Have you considered that maybe peoples’ reactions are based on bad experiences with unions? In particular, public sector unions. Even liberal areas are pretty anti-union, and with things like the DC and NYC Subways falling apart despite massive funding, who can blame them? With police unions protecting crooked cops and teachers unions protecting bad teachers, who can blame them?
(I think it’s also fair to say that the sheer rapaciousness of American public sector unions is the result of an anti-union war that has otherwise receded from the public consciousness. They fight everything tooth and nail, even reasonable reforms, because they’re the outnumbered survivors of anti-union movements.)
That's because union organizing campaigns are so rare. Usually, the organizers get fired. WalMart has closed entire stores that voted for a union.
Some anti-union resources for employers.[1][2][3] [3] advertises a "95% win rate".
[1] http://www.unionproof.com/ [2] https://lrionline.com/fighting-a-union-3/ [3] https://anh.com/
Also, I'm very confused about your "liberal areas" comment. My impression as a regular NYC subway rider is that the subway doesn't have massive funding, and what little funding it has is being spent poorly because of decisions by politicians, not because any union has asked for anything or is getting paid too much. I've heard a lot of anger at service cuts, at our governor, at the recent fare enforcement crackdown. I've heard zero anger about the salaries paid to unionized employees.
(I have, in fairness, heard the fairly inside-baseball complaint that the unions are pushing back against extending one-person operation to more train lines, for fears of more job cuts. I don't know anyone who thinks that's the biggest problem facing the subway, and I think the vast majority of the ridership, even the politically-active ridership with opinions about the merits of unions, has very little idea that this debate even exists.)
I do agree that people in liberal areas are unhappy about police unions. I think that's its own, special thing (among other things, in NYC the Second Amendment applies more to cops and retired cops than it does to civilians), and I don't get the sense that people are unhappy about teachers' unions in the same way.
I think American "left" and the Left everywhere else are entirely different things. As a leftie in the UK, I do not recognise the NYT as left at all.
Unions always enforce expensive, outdated work. The taxi cab unions fought Uber and Lyft, a vastly superior taxi system, all to prop up an existing outdated system.
Vastly superior for who?
Good things won't last forever. The taxi cab unions are already fighting these companies back in many cities.
They kind of remind me of the record industry and file sharing in the 90s: fighting technology, so they can keep their outdated and expensive system in place.
Most unions are like this. As another example, they will fight automation and force companies to hire multiple, overpaid workers, for a job that can be done by a single person. This only holds companies back and puts them at a disadvantage.
If I remember correctly, NYC Subway budget is about 10bn.
London tube is about 2bn.
It's not a money problem.
2. My argument is not so much whether it has massive funding or not, my argument is that riders have the impression that it has insufficient funding - i.e., riders do not have the impression that the problem with the subway is union salaries and benefits. I'm (obviously) happy to get into transit geekery, but this discussion is about whether people have a positive or negative view of unions.
These costs also need to be normalized for ridership figures (NYC has higher ridership). And don't forget that most of the figures you're going to see for NYC are for the entire MTA, which runs a lot more than just the subway.
And it's important to distinguish the cost per ride vs the subsidy per ride. Fare revenue shouldn't count "against" a transit system.
For some figures, the total budget of the London Underground is £10.3B (inclusive of fares): http://content.tfl.gov.uk/tfl-budget-2019-20.pdf [pg 10]
The total budget of the MTA (inclusive of fares) is $16.3B: http://web.mta.info/news/pdf/MTA-2019-Prelim-Budget-July-Fin... [pg 14]
Normalize those figures to dollar amounts and account for ridership, and it appears that the MTA is cheaper per ride than TfL.
10.3bn number is for TFL combined, which includes buses, DLR, overground, tram and other.
There’s a serious problem with incentives in the taxpayer funded space due to every union member voting in political elections, whereas the non union public is not involved, resulting in the politicians and unions being able to strike deals and no one really representing taxpayers.
I’ll never get the support of Dues Crazy union leadership, those people who rip-off their membership with ridiculously high dues, medical and other expenses while being paid a fortune. But the members love Trump. They look at our record economy, tax & reg cuts, military etc. WIN!
7:32 AM - 29 Apr 2019
inb4 'Trump isn't a politician'.
