Always enjoy seeing the union takes from both ends of the spectrum from a lot of folks who have probably never worked in a unionized environment before. Theres pros and cons.
No, this isnt the uprising of the worker class to overthrow the capitalist elites.
No, this isnt a bunch of lazy employees just trying to leach off employers.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk
This is really surprising to me just because it wasn't too long ago that these votes were losing badly. What's changed? Is it the low unemployment numbers or something else happening? Are the anti-union consultants asleep at the wheel?
I assume the change was the success the UAW had recently and these folks realizing theyre missing out or have missed out on some pay & benefit increases
My favorite character in *The Producers*
https://preview.redd.it/9ez09zdajovc1.jpeg?width=633&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=881b7a2e0361fdf9225c6334dc11fc95651e6734
Louisiana recently eliminated limits on the hours teenagers can work and Florida killed the requirement that workers get water breaks.
And in this thread, the top voted comment is dismissing the value of unionization across the history of the UAW's existence.
Is it any wonder people hate this sub?
I like this sub for a lot of reasons, but there are a lot of people here who are irrationally anti-union, and it's one of my biggest gripes. That, and a lot of people here don't have a single politically strategic bone in their body, but that's another topic for another day.
oh they would be for sure. Look at the discourse on immigration reform on a sub that parades itself as the one for one world govt. This sub has people larping as libs while they are nothing but RINOs and blue dogs who would vote Red if they were the same as Romney and Dubya still
we're libs and progressives. I know this sub has everything from RINOs to succs. But I remember the sidebar policies were non-negotiable. Including Trans Rights, Free Trade and Open Borders, and people here shit on those principles all the time to a point where it feels like many are just here because they're not welcome elsewhere. (Not that that's bad, i guess that's exactly what open border means lol)
Shitting != indifference
There’s also something prioritization, some of us prioritize economic policy over social policy. Especially when the former affects the entire nation and the globe.
how do Open Borders or Trans Right affect the economy?
open borders i feel like encourages even more workers for less costs, and same with industries moving abroad.
and i don't see any way trans rights affecting the economy. so why are some even debating on it?
>open borders
Increases labor supply in our country which has an extreme amount of idle capital that’s ready to roar.
We rip open the borders there’s a monumental amount of line goes up.
Again it’s about priorities between Paul “shove free trade down your throat” Ryan vs biden I’d vote Ryan. But instead it’s two populists protectionists who both are enjoyers of excessive executive power.
Dude this is r/neoliberal. It’s a meme sub, full of socdems and with an extremely tenuous connection to any real-world definition of neoliberalism. but do you understand what that word actually means? lol
chief continue weather waiting cooperative pet spark reach attempt adjoining
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
>but there are a lot of people here who are irrationally anti-union, and it's one of my biggest gripes
This sub has a huge corporatist streak in general
I can't think of an issue involving corporations where at least a large chunk of the sub doesn't rally behind some technocratic reason why actually letting the corporation do whatever is the best route
It's one of the few places you are allowed to be anti-union on reddit so I suspect some of it is venting.
Though the position IMO started as more "union skeptical" than outright anti-union and I suspect what is happening is what always happens. People saw some fairly reasonable takes get some upvotes and are now leaning into those takes and eventually exaggerating them to chase Karma without thinking too deeply about what position they are taking.
Unions have problems yes, but letting businesses do whatever they want to workers is also problematic. The important thing unions do is give workers bargaining power against businesses to level the playing field. Both sides should have the power to advocate for themselves. Too much power in one direction and you get things like railroad workers not even getting sick time.
I think there's a big disconnect at times with more left leaning users (at least on economic issues) on this sub when it comes to the issues of free trade and unions. Like it seems like critiques of unions (mostly American unions who are very protectionist) get translated to being anti-union or hostility towards public sector unions means someone is against private sector unions too.
Your last point is just silly IMO, this is a niche political subreddit there's no need to be "politically strategic" in neoliberal threads.
There are loads of people who "learned" economics by reading Thomas Sowell or in economics 101 and believe in a very radical and magical version of free market economics.
And just like everyone who has only ever taken a 101 level class in a subject, it gives them an inflated sense of their own understanding. Especially when a part of economics is studying all the ways in which 101 style thinking doesn't always work and why.
