[Cause]

Gender: Male
Race: White
Age: 25
Education: MSc Biochemistry
Union Membership: Never/unlikely

I give the above information to show my possible Bias and because I do think it is important information for people of dissenting views to perhaps have access to. Obviously in most countries I imagine the mention of race would be unnecessary but coming as I do from South Africa it is not possible to separate the issues of striking and workers right from skin colour.

On to the actual discussion. I have long held the belief that unions in my country have too much power and striking workers have too many rights in my country. I realize that many of the problems I may discuss are unique to my country, legally and culturally (its a legacy from apartheid that striking workers almost always carry weapons), but many are not and I am interested to hear the thoughts of people from different countries. This is not meant to be a discussion about South African Strikes and Unions but rather a general discussion, though my examples will of course be from my personnel experience and hence South African examples. Really I am interested in discussing the power of unions, the right to strike, the interest of the country or company vs that of the workers and union busting.For example it is my understanding that both England and the USA have both during their history strongly enforced Union Busting have have restricted the rights of unions and workers quite dramatically compared to other countries.

So onto my talking points. In my country so long as union provides warning it may launch a protected strike. A protected strike can be conducted not only to protest unfair labor practices or unsafe working conditions but also for the purpose of enforcing a work stoppage until demands for a higher wage are met. Its my understanding that most countries allow the first two kinds of strike but are more strict regarding the third. I live in a country where the majority of the labor force is unskilled/uneducated and and one in four people is unemployed. If not for legislation prohibiting it in many cases of a strike an employer could easily fire all the striking workers and replace them. Of course that could lead to exploitation of workers. Though my country does have laws regarding minimum wages. So I'm interested in this regard to peoples thoughts on your countries law regarding such strikes as well as the rights of business vs worker rights. Of course many illegal strikes that do not afford workers protection happen often. In almost all cases my countries courts side with workers regardless and reverse the decision of a company to fire its workers.

While the military and police in my country do not have the right to strike other services which I think many will agree are essential do. Emergency response workers and nurses do have the right to strike and regularly do. Also their is a yearly strike by my countries teachers just before exams. Their is talk of legislation to make teachers an essential occupation and remove their right to strike in response. Of course one wonders how a government could enforce an entire profession from striking, especially when it has a history of doing so. After all I understand the police in america regularly strike using the excuse of the so called 'blue flu'. So here I'm interested in peoples thoughts when the interests of a profession are counter to the interest of a country. Education in my country is a shambles! The fact that teachers regularly strike just before final exams is undeniably part of the reason for this. Why should some professions be allowed to strike when others cant?

Strikers in my country are often invariably violent as well. Its not uncommon for strikers to kill, intimidate or humiliate those colleagues who do not wish to strike. And are equally if not more viscous with 'Scab' workers. This is of course illegal but it seems impossible to stop. Recently in the internationally infamous Lomnin Miners strike the miners killed two police officers, two security guards and at least six workers. Of the 500-3000 striking workers who is guilty of these ten murders? All of them? none of them? Should they be rewarded with a wage increase? When so many are collectively guilty do they all become innocent? These same strikers have now threatened to burn alive anyone who works for the mine before their demands are met and have also threatened to sabotage the mine. My government has already been forced to drop the murder charges against 300 of the arrested miners. And when the police last confronted them it left 34 strikers dead and everyone from government to unions divided on whether it was a massacre or the police acted as they had to. How do you deal with such violent groups? I worry about the precedent it would set if any of these strikers get their demands met.

Lastly I have already mentioned one in four people is unemployed in my country. Their was talk of creating a wage subsidiary for business that would hire new youth workers. The unions have blocked the move. They claim it will insensitive business to hire new youth workers and to fire older workers. Of course it should also be mentioned the average age of a union member in Cosatu my countries biggest union with over 2 million members (25% of the workforce) is 46. They claim to champion the poor and the worker but it seems to me that that is only true when it coincided with what is best for its members. Should unions be able to bring such political power to bear on government? Obviously 2 million votes is 2 million votes and that's democracy in action but by organizing and collecting that vote I would argue that the union actually manages to use that voting power far above what its worth. Politicians will do much to gain two million votes and its easier to get them in one lump sum than fight for them individually. Cosatu has in fact infiltrated (a biased word but I don't know what else to use) my countrie's ruling party at all levels and many former union bosses are party bosses.