I've always found this condemnation odd given how often it's actually true.
If you break down salaries by demographics, one of the biggest correlations with salary is age. Senior positions pay more than junior ones. It's an extremely common career path to start off in an entry level job and ultimately end up in management by the end of your career.
So the reason people think they'll be making more money in ten years is that most of them will be. You may not be Warren Buffet but you could easily be the manager of your branch office and making two or three times your current entry-level compensation.
One of them will be a team leader at some point. A second one might follow and become a team leader while the firth one goes higher.
Will they go up one more level ? let’s say yes. That makes e of them climbing the ladder.
Will there be a fourth ? probably not. That leaves 6 people not going up, and only earning marginally more. That’s less than half will see significant change in their 10 yers next.
Large organization graphs are shaped like pyramids, but the thing about a pyramid is that the combination of the top and the middle is as big as the bottom. The organizations large enough for unions to come into play have multiple layers of middle management.
But let's suppose the company is less than 50% managers. That still doesn't mean the typical person won't ever be a manager, it only means they're an employee for more time than they are a manager.
Also remember that small businesses employ the most people and don't have that sort of tree structure. In that case you typically have the owner and the apprentice who is expected to buy out the owner when they retire and ten person teams are not a thing. And you will often have some workers in larger organizations who don't move into management in the same company they started in but who do leave to strike out on their own, i.e. become a founder/manager of a new small business once they have sufficient industry experience.
Most people do not have a managerial position their entire lives - period.
There are indeed people who stay in dead end jobs indefinitely, but such people are not the majority of people.
https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/area_emp_chart/area_emp_char...
And those jobs often have less competition for those management positions because they're so often held by college students who go on to jobs in the industry they've studied rather than competing with other salespersons or fast food workers for the office manager position.
My political opponents are actual, non-embarrassed millionaires and billionaires from families of millionaires and billionaires.
My political allies are temporarily embarrassed millionaires, from the folks accepting below-market salaries to work at a potential unicorn to the folks buying literal lotto tickets at the corner store. A few of them are no longer temporarily embarrassed, having joined the right startup, which only goes to demonstrate that the worldview is correct. Things worked out for them without unionizing, clearly things will work out for me too one day.
If you were referring to only politicians, they're basically all millionaires.
(And I think you'll find that I disproportionately support the non-millionare politicians.)
You're counting your opponents as the second group and your allies as the first group. Someone on your opposing side could make the _exact_ argument by reversing the groups. It's telling that your statement does nothing to show what your actual politics are.
The people I support politically are generally wealthy. I am also fairly confident that the ones who aren't probably will be if they are in politics long enough and not necessarily through corrupt means. Anyone of that stature can, at the very least, sell quite a few books on their name alone for instance. It goes hand in hand that influential people can more easily amass wealth.
And I think my politics are more accurately represented by normal people vs. career politicians than by donkey mascot vs. elephant mascot. I vote Democrat as a matter of lesser-of-two-evils, but I yearn desperately for a world in which no one who's involved in any way with DCCC can have influence in politics ever again. If you find me someone who votes Republican who says the like AOC and hate Trump, I'd probably agree with them on a lot of things.
What you said paints your political allies as people you know personally who are essentially "down on their luck" people who are trying to make it while your political opponents are millionaires the likes of Mitch McConnell or a Lindsay Graham.
Someone with the opposite political leanings as you could say that their political allies are the steel workers in Pittsburgh and the auto workers in Detroit who's job were lost to globalization and free trade (and they vote Republican as a lesser of two evils) while their political opponents are millionaires like Nancy Pelosi and Diane Feinstein.
You're using two different categories of people as allies and opponents.
If you cast your argument using the same categories, it doesn't make sense. Your allies, Pelosi and Feinstein are just as wealthy as your opponents, McConnell and Graham. Or inversely, your allies, the folks buying lotto tickets accepting below market salaries who just haven't joined the right startup are just as poor as your opponents, the factory workers and coal miners who've lost their jobs to globalization and technology.
I think you're trying to say your allies are both groups from the second example and your opponents are both groups from the first example but that doesn't really work because you're actively supporting half of each and actively working against the other half. You've chosen a side that you believe will help both sides, even though they are your opponents but I don't think that's a unique position to your side.
becoming a millionaire is statistically highly unlikely, and why would such an unlikely event warrant anti-union sentiment?
