My husband is an active teamster union officer at state and local levels. People do not understand what unions do. Democrats do not understand how union membership and politics have changed.
Have to say, definitely punctures my assumptions about an era with an unusually strong NLRB, headlines in the news about unionization drives at Amazon and Starbucks, and all the rest of it
It's like other news beats: just because the headlines are sensational doesn't mean the numbers back them up
I know multiple women in my union so it is hit or miss, but yeah there's a lot of misogyny and racism just swirling around. God help you if you're trans. It's also very hard to get in without knowing someone inside, unless you are willing to deal with a lot of BS.
yeah *this* - isn't a lot more of our economy service sector work that isn't unionized in the US now? (Not that things should be like this, but I would think it's a factor.)
I put a lot of the blame on the bootstraps myth. Guys believe they got where they are with absolutely no help and thus view union solidarity as a leech on their own hard work, not recognizing that unions built and maintain the environment that allowed them to succeed.
a couple of confounding variables here- the types of economies under Reagan and Biden are quite different and that complicates what he's saying. The Reagan era helped to cripple manufacturing (historically more unionized)in the US, but the manufacturing industry since has been largely destroyed
Biden's onshoring programs and investment in US manufacturing has done a lot to begin to bring this back but its not an immediate solution. A huge amount of US industries now are retail or in sectors that typically struggle to unionize. Further post-pandemic wage increases may have off set some
activity. Further, there is some evidence that union density was I agree with the overall sentiment that the Biden era was not nearly as amazingly pro-Union as their proponents like to claim, but there's certainly a lot of nuance here.
I don't think that's the takeaway here. Biden was, objectively, quite pro-union. It's just that the president doesn't have the power to reverse this trend on their own.
I agree to an extent. I would say being pro-union doesn't really tell you a lot about the policies he's done. I think there was certainly a lot more he could have done with more aggressive actions at the NLRB and onshoring, but he did a lot certainly.
This is the correct take. What Biden did for labor was certainly helpful during our own union fight, but the systemic barriers he could do nothing about on his own absent any real congressional action for decades, were many and still nearly insurmountable for people that very much wanted a union.
Bezos shut down Amazon warehouse in Quebec,Canada because they unionized....it's not going over good here. The unions that are left are going to lose big time under Trumps onslaught!
Thanks for sharing. So horribly sad for our country. I feel like the post-pandemic PTSD malaise — not understanding or appreciating the redemptive arc Biden was giving us the opportunity for — has doomed us to continue to wander in the desert for some time.
Biden has a very good chance of being the last union aligned Democratic President for decades. He favoured them over other workers to the tune of 10s of billions and they broke even for his trouble.
Unions are dated. They will always be easy to divide as long as they confine themselves to specific industries and locations. We need a cross-industry union that could actually impact something but union leaders will never give up their fiefdoms.
And what has been done to slow that removal of the ability to unionize? It's easy to target specific sectors. We have to move beyond the thinking of "unions" and into class solidarity and collective action. People say "form a union" with the same intention as "learn to code"
Point of confusion: this is about union density falling, not the overall number of unionised workers. AFAIK, union density is falling because the overall workforce is growing faster than unions. I agree of course that lower union density is bad, and that we ought to prioritise organising +
+ but is this inflexion point (<10% union density) a particular cause for alarm, especially when unions are growing? I could definitely see it hampering organising in the long-term, but I'm curious about the mechanism there
I just finished reading A History of America in Ten Strikes and can definitively say I learned not a single thing about unions in my education as a millennial, which I’m sure was intentional. But I was blown away by the power and working class solidarity of the 18 and early 1900’s that is gone now.
Same. I vaguely learned that unions existed, but once I started listening to history podcasts, I realized I was taught nothing. Had no idea how violent and tough of a fight it was to get what little protections/norms we have.
Started and eventually became president of an independent union last year in an effort to protect the jobs of tech workers in a field rife with exploitation. Took a demotion from management to get it done. From my experience I can say, categorically:
We won our union fight, and I managed to save the jobs of nearly every person that worked in that small business, but not before many months of abuses had passed. Had I not been there, pissed off and feeling vengeful enough against the business owners, workers would have had no chance.
I'm not saying that to toot my own horn. I'm saying that even with a motivated, fully 100% positive rate of sign ups, and a VERY angry and motivated dude willing to spend months reading, understanding, navigating, and effectively using labor law to curtail those abuses by business owners....
...that the hurdles to creating that union were so vast and omnipresent that doing so constitutes a near impossibility for an average person just trying to pay their bills and take care of their family.
There's reasons large unions exist. One of them is that a cadre of experts, lawyers, and socially-minded labor hounds working to keep the union going, spread the message, and prevent abuses to those trying to organize is damn near a necessity when a group decides they want a union.
I was lead to believe we had the most pro union president in history tho. He had such strong union support that he even felt confident in not inviting the teamsters union president to speak at the DNC.
I know unions had dwindled, but this surprises me with all the news about workers creating unions at Starbucks and Amazon, as well as some southern auto plant workers adopting unions. I’d be interested to see data over that entire timespan instead of its beginning and end.
The sad truth is that these victories end up adding somewhere between 10k and 30k folks to union rosters. When the national workforce is 250 million, that’s a drop in the bucket.
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It's like other news beats: just because the headlines are sensational doesn't mean the numbers back them up
You need to learn a specific trade to get that around here
There's some truth when they call it a "Lottery ticket to the middle class"
This is now the era of the golden calf.
Makes me feel like all this work wasn't worthless
Started and eventually became president of an independent union last year in an effort to protect the jobs of tech workers in a field rife with exploitation. Took a demotion from management to get it done. From my experience I can say, categorically:
2) The amount of labor law one has to learn to effectively navigate the process of creating or joining a union is an extraordinary barrier.
3) All this seems to be by design.