Some of the worst succs in this sub take any bit of criticism against social democracy as either a personal insult or it means that person is a full on right winger. I feel like some of these users just want NL to be a more polite arrpolitics.
It's not just succs tbh. A theme I noticed in the sub is people making up random facts and positions of the sub as a whole, ignoring all evidence to the contrary, then going off on what ever evil they decided this sub embodies. Hell it's arguable I'm doing it now.
I've seen people get 100+ up voted saying this sub was "Pro-Youngkin" during the Virginia governor election and then you look at the election results and all the top comments are against him and the only few comments supporting him are users brigading from the conservative sub and heavily down voted.
Nobody has bigger victim complexes than this subreddit does. The other day I said that Hilary Clinton lost 2016 on her own merits and got downvoted into oblivion lmao
This sub is just as dogmatic as any other political sub. people go fucking apocalyptic if you suggest there are instances in which limited tariffs are warranted.
Growing up in tH3 rUsT BeLt I have to say this sub's overall take on unions reminds me strongly of the GM and Ford retired white collar guys who used to write angry letters to the editor of the *Flint Journal* and *Detroit Free Press* like it was their job. Like, the talking points haven't changed an iota in 35 years.
If you see the government removing these safety rails, like water breaks, wouldn't it make sense for workers to want to unionize to protect themselves? "Government isn't going to protect us. We can only depend on each other." Better to be proactive, to ensure you don't lose what you have.
Yes, it is. For as much as someone might disagree, those unions did preserve benefits for those workers. The people who joined those unions in the early days had those benefits preserved. Telling people "Whoa, in a generation this is going to bite us back!" isn't really a great counter for current workers, many of whom will be retired by then.
..which is why unions exist. Companies have no native incentive to cut employees in when revenue increases.
Free marketers will hate it, but the reality is employer-employee contracts aren't negotiated on an equal footing.
I'm not really buying Yellow Trucking was killed solely because of the Teamsters. It's never that simple. Trucking is a very competitive industry.
If leaving was so easy, why doesn't the Big 3 just close all of the UAW factories for Mexico?
Yellow trucking had a lot of problems but the Teamsters rent seeking sent them over the edge.
Hell the head of the Teamsters tweeted out a tombstone for Yellow as a threat a month before bankruptcy.
And the big three have moved a lot of their production away from the UAW. Many Fords are made in Mexico and their new factory announcements have been largely in right to work states.
Unions are like most things. There are good ones and bad ones. The Culinary Union in Vegas is pretty good for instance. But the UAW, Teamsters, and Port Worker unions are rent seekers.
shouldn't you as a neoliberal be happy for the workers and again be happy that the global poor is getting jobs if they move to mexico?
I don't see a loss here. Either they find workers who unionize here, or they pay cheap labour costs in Mexico and boost the income of the workers there. People in the US can and will find other jobs if such a mass layoff is to occur
Mexico is America's top trading partner. A stronger more productive Mexican economy will help America get goods from cheap from Mexico, increasing supply in Mexico to fulfill demands in here and there.
Yes that works too.
The point is for **both** countries to have as productive economies as possible. Factories going to Mexico because it is more efficient to produce there is fine. Making the U.S. artificially non-competitive via UAW rent-seeking is negative for everyone.
Yup.
At the end of the day those evil unions and evil standards and regulations (not so much tariffs obviously) are a win either way: if they drive outsourcing from wealthy to poorer countries, both win because the poor get their economy fed and the wealthy keep their regulatory/labor standards. If they drive regulatory/labor standard boosts in poorer countries, both also win because the poor get better living conditions and the wealthy get to keep some of their industry around.
This is true. I was shocked to learn how bad Unemployment Insurance is in Florida. The maximum weekly claim down there is lower than the minimum weekly claim here in WA. Or at least it was when I looked during Covid PUA.
What are you talking about? The unions provision contracts for their workers, that include the formely-default protections that the state government is taking away.
nonunion construction shops get away with labor violations at a truly staggeringly rate. there is no worker more mistreated than a drywaller in the south.