Less unlikely than 3 decades ago, but the chance of a (lower) middle class person becoming a millionaire, and especially a liquid (non-retirement+primary home) millionaire, which is the kind of thing we think of when we say millionaire, is exceedingly low.
I know of nobody on the right that has voted with that mindset.
Of course, this "TEM" thing is partly a face-saving move for our white, right neighbors by progressives who don't want to point to the racism/classism and a willingness to accept Pyhric victories that really drives a lot of anti-union sentiment. Why, not wanting the "undeserving" to receive undo benefits is the crux of several arguments on this very page.
That said: how many posters here consider themselves just One Great Idea away from being the next Zuckerberg, and thus tend to view discussions on, I dunno, work/life balance or engineers' unions from an employer's perspective instead of their own? Seems like more than a few to me.
[1] OK, I checked wikipedia, turns out that the original phrase was "temporarily embarrassed capitalists", but this is the variant that stuck.
Viewing employment as a collaborative endeavor rather than a hostile negotiation goes a long ways towards improving both sides.
Finally, part of the issue is that basically none of the innovative companies in the US are union shops. Because of the ham-fisted salary control most US unions are known for, they are just seen as a way to get a company to pay more than the market price for a skill by forming a cartel.
Okay, everyone, think carefully about what the trite "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" quote implies. The underlying meaning is "These people are too ignorant/foolish/some other pejorative to recognize that they are not, in fact, 'temporarily embarrassed millionaires', LOL." It also has a implication of "I, however, do recognize this because I am wiser/smarter/etc. than them and I know what's good for them better than they do themselves."
If the people who repeat these kinds of things think that ordinary folk are not bright enough to pick up on these subtexts and resent the hell out of them for it, maybe they are not a tenth as smart as they think they are. Maybe it's time to stop parroting Wright's stupid quote and stop looking down on these people if you all actually want to, like, win elections or something.
Isn't mandatory membership a simple corollary of unionization efforts?
Why not? I can just demand that my contract looks the same as the unions, anything wrong with that?
No, What I would like is that other people are free to collectively bargain on their own behalf, and their own behalf alone, and I am free to bargain individually for myself, without their "help" or obligations.
Although unions proximately came into existence for the purpose of taking collective action against oppressive employers, it's equally true, and at least as important, to understand that they came into existence in order to fill a regulatory vacuum in labor law.
This should prompt some important questions:
1. Should the job of protecting workers from employers properly belong to any entity other than the government?
2. Is filling the regulatory vacuum with regulation theoretically or empirically insufficient to protect workers?
3. Are unions the only means of collective action?
4. Are the functions that unions serve beyond coordinating collective action actually necessary in order to protect workers? Would they still be necessary even if labor law was sufficiently well regulated?
My position is this: We should dramatically expand and increase labor regulation and enforcement actions, and we should allow employees to take collective action. Then we should ask ourselves whether unions are still necessary.
Agree 100%.
Im the United States most local and state ballots have measures on them generated by petition drives. Get X number of registered voters to sign a petition and it is on the ballot.
I always signs these when the someone approaches me. I may not agree with the cause or be a proponent of the goal, but the group organizing should have the right to appear on the ballot and have citizens votes on it.
I don't think it's a fair comparison.
"One can be pro-organizing but not pro-union."
My understanding is the OP Was looking at it through the lens of a worker.
My comparison was meant to say I support someone's initiative to have something put up for a vote, but that doesn't mean I will vote for it. I could have been plainer in the explanation.
Phase transitions and bifurcations show up all the time in natural systems, from mathematics to cell division and population ecology; I don't know why people think social structures would be immune from this.
You're right but because it's no different from someone saying their specific solution is the only way. In reality, there are a multitude of different opinions and it seems likely to me that more than one would be effective.
> There's some times and things where one should expect a normal distribution, and other times and things where a binomial distribution shows up.
Sure things might tend to distribute into two major positions but that doesn't mean nobody holds a different opinion and it says absolutely nothing toward whether those two solutions are somehow the ideal solutions (or one of them, in the case of the OP).
Your statistical example actually takes things the wrong direction. The person you are responding to is positing a distribution with more than two modes, not fewer, and by suggesting there are two your example actually is closer to the “centrist” straw man.