Its long been my belief that once a year my country is held hostage by wage disputes. Civil servant, teacher, transport and nurses strikes bring my country to its knees like clockwork. This despite the fact that often their are many unemployed people on the sideline willing to do the job for less. It seems to me the strength of unions and the right to strike in my country is at the expense of the country as a whole. Im just interested in other peoples thoughts and stories from their own countries.

This post has been edited by Cause: 06 September 2012 - 05:17 PM

[Primateus]

I can only speak of my own experience with strikes and unions, but I've only ever had a real run-in with a union strike once. Although fortunately the strike never happened this was a case where I was supposed to support workers in a business that had absolutely nothing to do with my work. The problem, for me, was that I was newly hired and a brand new member of the union (back then you had to be a member of the local union, it wasn't a matter of personal choice) and I was therefore ineligible for strike benefits. So I was supposed to show solidarity to people I didn't know, didn't work with and didn't care about, but they would not show me the same courtesy.

Yeah, unions are "good" but sometimes I think they're more concerned with the union itself rather than its members.

[Cause]

Primateus, on 06 September 2012 - 05:22 PM, said:

I can only speak of my own experience with strikes and unions, but I've only ever had a real run-in with a union strike once. Although fortunately the strike never happened this was a case where I was supposed to support workers in a business that had absolutely nothing to do with my work. The problem, for me, was that I was newly hired and a brand new member of the union (back then you had to be a member of the local union, it wasn't a matter of personal choice) and I was therefore ineligible for strike benefits. So I was supposed to show solidarity to people I didn't know, didn't work with and didn't care about, but they would not show me the same courtesy.

Yeah, unions are "good" but sometimes I think they're more concerned with the union itself rather than its members.

Agreed! Unions in my country compete for membership and of course membership fees. Union bosses earn more than ten times the workers they represent and I think often that's all they care about. I'm also not an expert by any means on my countries union laws but as I understand from my limited research Unions try to maintain, have to maintain a certain percentage of a companies work force to maintain their rights. If they have a large enough percentage of the workforce they can make membership mandatory! and edge out other unions. I also think collective bargaining has removed incentive for a worker to be better than his peer since he cant be rewarded for his efforts individually. I would say productivity as a whole suffers.

[Soulcrusher]

Male, 25, Yr12, Night Porter


I have never ever been a fan of unions, in Australia they seem to use scare tactics and are vying for more control of workplaces and that just doesn't sit right for me. Regardless I always see it as a waste of money, I've never ever had problems in the workplace, and I have worked wquite a few different jobs, I'm always quite happy with where I am/How much I'm getting paid, But I'm by no means a person who will spend 20years at their jobs.

I recently read an opinion article regarding the strikes over east;
http://www.thepunch....k-without-fear/

[Fist Gamet]

I don't think I can make any kind of decent comparison with the unions in the UK compared to the current situation in SA. the cultural differences are, if I read your post right, quite vast. My impression was that in the case of the miners, you have well educated union bosses leading a huge number of poorly educated men, which, to me, is just asking to be abused by the union bosses. Is this what is happening? Surely no decent and civilised union would condone using violent intimidation and murder to get their demands met. Perhaps I am reading it very wrong but you won't see strikers in the UK killing people.

In the UK, the unions were probably too powerful up into the 1970 and 80s but Thatcher systematically destroyed them (through illegal and immoral means, I might add) and there was a lot of violence in 1984/5 during the Miner's strike but a lot of that was done by the military and the police.

As to unions in general, I am fully supportive of trade unions and I absolutely believe in the right of workers to be in one (isn't it actually part of the Human Rights Act?) and not just because of the huge differences Unions have made to the rights and conditions and wages of countless workers over many, many years. We MUST, imo, have strong unions who are able to fight and oppose unfair bosses and governments. If we don't, we would all lose. Taking the current heartless, amoral, elitist bastards (making my bias clear) in power in the UK right now as an example, health unions have been able (so far) to curtail a few of the more (evil) pointless, awful, ill-advised and downright disrespectful and dangerous of the changes they are trying to force upon the nation - all in the name of saving money to stave off the global meltdown caused by the sheer mindnumbingly fucktard greed of the super-rich and their bankers (of whom none have been held to account). However, because the unions are not as strong as they once were, many of the dangerous and terrible changes they are forcing through are still going to happen. Just about every single health union in the UK told them that the Government plan to overhaul and change the NHS was disastrous and blindingly stupid, but they have been able to utterly ignore hundreds of thousands of NHS workers to force it through.
My point, is that with unions too weak to oppose governments, terrible things can and do happen. The changes I am talking about have cost 60000 jobs so far and the cost to patients and patient care is incalculable.