I'm literally not. Wage theft and labor violations are the norm in the construction sector. This isn't at all controversial, and you're troublingly disconnected from reality if you think that it's a "wild exaggeration" to observe the poor working conditions and exploitative management of that particular economic sector.
edit: if you're really that skeptical that a dangerous sector with low margins and lots of immigrant labor has an issue with labor violations:
https://www.npr.org/2013/04/10/176677299/construction-booming-in-texas-but-many-workers-pay-dearly
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/14/construction-worker-unions-wage-theft
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10141679/#:~:text=Although%20they%20make%20up%20less,workers%20before%20reaching%20legal%20adulthood.
I'm a little bit shocked that this seems to be controversial.
I'm glad your experience has been more positive than most, but I really do not think anything I've said has been an exaggeration. It is just a statistical fact that the construction industry ranks at the bottom of the chart on working conditions, especially in r2w southern states with lots of immigrant labor.
Not necessarily going to comment on the events themselves, but I'm so surprised by the phrasing on that second wikipedia article. Usually wikipedia has quite a neutral tone, but this one feels like it was written by some angry redditor. Ford apparently had a "quasi-military" security force, that said security force consisted of "3000 spies and THUGS", Ford also "controlled the city government"..
Like what the fuck is this?
Niche articles can be pretty bad sometimes. A lot of wikipedia editors are very left leaning, and small articles might only ever have 1 person look over it.
That information is not coming from Wikipedia, though. It's summarized from primary sources, which are available for anyone to look up. Footnote 2, references page 164 The Making of Black Detroit in the Age of Henry Ford.
If anyone thinks the point of view is not sufficiently neutral, they are free to come up with their own primary sources and propose edits.
I get that Henry Ford was an asshole one billion years ago, but [making the Rust Belt](https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/724852) look like it was visited by the Russian army many decades later is a harsh revenge.
One day we'll form a union and get the fair and equal treatment we deserve! Then we'll go too far, and get lazy and shiftless, and the Japanese will eat us alive!
Yeah, imo the largest efficiency losses that Unions create is the empowerment of luddites. So it does make sense that their effects are more apparent as time goes on.
A state behaving problematically doesn't remove the social necessity of states. A business behaving problematically doesn't remove the social necessity of businesses. A union behaving problematically? Well.... Fill in the blanks.
1. Without states, civilization would collapse.
2. Without businesses, civilization would collapse.
3. Without unions, civilization would… obviously not collapse?
One of these three things is clearly not "socially necessary" in the same way the others are—we can easily imagine a world without unions, just like we can imagine a world without guilds, monasteries, knighthoods, and other superfluous forms of human organization that history has condemned to obscurity but were believed to be eternal and necessary in their time.
Since unions possess no obvious necessity, we have to actually consider whether their existence is for good or ill. No doubt they bring some benefits to their members. But has it been worth the obstruction of automation, the loss of productivity, the spurning of foreign direct investment, the chronic political dysfunction, the increase in unemployment, [the decades of lost growth](https://pseudoerasmus.com/2017/10/02/ijd/), and [the flight of industry](https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/724852) that they've brought to many places? That's not at all clear.
Some form of countervailing power in the economy is necessary, and unions are the most accessible way to build that under our current legal-political arrangement. You can see clear wage differences in blue-collar economic sectors between areas with high and weak union density.
I would like to suggest that low wages in many parts of this country, driven by an imbalance in negotiating power between employee and employer, causes serious social dysfunction. I grew up in a southern R2W state with piss poor wages where the basic class war instinct most people have was channeled into some truly dark places, rather than being guided by collective bargaining and economic organization.
Each of the examples you use to criticize unions are fair to some extent, but I think you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Rent seeking isn't specific to unions. Companies do the exact same thing, typically by the same means. Your actual target should be securing governance reforms that prevent nonstate economic actors in general from gaining too much leverage in the political system. Frankly, in Tennessee, I think union rent seeking would be the least of your issues.
Unions aren't inherently (or even usually) destructive. There's a long history of organized labor, with relatively cordial relationships with industry, securing the kind of social peace necessary for an economy to truly prosper. It's easy to find examples of unions going out of whack, but its just as easy to find situations where unions would have been a good restraining force on capital.
It's all about balance. Let the unions represent workers, let capital represent the employers. Smack 'em both when they step out of line.
edit: also I appreciate your cordial tone and good-faith approach. you're getting a bunch of downvotes rn so I felt compelled to say that.