The argument you are calling “centrist” is not claiming there is a “truth somewhere in the middle”. It’s claiming there are plausible positions (concentrations of probability in your metaphor) in more than just two locations.
I also considered adding that the assumption of a one-dimensional parameter space is also overly reductionist and not representative of the majority of positions people take when they feel like the mainstream choices are both wrong.
Then you responded with a completely different set of points attacking the parent poster on completely unrelated topics that you somehow equated to what the parent said.
If we want positive change in our world we need respectful and rational discourse. Posts likes yours actively tear down discourse and makes worse the very problems you mention.
You were quick to list the handful of dictators and “strongmen” you know off hand, but for every example you listed there is someone like Merkel, Obama, etc. on the other side.
It comes down to both our ideologies being wrong. No you can’t talk your way through everything and no you can’t fight your way through everything either. You have to wade through the muck in the middle, and because that muck isn’t sexy very few people are actually willing to do it.
You seem to be characterizing ideologies as fight everything out vs talk everything out, and then saying that centrism is the 'muck in the middle' where compromises are brokered. Why, then would you invalidate the whole concept of opposition and dismiss them as ignorant?
This is a very ahistorical take. Tone policing and "moderation in discourse" has a strong connection to the will to maintain status quo. Radical discourse, direct action and even an unpleasant tone have however a rich history of change, both positive and negative.
A. You can be moderate because you believe moderate actions will bring about radical change, or
B. You can be a moderate because you believe things are good to some degree as they are, and any actions should result in moderate changes.
I'm inclined to believe the calls to moderate discourse come from the latter group. "Rational discourse" stands in opposition to "irrational discourse", with implied irrational demands.
In other words, if you can't see why group X would want something, you won't see anything group X does to get that as rational.
Why should every position need teeth? Isn't it possible that we are largely doing things correctly enough, and we should focus on the exceptions to that?
> "...I just don't support ... my parents meeting my daughter and her black boyfriend" [your caricature of a moderate liberal]
What do you accomplish, if your parents really are so racist, by tactlessly exposing to something they will simply reject? You have better options, even if your goal is for them to change. What about his parents, are they good? Maybe if they knew your daughter's boyfriend's parents were responsible, the truth would be easier to accept. I don't get why empathy is no longer a common resource for solving problems in the left coast culture.
People who are wrong about something are still people, and you won't notice when you're wrong like them, so why can't you empathize sometimes?
This is hardly my experience with racists. It would be nice if it worked, but there's a huge gulf between "empathy" and "wishful thinking."
(And my experience with racists is informed by gulf coast culture, not left coast culture.)
If they're your own parents, you have a huge advantage in terms of common ground.
The Klansman, at least in the present day, knows that he's on the margins of society's beliefs. Like any other tiny political position, holding those beliefs is uncomfortable. Even among the second category of racists, the KKK is too far. The Klansman doesn't have friends. His subconscious has been hoping for a way to rationalize leaving; it's more than happy to listen to Daryl Davis. His conscious, of course, is embarrassed to have been wrong, but with time that will fade.
The second category of racists don't believe that they're racist. They believe (possibly correctly) that they're in the mainstream, that the label "racist" has been turned into a cudgel by a minority. If their own child is dating a black man, well, it's the child that's been brainwashed, the common ground is to convince their daughter to remember how the family works. (Why did no KKK member attempt to convince Daryl Davis to cease his crusade?) They're the ones who have friends and social groups who will support them. They're the ones who can easily find neighborhoods and churches and grocery stores free of black people - not that black people would be unwelcome, but clearly, it's unnatural for whites and blacks to interact. They have no subconscious desire to rationalize changing their minds; if anything, they have a subconscious desire to keep their feelings. (What will their friends say? What will their extend family say? What will their church say? Well, they won't say anything, but we all know what they'll think, right?)
The Klansman is a Klansman because his friends are Klansmen. If left to their own devices, they'll just get more used to living that way.
Daryl doesn't win because he's on a crusade, he wins because he's a good friend.
It's great when this happens, but it's also extremely labor-intensive and it requires the person who has been in the grip of a hateful ideology to be looking for a way out of it in the first place. If they're not, then things can go terribly wrong. Back in 2017, three bystanders tried to intercede with a guy who was screaming racial abuse at two women on public transport, and he stabbed all three intercessors, killing two of them.