I expect my union to champion my cause for fair pay and conditions and to oppose changes that are unfair and deterimental to me and my profession. Without them I would be poorer, at the whim of bosses to hire and fire, my work environment would be unsafe, there'd be no proper pay progression or protection. the pension would be out the window, there'd be no sickness and illness cover...and so on.

So for me, unions are vital, absolutely vital, but, I agree, if they are too powerful they can be dangerous because someone is always looking to screw someone for their own benefit. As for countries being held to ransom, I can only speak from the UK experience and that is to say that this mantra is exactly what the governments want you to believe because the ability of any union to take successful action depends almost entirely upon the goodwill and support of the rest of the general public. Battles between unions and governments follow the same course every time where the government uses the media to convince everyone that the union is all evil and being unfair and bullying and holding a gun to the nation's head. They do the same to convince us all that benefit fraud is the country's great illness when, in truth, it is the unadulterated pursuit of greed by the top 1% and the complete lack of control over the free market and demise of Social Democracy and Social Conscience.

Stand up for the little guy

[Dolmen 2.0]

Im a south african perm resident with familial roots in several other southern african countries. I've lived in south africa long enough to think other countries weird for their lack of regular strike action. Its just the way people get heard here, might have much to do with education levels. I have grown up with it. Once, back in the day, me and my family were targeted by a 'strike' mob in Malawi because my mother spoke out against sexism . It was a nasty business, they gathered around our home and threw rocks at our windows. I distinctly remember my grandmother getting us ready for what might happen should they realize we were in the house. I had no doubt they would have beaten us to death. Such things from 'educated' members of the neighbouring university made me lose hope. These days if i see a strike procession happening I just shrug and cross the road. I'm that used to it. Strikes like the one currently rocking the nation are a poor reflection on South Africa. I agree, strike action cripples the economy, education and judiciary . Its not fair on anyone but the strikers involved but south african society is precious about how they handle strikes because of the history of apartheid. I think south africa is rife with violent protest because violent protest got us freedom. The legacy carries on but the nobilty behind it has disappeared and localized agendas of greed and self interest have kicked in. I think its all the hens coming to roost. The people in power came to power through protest and now cannot enforce a ban on violent protest because it would be hypocracy. I genuinely feel better laws should be implemented. Lives should never be lost in a wage dispute. Unions are vital but need to be reigned in. I'm not happy with how little control they have over their members and how much power they hold in SA politics.

[Tapper]

White male, 32, heritage non-profit consultant.

I think the Dutch system is a mostly non-strike one: our unions and employers collectively negotiate pension plans, wage raises et cetera. Striking is mostly done by those branches where the government is heavily involved, whether it's because of policy-making (education sector, mostly, because there the government regularly screws up) or through paying wages (garbage collectors, bus drivers, police officers) or both (the lower end workers in healthcare: nurses, mostly).

Our unions are competing for members but basically, it boils down to regional differences. If you live in the religious parts of the country (southern bit is catholic, the countryside is mostly several variants of protestant) you join the union for your job/branch that is related to the Christian Democrats. If you're non-religious and/or living in the western heavily urbanized area, you join the ones related to the Labour party. Our Liberal party (which would be the conservatives for the UK and US residents amongst the readers, just to keep it mildly confusing) is traditionally associated with the employers and therefore has no unions related to it.

However, our Labour unions are mostly infighting over leadership, the Christian ones have to deal with diminishing memberships due to secularization and with the economic crisis, their demands can be easily refused (not that they don't try... I think there's still a few percent of wage increase in store for next year, crisis or not). A futher complicating issue is that the unions are not representing the vast majority of young professionals. Unions insist on highly lucrative pension plans for the baby-boom and post-baby-boom generation and generally fail to represent the generations behind them (saying: by sticking to these demands, we entrench ourselves, allowing us to fight for the same luxury for you when you retire - invalid argument as this is economically unaffordable), who will have to pay these pensions - especially dire since our population is rapidly becoming an inverse pyramid with an ever diminishing amount of children born and an ever increasing life expectancy. Therefore, a lot of people of my age and slightly older decline becoming involved in unions as we'd legitimize a pension plan that would leave ourselves with very little security while paying (relatively) crazy amounts of money to keep others in luxury. I begrudge no-one a comfortable old age after X decades of working, but I would like (near) equality between generations, or at the very least shared burdens.