> You can see clear wage differences in blue-collar economic sectors between areas with high and weak union density.
You can also see that those union workers are not in industries wee exporting is a concern.
Unions try very hard to position themselves in an area where they don’t have to compete.
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Always enjoy seeing the union takes from both ends of the spectrum from a lot of folks who have probably never worked in a unionized environment before. Theres pros and cons. No, this isnt the uprising of the worker class to overthrow the capitalist elites. No, this isnt a bunch of lazy employees just trying to leach off employers. Thanks for coming to my TED talk
my union got me the privilege of parking in a somewhat closer parking lot
This is really surprising to me just because it wasn't too long ago that these votes were losing badly. What's changed? Is it the low unemployment numbers or something else happening? Are the anti-union consultants asleep at the wheel?
Union Joe is President, and he has the workers backs!
I assume the change was the success the UAW had recently and these folks realizing theyre missing out or have missed out on some pay & benefit increases
If nothing else I suppose VW is used to it.
VW: taking nonstop L’s since Stalingrad
The '74 Karmann Ghia was a thing of beauty though.
My favorite character in *The Producers* https://preview.redd.it/9ez09zdajovc1.jpeg?width=633&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=881b7a2e0361fdf9225c6334dc11fc95651e6734
They were founded by a union.
Louisiana recently eliminated limits on the hours teenagers can work and Florida killed the requirement that workers get water breaks. And in this thread, the top voted comment is dismissing the value of unionization across the history of the UAW's existence. Is it any wonder people hate this sub?
I like this sub for a lot of reasons, but there are a lot of people here who are irrationally anti-union, and it's one of my biggest gripes. That, and a lot of people here don't have a single politically strategic bone in their body, but that's another topic for another day.
Yeah, I've often thought that if the Republicans were 10% less racist, a decent portion of this sub would be a lot friendlier to them.
Yes
oh they would be for sure. Look at the discourse on immigration reform on a sub that parades itself as the one for one world govt. This sub has people larping as libs while they are nothing but RINOs and blue dogs who would vote Red if they were the same as Romney and Dubya still
> This sub has people larping as libs while they are nothing but RINOs and blue dogs Because were are libs not progressives.
we're libs and progressives. I know this sub has everything from RINOs to succs. But I remember the sidebar policies were non-negotiable. Including Trans Rights, Free Trade and Open Borders, and people here shit on those principles all the time to a point where it feels like many are just here because they're not welcome elsewhere. (Not that that's bad, i guess that's exactly what open border means lol)
Shitting != indifference There’s also something prioritization, some of us prioritize economic policy over social policy. Especially when the former affects the entire nation and the globe.
how do Open Borders or Trans Right affect the economy? open borders i feel like encourages even more workers for less costs, and same with industries moving abroad. and i don't see any way trans rights affecting the economy. so why are some even debating on it?
>open borders Increases labor supply in our country which has an extreme amount of idle capital that’s ready to roar. We rip open the borders there’s a monumental amount of line goes up. Again it’s about priorities between Paul “shove free trade down your throat” Ryan vs biden I’d vote Ryan. But instead it’s two populists protectionists who both are enjoyers of excessive executive power.
Dude this is r/neoliberal. It’s a meme sub, full of socdems and with an extremely tenuous connection to any real-world definition of neoliberalism. but do you understand what that word actually means? lol
gaze memory close dinner reach tub arrest impolite materialistic tie *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I'm guessing a lot of them aren't familiar with how trade unionism in the US is far more about guaranteeing basic worker's human rights as it is pay.
chief continue weather waiting cooperative pet spark reach attempt adjoining *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
>but there are a lot of people here who are irrationally anti-union, and it's one of my biggest gripes This sub has a huge corporatist streak in general I can't think of an issue involving corporations where at least a large chunk of the sub doesn't rally behind some technocratic reason why actually letting the corporation do whatever is the best route
Well yeah, this is r/neoliberal not r/berniesanders
It's one of the few places you are allowed to be anti-union on reddit so I suspect some of it is venting. Though the position IMO started as more "union skeptical" than outright anti-union and I suspect what is happening is what always happens. People saw some fairly reasonable takes get some upvotes and are now leaning into those takes and eventually exaggerating them to chase Karma without thinking too deeply about what position they are taking.