Unfortunately it is the job of those sympathetic to a cause to support it, whether they are victimized or not.
It's not "fair" or "right", it's just a reality that causes are advanced by those who care about them. Life is tragic that way.
> Back in 2017, three bystanders tried to intercede with a guy who was screaming racial abuse at two women on public transport, and he stabbed all three intercessors, killing two of them.
If he was ready to stab this woman, it is what it is. The lunatic who did the stabbing didn't get his way for free either. May they rest in peace.
Lunatics are brave and motivated, and heroes must be brave as well. It'd be nice if heroes could be effective and strong as well, but we don't get to choose when life calls upon us.
If that seminal Klansman were a lunatic, Daryl could have died that night. Daryl's a brave man, and that is unfortunately what is called for.
It's not fair or right either. Life is tragic that way. Sometimes your kids find no need to empathize with you.
My point (in the original context, but it still stands) was more that if you are serious about it being a good thing for your parents to be at peace with your daughter's race mixing, then you have to be serious about accomplishing that goal. The best way is probably not lashing out or lecturing the elderly about your perceived disappointment with them.
I suspect that people who do not consider their methods, are often not acting out of a sense of duty or charity, but instead engaging in an elaborate virtue signal, with the people they should care for standing as props.
In the case I mentioned the perpetrator was arrested by police, but you're waving aside the deaths as 'life is tragic, rest in peace.'
Police were called out the evening previous to the attack when the same guy was verbally abusing a black woman, Demetria Hester, on the same transit line, but they didn't arrest him and seemed to suggest to the woman that she had brought it on herself because she had fought back against his aggression and kicked him in the balls. It's subsequently emerged that Christian had threatened police, and despite all this they didn't do anything until after he had killed (reasonably comprehensive details below).
https://www.wweek.com/news/courts/2019/09/13/alleged-max-kil...
Your whole position seems to be predicated on a kind of passive resistance, and if that gets people killed well that's just too bad. It seems like you're saying that anyone who actively resists or retaliates against aggression thereby loses all moral standing. That seems like a pro=aggressor position to me, since aggressors don't really care what other people think.
The points you're arguing against are ones I never made, so I will not go to any effort to defend or disavow them. I get the impression you're making no effort to find sense in what I'm saying, and looking for an excuse to call it "nonsense". I don't appreciate that and I won't keep it going.
It's not "fair" or "right", it's just a reality that causes are advanced by those who care about them. Life is tragic that way. [..] If he was ready to stab this woman, it is what it is. The lunatic who did the stabbing didn't get his way for free either. May they rest in peace.
All I did was summarize your comments above for the sake of brevity. I do think it's nonsense, and callous nonsense at that. What sort of sense am I supposed to have found that I missed?
People who are wrong about something are still people, and you won't notice when you're wrong like them, so why can't you empathize sometimes?
Oh dear no. Sure, they're still people, but if they've chosen to be mean about their views eventually they're going to be treated with reciprocity. It is not valid to say that 'you won't notice when you're wrong' as many people actively engage in self-reflection and other approaches so as to improve their decision-making.
When those asking for empathy habitually deny it to others, it's reasonable to question whether their request is made in good faith or is a mere gambit. The more a person's behavior resembles the latter, the more reasonable it is to cut them off.
Unions are just corporations for labor sales. If you don’t like your management, replace them with your vote.
Not necessarily, some are democratic, like some in Sweden. The IWW is an example of an alternative to the centralized unions [1].
But that's the problem. The employee faces the same asymmetry when dealing with the union as dealing with the employer -- a single individual has difficulty driving a change in organizational behavior.
It's harder for an individual to fix a bad union than to leave the company for one without that union, so that's what many people will do. Which makes it even harder for anyone to do it your way, because many of the people who agree that there is a problem will have left.
Is that accurate?
That's especially true when there are other jobs in the same industry and the same city but at a different company.
Emoloyees aren't part of the corporation any more than the widgets they make are.
Which is why they're not democratic, opposed to say cooperatives.
Not necessarily, some are quite centralized. For example, LO in Sweden. The US has plenty of examples. Look at Harlan County for an extreme example.
Do you understand now why decentralization of power can have its uses?