Attempts to create a group of unions to represent the younger generations has failed due to peer pressure from the established ones: since the ideals are partly opposed to each other, the established ones point at their membership numbers and claim the negotiating table for themselves. This of course also makes membership of the smaller unions mostly irrelevant. The employers don't really care who they talk to, as long as an agreement is reached that represents the majority of the workers, or the biggest minority that one can get to the negotiation table (as unions represent less than 50% of workers in some branches, if I am not mistaken).

So, the Dutch situation is, in my probably fairly biased view: unions have perhaps outdated themselves, and with the wave of privatization of state companies/ branch organs like the health service, the public transport sector and the de-regulation (partly) of insurance companies, the government doesn't involve itself much to adress the issues and make unions relevant again, or force them to represent a balanced outlook.

[McLovin]

Tapper, on 06 September 2012 - 09:40 PM, said:

unions have perhaps outdated themselves

Pretty much it in a nutshell.

Oh sorry, White male, 40, industrial psychologist.

[Gwynn ap Nudd]

White male, 35, professional engineer (which prohibits me from joining a union)

Union strikes are fairly common in Canada, though violence beyond verbal abuse is fairly rare. The one thing that seems odd to me is the referenced occurence of strikes in SA. Strikes (and lockouts which are just as common) generally only occur when one contract has ended and another is being negotiated. There has been a large shift in union membership in Canada over the years, with the majority of all union members now being in the public sector.

As I see it, there are a few factors which have both caused the influence of unions to wane and made there existence more important in recent years. The shift towards globalisation and the prolonged downturn in the US economy have fueled a race to the bottom in terms of wages and benefits. This is also in part due to the short-sigtedness that both sides had when previous labour agreements were signed. For example, many benefits packages are dependent on having enough future employees paying into retirement funds to be able to pay out the retired.

Due to the losses in manufacturing jobs in North America and state of the American economy in general, the unions have been unable prevent wage erosion in the private sector, or public sector recently (though that's in large part a taxation issue as well). It's not uncommon for one municipality to offer huge tax breaks and incentives to lure a manufacturer to their location in order to provide jobs, and have local unions agree to take lower wages, while higher paid workers in another jurisdiction see their plant close if they are unwilling to take rollbacks. Caterpillar's recent move from Canada to the US was a prime example of this. Most of the recent private sector strikes/lockouts I am aware of are in this vein, workers trying to hold onto previously won benefits and wages while the companies are looking to cut or freeze wages and reduce benefits.

As for the importance of unions, we have seen the size of the middle class in North America shrink to a large extent in the last twenty years. The differences between the upper and lower class have also grown. Some of that is political, so I won't get into it in this thread. The essence of union importance lies in the deterioration of the middle class. With the hiring practices of companies that do not have unionised workers (eg. Walmart - who would rather close a store than have workers there unionise) and the high unemployment rate in the US, I would expect that the median income would have dropped a lot in recent years if there were no unions trying to keep some employers honest.

Personally, I think one of the biggest issues unions have now is that employers are multi-national while unions are not. In terms of the US and Canada, there is enough in common that the two should have one union for one job description. Instead we see the multi-nationals playing the unions off against each other. Eg. the autoworker contracts. They CAW and UAW have been played off against each other to see who will take the highest cuts to wages and benefits before the car companies decide which plants they will keep open/the most jobs at.

I think the media here has done a very good job of painting unions in a negative light in recent years. Coupled with fewer people depending on unions, this has led to a general public dislike of them. In the current economic climate I think they are fundamental to both the wellbeing of the worker and the economy. The US for example is a consumer driven economy (Canada is mostly resource driven). I just don't see how a consumer driven economy can work well without a sizable middle class, though I am not an economist.

One bit I left out of the above i being legislated back to work (not being allowed to strike). Which is becoming increasingly common in Canada. I'm off for now, but may add something on that later.

[Morgoth]

White Male, 26, lawyer.