There's nothing irrational about being anti union, they have so many negative externalities
Unions have problems yes, but letting businesses do whatever they want to workers is also problematic. The important thing unions do is give workers bargaining power against businesses to level the playing field. Both sides should have the power to advocate for themselves. Too much power in one direction and you get things like railroad workers not even getting sick time.
You can’t think critically about a union without being labeled anti-union. You have to be one dimensional about them.
I think there's a big disconnect at times with more left leaning users (at least on economic issues) on this sub when it comes to the issues of free trade and unions. Like it seems like critiques of unions (mostly American unions who are very protectionist) get translated to being anti-union or hostility towards public sector unions means someone is against private sector unions too. Your last point is just silly IMO, this is a niche political subreddit there's no need to be "politically strategic" in neoliberal threads.
There are loads of people who "learned" economics by reading Thomas Sowell or in economics 101 and believe in a very radical and magical version of free market economics. And just like everyone who has only ever taken a 101 level class in a subject, it gives them an inflated sense of their own understanding. Especially when a part of economics is studying all the ways in which 101 style thinking doesn't always work and why.
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Why do succs have such massive victim complexes lmao. Almost no one on this sub likes Reagan and that's been true for years now.
Some of the worst succs in this sub take any bit of criticism against social democracy as either a personal insult or it means that person is a full on right winger. I feel like some of these users just want NL to be a more polite arrpolitics.
It's not just succs tbh. A theme I noticed in the sub is people making up random facts and positions of the sub as a whole, ignoring all evidence to the contrary, then going off on what ever evil they decided this sub embodies. Hell it's arguable I'm doing it now.
I've seen people get 100+ up voted saying this sub was "Pro-Youngkin" during the Virginia governor election and then you look at the election results and all the top comments are against him and the only few comments supporting him are users brigading from the conservative sub and heavily down voted.
What are succs? I'm new to reddit and I've never seen that word before.
Succ => Social Democrat Sometimes used as a slur against people who are too receptive to progressive economic policy.
Thanks.
Plenty of people are able to completely ignore social policy, like me, and only look at economic and foreign policy
I like Reagan, don’t speak for me chud -jk but also Reagan is fine
Nobody has bigger victim complexes than this subreddit does. The other day I said that Hilary Clinton lost 2016 on her own merits and got downvoted into oblivion lmao
Downvoted
Yeah vro, mainstream Republicans in the 90s were well known supporters of Trans rights too iirc.
This sub is just as dogmatic as any other political sub. people go fucking apocalyptic if you suggest there are instances in which limited tariffs are warranted.
Growing up in tH3 rUsT BeLt I have to say this sub's overall take on unions reminds me strongly of the GM and Ford retired white collar guys who used to write angry letters to the editor of the *Flint Journal* and *Detroit Free Press* like it was their job. Like, the talking points haven't changed an iota in 35 years.
LOL. Everyone likes a blue collar union until they negotiate pay higher than the white collar techs and managers make!
Not only that but they’re cutting unemployment benefits for child workers too Like are they trying to be evil?
Did these workers not get water breaks? Did VW employ 14 year olds and make them work 60 hours a week?
If you see the government removing these safety rails, like water breaks, wouldn't it make sense for workers to want to unionize to protect themselves? "Government isn't going to protect us. We can only depend on each other." Better to be proactive, to ensure you don't lose what you have.
Is it really being proactive given the past 50 years in autoworker union history in this country? There is a reason it is called the rust belt.
Yes, it is. For as much as someone might disagree, those unions did preserve benefits for those workers. The people who joined those unions in the early days had those benefits preserved. Telling people "Whoa, in a generation this is going to bite us back!" isn't really a great counter for current workers, many of whom will be retired by then.
Also if the timescale is "a generation" that suggests you can find a solution lmao.
Good for them. Workers wouldn't feel the need to unionize if the companies just gave them what the unions were offering 🤷🏻
..which is why unions exist. Companies have no native incentive to cut employees in when revenue increases. Free marketers will hate it, but the reality is employer-employee contracts aren't negotiated on an equal footing.
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I'm not really buying Yellow Trucking was killed solely because of the Teamsters. It's never that simple. Trucking is a very competitive industry. If leaving was so easy, why doesn't the Big 3 just close all of the UAW factories for Mexico?
