the four objectives given three are actually means to an objective. I'll sort this out after a vote among the members. and some tea. Totnesmartin 11:27, 3 August 2007 (CDT)

[edit] The problem with treating trade unions as price fixing schemes...

..Is that trade unions are essentially vendors for their members' services. Unless you really think that employers are somehow a special class entitled to dictate terms to their employees without question (and since we aren't a feudal culture (and most Westernized countries, not just the US, have a concept of equal protection of citizens), it seems kind of hard to assert that they're not doing anything that any other sorganization has the right to do.

Fdof: there were bigger problems than dictionary definitions here. Asserting that unions are anticompetitive is, at best, an oversimplification. They also function as political advocacy groups, based on the idea that employee-employer relations are inherently weighted in favor of the employer. The human rights abuses that come from that arrangement tend to serve to make the situation worse, so unions seek laws to eliminate those. Human capital, vendor analogy aside, is a very different product from anything else employer need, because people have lives outside work. It isn't just about money.

I'm not going to roll back your second edit, as it removed the more problematic parts of the first one, but some discussion may be called for. EVDebs (talk) 03:22, 25 August 2012 (UTC)

If I had been able to think of a more neutral term, I would have used it. Pretty much all the terms that deal with this concept are derogatory, even though when a group is exploited, this sort of activity can be justified. I tried to include in my edit the idea that there are good reasons for justifying it; I'm not trying to say that this makes unions illegitimate, only that there are legitimate concerns. And I don't think that calling it a "oversimplification" for not including other properties of unions, when those are separate issues, and are discussed elsewhere in the article, makes much sense.Fdof (talk) 23:43, 25 August 2012 (UTC)
Well, don't forget to make clear the difference between what a union is and what some unions have done. There's some more work to be done here, definitely. EVDebs (talk) 07:33, 26 August 2012 (UTC)

Can we get some more people involved in this convo here? EVDebs (talk) 07:32, 26 August 2012 (UTC)

Imagine I operate a labour hire business — I negotiate with employers to provide them with employees to provide certain functions under agreed conditions (pay, hours, and otherwise). Surely no libertarian could object to that. Since such a business could have thousands of workers available to hire out, it could potentially have an advantage in negotiation that the individuals it offers alone would not. Now suppose, I start such a labour hire business, but on a cooperative basis - i.e. the labour hire business is owned by the employees it hires out. Could a libertarian object to that? I don't see how they could either. And yet, such an organisation, would not be too different from contemporary labour unions. If a large enough number of employees insist on working through such a firm, then employers might have no practical choice but to engage them through such a firm - and I can't see any libertarian objection to that either - it would simply be employees voting with their feet in a free market. Even if these labour hire firms were to negotiate clauses, that said that their customers could not employ individuals independently (or via a competing firm) except on just as good conditions — that would just be freedom of contract, right? So, while libertarians object to labour unions as currently constituted, maybe we could reimagine them in such a way that they would pass libertarians' objections? Zack Martin HolyMaratreanSigil.png 08:18, 26 August 2012 (UTC)
Any group can be coercive. Unions are no different -- see especially the record of discrimination in the AFL, for example. OTOH, much anti-union rhetoric is propaganda in service of the economic elite who would prefer employees to shut up and continue licking the boots of their Galtian overlords. Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 08:57, 26 August 2012 (UTC)
That's what I meant by distinguishing between what unions are and what some unions do. It's not that discrimination and corruption aren't a problem, but they have nothing to do with whether unions per se are a good thing; they're part of a broader cultural issue, and when it comes to unions (and corporations for that matter) it's an implementation issue. EVDebs (talk) 18:39, 26 August 2012 (UTC)
Personal tools
Namespaces

Variants
Actions
Navigation
Community
Tools
support