I'm a member of the lawyers union (juristforbundet), which is a branch of the Academics Union in Norway. It's been a while since my union held a strike, but it does happen occasionally. Much more important is the weight they bring to the barganing table during sallary negotiations with the government and different business organizations.

I find the very notion that unions are bad to be a little puzzling to be honest. Unions are simply people joining together to negotiate as a group. Is that bad somehow? Certainly, as with politics, unions can end up doing some pretty stupid things (oil workers recently went on a strike here because their fantastic retirement plan is being downgraded to merely amazing for instance), but to go from there to say that unions have outlived their purpose? I think that shows a lack of understanding as to what the very presence of unions do to help your situation. Be you a member or not.

In addition, if I were to end up in a conflict with my employer (say being fired for being blond) my union will foot the bill and hammer down on the company like the army of angry lawyers that they are.

The situation in SA is different, though from reading The Economist my impression is that things might not be as black and white as Cause makes them out to be. However, the problem hardly seems to be unions, but rather the culture of violence SA seems to struggle with. Banning unions would hardly be an answer to that.

[Tapper]

Outdated themselves is perhaps a bad word if you see it in the sense of "can be abolished, they served their purpose and are now a relic of the past." I meant it as "in need of a revamping/ reorientation" which of course, is also "outdated". The unions are currently still occupying a stance that served them well during the 70s when the Dutch wellfare state was being upgraded from a basic one into what it is today, and which is now slowly being demolished because it is unaffordable - one might say that merely the cherry topping is being removed of an otherwise still highly desirable cake with plenty of fruits and cream and glacing - or one might say, as the unions do, that this is the beginning of the end and politicians and employers will only stop when there are no pension schemes anymore and the worker is once again a slave (well, those won't be their actual words, but they do insist that their members ought to have access to all benefits even if this is unaffordable in the long term).

I am perfectly happy with others doing my salary negotiations. The unions do this well. I am perfectly OK with the health and safety regulations that are being installed, even though I think they may be slightly overbearing and at times making work unnecessarily difficult when regulations actually go beyond good sense, but overall, since I am somewhat connected to the renovation/construction side of the market, I can see they make life a lot safer and that they work their ass off for those who suffered accidents. I am very happy that those who have the misfortune to get crazy political decision upon decision upon budget cut followed by badly flawed political revamps of the system and structures followed by more cuts, like universities and schools, are represented and can make a fist and make their voice heard. The unions do all that. I can forgive them the occassional slip-up.

What I am not happy about, and why I feel misrepresented and won't become a member because becoming one is endorsing their policy, is on the Dutch pension front. There, the unions play a very socially conservative role that goes directly against my interests and future wellfare. I will join a union that fights for me on all fronts. I won't join one that gives me some security but also plunges a fist up my ass that will see my prospects of a decent retirement destroyed because it won't accept that change is needed and instead of compromising, digs in, dragging out the struggle for several years until a meaningful contribution by the 50 and 60 year old workers is all but an empty gesture. I understand why: that particular change will hit its long standing members and erode their power base.

However, for me, well... I very much think I will wait until the sobering of the pension scheme has been decided politically, codified in law and forced down the throats of those involved. I will still get hit by it, there is no avoiding that, but since it is then reality for all involved, the union can focus on my generation, and I will feel my interests are being served, instead of watching a battle where I actually think the side I joined ought to lose.

[Terez]

Tapper, on 06 September 2012 - 09:40 PM, said:

Our Liberal party (which would be the conservatives for the UK and US residents amongst the readers, just to keep it mildly confusing) is traditionally associated with the employers and therefore has no unions related to it.

Is that liberal as in neoliberal, i.e. the 'free markets, free trade' party?

I live in a 'right to work' state, which essentially means that you can't be forced to join a union to get a job, which means that unions are not very strong here because 1) few want to pay the fees, and 2) it's the Deep South and many are politically opposed to unions. I'm not sure how I feel about that. I think unions are a bit strange and in some ways, yes, outdated. I tend to think they would work better if they were volunteer organizations staffed in terms by people who continue to work in the field.

[HoosierDaddy]

Anybody ever seen a workplace orientation video about how Unions are bad and that starting one would be terrible? I watched Target's once. I was chuckling the entire time.