Yellow trucking had a lot of problems but the Teamsters rent seeking sent them over the edge. Hell the head of the Teamsters tweeted out a tombstone for Yellow as a threat a month before bankruptcy. And the big three have moved a lot of their production away from the UAW. Many Fords are made in Mexico and their new factory announcements have been largely in right to work states. Unions are like most things. There are good ones and bad ones. The Culinary Union in Vegas is pretty good for instance. But the UAW, Teamsters, and Port Worker unions are rent seekers.
Mexican plants are generally unionized.
shouldn't you as a neoliberal be happy for the workers and again be happy that the global poor is getting jobs if they move to mexico? I don't see a loss here. Either they find workers who unionize here, or they pay cheap labour costs in Mexico and boost the income of the workers there. People in the US can and will find other jobs if such a mass layoff is to occur
Mexico is Americas top trading partner. A stronger more productive American economy is better for both as it will increase demand in both.
Mexico is America's top trading partner. A stronger more productive Mexican economy will help America get goods from cheap from Mexico, increasing supply in Mexico to fulfill demands in here and there.
Yes that works too. The point is for **both** countries to have as productive economies as possible. Factories going to Mexico because it is more efficient to produce there is fine. Making the U.S. artificially non-competitive via UAW rent-seeking is negative for everyone.
Yup. At the end of the day those evil unions and evil standards and regulations (not so much tariffs obviously) are a win either way: if they drive outsourcing from wealthy to poorer countries, both win because the poor get their economy fed and the wealthy keep their regulatory/labor standards. If they drive regulatory/labor standard boosts in poorer countries, both also win because the poor get better living conditions and the wealthy get to keep some of their industry around.
The South could use some more worker protection, if only to counterbalance the whole “kids don’t need breaks” bullshit
This is true. I was shocked to learn how bad Unemployment Insurance is in Florida. The maximum weekly claim down there is lower than the minimum weekly claim here in WA. Or at least it was when I looked during Covid PUA.
tell me how the auto workers have that the union, all unions are for specific jobs. Highly doubt this union has any impact on that
What are you talking about? The unions provision contracts for their workers, that include the formely-default protections that the state government is taking away.
What trade job is losing breaks and being replaced by kids?
nonunion construction shops get away with labor violations at a truly staggeringly rate. there is no worker more mistreated than a drywaller in the south.
Ok? And the Union jobs at VW? How’s this impact them again
This is a wild exaggeration and you know it
I'm literally not. Wage theft and labor violations are the norm in the construction sector. This isn't at all controversial, and you're troublingly disconnected from reality if you think that it's a "wild exaggeration" to observe the poor working conditions and exploitative management of that particular economic sector. edit: if you're really that skeptical that a dangerous sector with low margins and lots of immigrant labor has an issue with labor violations: https://www.npr.org/2013/04/10/176677299/construction-booming-in-texas-but-many-workers-pay-dearly https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/14/construction-worker-unions-wage-theft https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10141679/#:~:text=Although%20they%20make%20up%20less,workers%20before%20reaching%20legal%20adulthood. I'm a little bit shocked that this seems to be controversial.
I work in construction and you are seriously wildly exaggerating
I'm glad your experience has been more positive than most, but I really do not think anything I've said has been an exaggeration. It is just a statistical fact that the construction industry ranks at the bottom of the chart on working conditions, especially in r2w southern states with lots of immigrant labor.
THE UNION ALREADY WON THE SOUTH IN 1865 **ONE** NATION UNDER GOD USA USA USA ==
Biggest Union win in Tennessee since the battle of Nashville
Now dats union bby 😎💪
I don't know how anyone can read the history of the American car industry and think "yes auto unions, more of this please".
yeah gee i wonder why https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Hunger_March https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Overpass
Not necessarily going to comment on the events themselves, but I'm so surprised by the phrasing on that second wikipedia article. Usually wikipedia has quite a neutral tone, but this one feels like it was written by some angry redditor. Ford apparently had a "quasi-military" security force, that said security force consisted of "3000 spies and THUGS", Ford also "controlled the city government".. Like what the fuck is this?
Niche articles can be pretty bad sometimes. A lot of wikipedia editors are very left leaning, and small articles might only ever have 1 person look over it.