Unions exist for a purpose, and whether or not they are as necessary as they used to be.... at least in the U.S. they certainly are. Corporations can spend limitless amounts of money to push pro-corporate legislation and weaken their natural balancer (unions) by passing shit like "Right to work" laws which basically means we're going to make it harder for you to cooperate as a group to fight our pro-corporate legislation by funding ads against or for legislation.

[McLovin]

HoosierDaddy, on 08 September 2012 - 03:30 AM, said:

Unions exist for a purpose, and whether or not they are as necessary as they used to be....

IMO unions are outdated not because they are no longer necessary, but because they failed to adapt with the times. The globalizing economy made certain US workers cradle-to-grave entitlement culture unsustainable, and they needed to get out in front of that and lead. Instead they pretended it was still 1970.

[HoosierDaddy]

McLovin, on 08 September 2012 - 11:35 AM, said:

HoosierDaddy, on 08 September 2012 - 03:30 AM, said:

Unions exist for a purpose, and whether or not they are as necessary as they used to be....

IMO unions are outdated not because they are no longer necessary, but because they failed to adapt with the times. The globalizing economy made certain US workers cradle-to-grave entitlement culture unsustainable, and they needed to get out in front of that and lead. Instead they pretended it was still 1970.

They tried to keep the status quo because it was great for unions. It built the middle class of the 50s, 60s, and 70s.

Outsourcing is the great evil of the union. You can't compete with Indians and Chinese wages.

This post has been edited by HoosierDaddy: 08 September 2012 - 12:48 PM

[Gwynn ap Nudd]

HoosierDaddy, on 08 September 2012 - 03:30 AM, said:

Anybody ever seen a workplace orientation video about how Unions are bad and that starting one would be terrible? I watched Target's once. I was chuckling the entire time.

Unions exist for a purpose, and whether or not they are as necessary as they used to be.... at least in the U.S. they certainly are. Corporations can spend limitless amounts of money to push pro-corporate legislation and weaken their natural balancer (unions) by passing shit like "Right to work" laws which basically means we're going to make it harder for you to cooperate as a group to fight our pro-corporate legislation by funding ads against or for legislation.

Or the new plans Romney has to limit which monies unions can spend on political advertising, essentially rendering them useless in the political arena.

http://www.mittromney.com/issues/labor

[Fist Gamet]

I am completely bamboozled by the idea that Unions are outdated or have outlived their usefulness. The whole point is that you, on your own, isolated by bosses and governments who want to give the employers total and untouchable dominance in the market, will be screwed left, right and centre when it suits the employer. You will lose wages, holidays, pensions and your job and home if it suits them to 'streamline' or 'reorganise' and, without, unions, there will be NOTHING you can do to stop it.

The power of the Union is to protect you and those you work with from this. This need never ends. This is a fight you cannot afford to ever lose or give up. Governments can and will convince you that Unions are bad and out of date, and they do it to tip the whole game in the favour of the employers so that they can claim a strong and competitive economy - by screwing over the ordinary worker.

Governments and employers have battled the unions for decades and found that their best weapon was to convince the public that unions are becoming irrelevant and are actually harming the economy. This is just one of the many reasons that the gap between the super rich and the rest of us is growing exponentially year on year. The unadulterated pursuit of more and more and more by the financial banks and companies, coupled with deregulation and a hands-off approach from governments in their pockets are the root cause of the multitude of problems faced by hundreds of millions of workers around the world. And I firmly believe that part of the reason they have gotten away with it is because they have spent decades eroding the rights of workers and unions around the world.

Governments and companies rely upon your apathy, having spent many years convincing us all that it is pointless to resist

Never give up your right to strike because it is the only real weapon that we have in defending ourselves in the end. It is the only thing that can hurt the employers and governments.

[Terez]

Fist Gamet, on 08 September 2012 - 05:46 PM, said:

I am completely bamboozled by the idea that Unions are outdated or have outlived their usefulness. The whole point is that you, on your own, isolated by bosses and governments who want to give the employers total and untouchable dominance in the market, will be screwed left, right and centre when it suits the employer. You will lose wages, holidays, pensions and your job and home if it suits them to 'streamline' or 'reorganise' and, without, unions, there will be NOTHING you can do to stop it.

It seems to me that there is something of a semantics issue in this thread. Some are saying unions are outdated not in the sense that they have outlived their usefulness, but in the sense that their tactics and organization are not forward-thinking.