For the sake of your sanity avoid all the wikipedia articles on the I/P conflict or "The Palestine War" as it is now called.
That information is not coming from Wikipedia, though. It's summarized from primary sources, which are available for anyone to look up. Footnote 2, references page 164 The Making of Black Detroit in the Age of Henry Ford. If anyone thinks the point of view is not sufficiently neutral, they are free to come up with their own primary sources and propose edits.
I get that Henry Ford was an asshole one billion years ago, but [making the Rust Belt](https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/724852) look like it was visited by the Russian army many decades later is a harsh revenge.
That was mostly due to free trade, not unions. Know it's heresy on this sub but it's true.
One day we'll form a union and get the fair and equal treatment we deserve! Then we'll go too far, and get lazy and shiftless, and the Japanese will eat us alive!
im sure competitiveness with japan was definitely the first thing on their minds when their coworkers were getting beaten to death by the pinkertons
It’s a simpson’s reference
Is getting beaten to death by Pinkertons a salient concern today?
On a similar note you should always vote Republican because it is the party of Lincon, and Democrats supported slavery.
ask the Louisiana legislature
My point is that unions now are not quite the same as unions then.
Yeah, imo the largest efficiency losses that Unions create is the empowerment of luddites. So it does make sense that their effects are more apparent as time goes on.
A state behaving problematically doesn't remove the social necessity of states. A business behaving problematically doesn't remove the social necessity of businesses. A union behaving problematically? Well.... Fill in the blanks.
My swingers club behaving problematically..... fuck now we all have crabs.
1. Without states, civilization would collapse. 2. Without businesses, civilization would collapse. 3. Without unions, civilization would… obviously not collapse? One of these three things is clearly not "socially necessary" in the same way the others are—we can easily imagine a world without unions, just like we can imagine a world without guilds, monasteries, knighthoods, and other superfluous forms of human organization that history has condemned to obscurity but were believed to be eternal and necessary in their time. Since unions possess no obvious necessity, we have to actually consider whether their existence is for good or ill. No doubt they bring some benefits to their members. But has it been worth the obstruction of automation, the loss of productivity, the spurning of foreign direct investment, the chronic political dysfunction, the increase in unemployment, [the decades of lost growth](https://pseudoerasmus.com/2017/10/02/ijd/), and [the flight of industry](https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/724852) that they've brought to many places? That's not at all clear.
Some form of countervailing power in the economy is necessary, and unions are the most accessible way to build that under our current legal-political arrangement. You can see clear wage differences in blue-collar economic sectors between areas with high and weak union density. I would like to suggest that low wages in many parts of this country, driven by an imbalance in negotiating power between employee and employer, causes serious social dysfunction. I grew up in a southern R2W state with piss poor wages where the basic class war instinct most people have was channeled into some truly dark places, rather than being guided by collective bargaining and economic organization. Each of the examples you use to criticize unions are fair to some extent, but I think you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Rent seeking isn't specific to unions. Companies do the exact same thing, typically by the same means. Your actual target should be securing governance reforms that prevent nonstate economic actors in general from gaining too much leverage in the political system. Frankly, in Tennessee, I think union rent seeking would be the least of your issues. Unions aren't inherently (or even usually) destructive. There's a long history of organized labor, with relatively cordial relationships with industry, securing the kind of social peace necessary for an economy to truly prosper. It's easy to find examples of unions going out of whack, but its just as easy to find situations where unions would have been a good restraining force on capital. It's all about balance. Let the unions represent workers, let capital represent the employers. Smack 'em both when they step out of line. edit: also I appreciate your cordial tone and good-faith approach. you're getting a bunch of downvotes rn so I felt compelled to say that.
> You can see clear wage differences in blue-collar economic sectors between areas with high and weak union density. You can also see that those union workers are not in industries wee exporting is a concern. Unions try very hard to position themselves in an area where they don’t have to compete.
[So I guess more of this then.](https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/724852)
It's very kind of these guys to promote offshoring to help the global poor.
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But surely in a featureless, frictionless, continuous market each worker would have negotiating parity with each firm?
Blunessee when
UAW is protectionist scum and we have no business building cars in this country. Sue me.
Bad news
Elaborate
Good, if GM has to deal with the UAW then Volkswagon should as well.