[Silencer]

White male, 21, student/cashier. New Zealand context.

Guess I'm going to be the most anti-unionist person here, then.

All I've ever seen from NZ unions are selfish, self-centred, arrogant money grabs where unions embody the belief that people should get paid more and more and more each and every year even though they're doing the same work at the same rate and completely ignoring the fact that businesses cannot just keep increasing their expenses (including wages) without an increasing income to compensate. Do some businesses draw the line far too early? Sure. But when you get things like the teacher's union striking each and every year - literally like clockwork - complaining that their already-above-average salary has not increased this year, dammit, and would everyone kindly pay them more for their relatively secure, government-and-therefore-tax-paid jobs because oh woe is them they're "struggling to make ends meet" (HOW?!??!) and they DESERVE to be paid more ALL THE DAMN TIME no matter how much spare money the government doesn't have this year...no.
I kid you not, they protested for higher pay not that long after the Cantebury earthquakes that devastated a major city, killed hundreds, and is going to cost the entirety of NZ a bucketload to fix. For once, the government was actually backed up by the people when it gave a collective "fuck off" for the first time in decades to the Teacher's Union and told them there was no more money to give. And damn straight. My parents don't get a guaranteed pay-rise each and every year, why exactly should teachers?


That's pretty much all we ever hear from unions. "Give me more". And I've yet to see a scenario where it was justified. Hell, the people at my work complain that we don't get paid "enough". We're $3+ an hour more than the minimum wage, with excellent bonuses for accuracy and speed, plus annual bonuses, plus good benefits, and we work, what, four to five hours a night at what is basically data entry. Apparently this job should pay us more than $16/hour...do people honestly value their time that highly? No wonder there's always a campaign to increase the minimum wage to some new ridiculous height (which wouldn't actually result in more spending power in-hand, but whatever) if an excellent part-time job like mine doesn't pay "enough". Thank God we don't have a union...I remember one colleague (now quit) who proclaimed they could be working elsewhere for $20/hour very easily with better hours. Ho-hum, WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU NOT IN SAID JOB ALREADY??!?! Because it doesn't exist, that's why. Same thing happened to my dad when he was starting out as an electrician. Other electricians would outright lie about what they were earning - leading to resentment of one's own employers for no real reason! We get this even now, but when dad asks these other electrician's bosses, the truth comes out - they're getting paid nothing like what they claimed. And yet, I can see a union acting on such misinformation and stuffing everything up.
But here's the thing. If we were REALLY dissatisfied, or disgruntled...we wouldn't need a union to protest our wages. Quit. Organize a strike. Why does there have to be an ever-present union to do these things other than to collect money from its members in order to pay legal action? And is an organization that is constantly prepared to go into legal battles with its employers really going to encourage good relations with said employers? It's a built-in bitching session that is only going to make people angrier rather than resolve things to people's satisfaction - you can tell, because they're negotiating all the frickin' time.


On to the post by Fist Gamet:

Fist Gamet, on 08 September 2012 - 05:46 PM, said:

I am completely bamboozled by the idea that Unions are outdated or have outlived their usefulness. The whole point is that you, on your own, isolated by bosses and governments who want to give the employers total and untouchable dominance in the market, will be screwed left, right and centre when it suits the employer. You will lose wages, holidays, pensions and your job and home if it suits them to 'streamline' or 'reorganise' and, without, unions, there will be NOTHING you can do to stop it.

And yet, to my knowledge, this has not happened in any of the many professions in NZ which do not have an (active) union presence. Hell, some of those things are legal requirements and if anything are getting more and more ridiculously biased towards the employee as time goes on. I still remember the uproar when the government introduced an (optional) 90-day "trial" period for employers to see whether new employees were going to work out. I'm pretty confident that it was the first pro-employer law change in the past decade or two, and a very sensible one at that (having watched people who really, REALLY don't work out, despite being perfectly presentable in the interviews and whatnot...when it turns out your employee is a druggie who can't ever turn up on time on Monday morning within the first month or so, why should THEY be protected?!) and yet people went crazy over it. Even though the odds are stacked forever otherwise in the employee's favour. People who are good employees shouldn't have to worry about this being used against them. And my employers don't even make use of it - which is up to the company in question, and I'm pretty sure they're obliged to tell you if they are making use of it, so if you don't like it you have advance warning before taking the job.
So all I'm seeing in this paragraph of yours is scaremongering...which is exactly what the unions want!

Quote

The power of the Union is to protect you and those you work with from this. This need never ends. This is a fight you cannot afford to ever lose or give up. Governments can and will convince you that Unions are bad and out of date, and they do it to tip the whole game in the favour of the employers so that they can claim a strong and competitive economy - by screwing over the ordinary worker.

Governments and employers have battled the unions for decades and found that their best weapon was to convince the public that unions are becoming irrelevant and are actually harming the economy. This is just one of the many reasons that the gap between the super rich and the rest of us is growing exponentially year on year. The unadulterated pursuit of more and more and more by the financial banks and companies, coupled with deregulation and a hands-off approach from governments in their pockets are the root cause of the multitude of problems faced by hundreds of millions of workers around the world. And I firmly believe that part of the reason they have gotten away with it is because they have spent decades eroding the rights of workers and unions around the world.

Governments and companies rely upon your apathy, having spent many years convincing us all that it is pointless to resist

Never give up your right to strike because it is the only real weapon that we have in defending ourselves in the end. It is the only thing that can hurt the employers and governments.

Flipside:

Quote

The power of the government is to protect you and those you work with from this. This need never ends. This is a fight you cannot afford to ever lose or give up. Governments can and will convince you that Unions are bad and out of date, and they do it to to stop unions screwing over the economy in order to benefit themselves while also regulating against employers to prevent exploitation of workers.

Governments and employers have battled the unions for decades and found that their best weapon was to be honest and tell the public that unions are becoming irrelevant and are actually harming the economy. This is just one of the many reasons that the unions use increasingly desperate tactics to keep themselves in power, and they start doing things like associating the decline in union strength with the widening gap between the rich and the poor, while ignoring things like "rising wages lead to rising product costs" and "people living outside their means and using too much credit" and "honest to goodness flaws in the financial system which the unions themselves can't do jack-all about". The unadulterated pursuit of more and more and more by the unions, coupled with deregulation and a hands-off approach from governments in their pockets are the root cause of the multitude of problems faced by the economy around the world. And I firmly believe that part of the reason they have gotten away with it is due to people being self-centred and greedy.

Unions rely upon your apathy, having spent many years convincing us all that it is pointless to resist, and to our own great benefit to let them carry on their merry way

Never give up your right to strike because it is the only real weapon that we have in defending ourselves in the end.

And yes, I left that part of the last line unaltered deliberately, because I consider the "right to strike" a completely separate issue to unions. (Side note: I don't necessarily disagree with some of what you're saying about banks and finance companies and whatnot, relative to the global economy, I just don't really see it as relevant to the argument you were making and it was too good an opportunity to pass up, in regard to doing a parody-quote )


Now, I'll grant that the situation in the States is probably a lot more fucked up than in NZ - but from my perspective all unions have ever done is hurt themselves and probably our economy. As someone mentioned further up-thread, they've had this short-term, "me me me" approach for years and now that the economy is screwed they don't want to give anything back. "Screw the next generation, we've got ours", if you will. Or even "screw the economy, as long as our union members keep getting higher wages and better benefits we'll be fine!".

Unions had their time. Now they're both obsolete and a menace to the greater society in general. /shrug.

[Tapper]

Terez, on 08 September 2012 - 12:51 AM, said:

Tapper, on 06 September 2012 - 09:40 PM, said:

Our Liberal party (which would be the conservatives for the UK and US residents amongst the readers, just to keep it mildly confusing) is traditionally associated with the employers and therefore has no unions related to it.

Is that liberal as in neoliberal, i.e. the 'free markets, free trade' party?

I live in a 'right to work' state, which essentially means that you can't be forced to join a union to get a job, which means that unions are not very strong here because 1) few want to pay the fees, and 2) it's the Deep South and many are politically opposed to unions. I'm not sure how I feel about that. I think unions are a bit strange and in some ways, yes, outdated. I tend to think they would work better if they were volunteer organizations staffed in terms by people who continue to work in the field.

Partly, but not entirely. They're founded in 1948, but by a merging of offshoots from parties that existed since the 1920s or before. Liberals have traditionally had a very hard time uniting here in NL partly because of their emphasis on individual freedom I don't think that would make them by definition neo-liberals in the 'School of Chicago' style, and more likely economic and socially liberal.