I’d encourage younger folks who have an idealized view of American unions to check Scorcese’s new movie the Irishman about the Teamsters and Hoffa.
Here, by contrast, is a great podcast on the subject spanning many incidents and movements:
https://workingclasshistory.com/podcast/
And another recent great book by Alex Gourevitch, “From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth: Labor and Republican Liberty in the Nineteenth Century”
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/from-slavery-to-the-coo...
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/alex-gourevitch-labo...
“Labor Law for the Rank and Filer” by Staughton Lynd (who has written many great works of labor history) is the book inspiring many tech organizers:
https://www.pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=325
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/10/business/economy/labor-bo...
> Nowhere in the world has organized crime infiltrated the labor movement as effectively as in the United States. Yet the government, the AFL-CIO, and the civil liberties community all but ignored the situation for most of the twentieth century. Since 1975, however, the FBI, Department of Justice, and the federal judiciary have relentlessly battled against labor racketeering, even in some of the nation's most powerful unions.
> Mobsters, Unions, and Feds is the first book to document organized crime's exploitation of organized labor and the massive federal cleanup effort. A renowned criminologist who for twenty years has been assessing the government's attack on the Mafia, James B. Jacobs explains how Cosa Nostra families first gained a foothold in the labor movement, then consolidated their power through patronage, fraud, and violence and finally used this power to become part of the political and economic power structure of Twentieth century urban America.
If you want to actually unwind the history of organized crime and unions in the US, you would have to also get into their long-standing ties with intelligence and federal police services, especially as a means to disrupt and purge communists from the labor movement. A good chapter to examine might be what drove Hoover’s odd, counterfactual insistence that the mafia more or less didn’t exist for a good part of his tenure at the FBI. Or the CIA’s Operation Gladio and it’s involvement with the Italian mob.
It's a good movie and all. I just wouldn't draw a lot of public policy lessons from it.
Company X offers to pay me to do job Y. My two options, as I see it, are taking the job and doing Y, or refusing to do Y and therefore not taking the job. I don't understand the logic of "I'll take the job but then refuse to do Y", except if I assume ill-intent from the person taking the job.
You are of course correct that any person is technically free to reject any particular job, but someone with an interest in both continuing to be able to provide for themselves and their family as well as in bringing about structural shifts that would allow for much truer freedom might refuse to perform a particular function for reasons other than ill intent.
There's absolutely nothing stopping people, especially a collective of people who might want to form a union, from pooling their own funds and starting an enterprise based on the values of their own collective design.
>You are of course correct that any person is technically free to reject any particular job, but someone with an interest in both continuing to be able to provide for themselves and their family as well as in bringing about structural shifts that would allow for much truer freedom might refuse to perform a particular function for reasons other than ill intent.
And someone, or a group of people, who've created an enterprise of their own values, are generating value from it and are providing labor opportunities and value to others are free to fire people who outright disagree with said values, or attempt to form an entity of power to dismantle or disorientate those values.
It is incredibly dishonest, and certainly of ill intent, to join or remain within a company or group whose values you strongly disagree with for the purpose of financially benefiting from that group's activities and trying to undermine said values from within.
Perhaps, but this is why unions should exist even when things are going well, to prevent them from getting bad in the first place.
I reject your strawman argument. FAANG engineers will hardly starve and die if they choose to work somewhere else.
Or start your own business and find your own way to provide for youself outside of the existing system?
The broader condition of society is that you need to produce something of value for them if you desire others to provide things of value to you.
The opposite side of your logic, is that if you assume good faith on the side of the job taker, then the want to do the job that they signed up for, and is willing to do what it takes to make sure they are able to do that job in a safe, efficient, and non-soul crushing manner.
In addition, conditions can change from the initial agreement of employment. Lots of stuff about workplace environments are not fully captured in job contracts, and are so subject to change. You don't need to assume bad-faith from a person to understand why the might want to have a say in how things change. After all, they agreed to a job under a certain set of implied environments.
Companies do not have to function like democracies. However, companies that try to harness the moral and ethical motivation of their workers should always be aware of how to keep company actions and goals sufficiently aligned with those of their workers to be able to tap into that extra motivation.
My experience is that the more someone rambles about "being the only rational one", the more oblivious they actually are.
People want companies to function like democracies, because they feel it's better for the world, or better for them, or both.
The capital don't have to listen to them of course, and the people can then organize and try to enact change in a different way - like voting for particular regulations or something similar.
Since you seem to value "rationality" and power, maybe you should think about how big collectives of people have power, and whether it wouldn't make sense to make some concessions, because otherwise things might get out of control and people like you might end up in a gulag or something.
Is there is an example of how this works in practise. wondering how they get consensus and do workers really want this.
https://www.democracyatwork.info/atc
They walk through all of this with actual worker cooperatives and people researching and organizing around cooperative economic models.
I’m being a bit hyperbolic here, but it’s funny that the circumstances you cite (sewing, basic safety) actually drove unionization in the early 20th century.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_...
Turns out that if you don’t change the relations of power in your workplace, hold your bosses to account, they have a tendency to not be too concerned about your well-being.
Why do you insist in throwing the word "dictatorship" around?
Owning a sewing machine and paying someone to use it on your behalf should absolutely bestow you the power to choose what that person makes for you, while being paid by you, and while using your machine. How can this be controversial?
Let's take a look at this. Your contributions to the end product are:
- Owning a sewing machine
- Paying someone to use it
Their contributions are:
- Making the thing (say, sewing a shirt)
I think there is an inherent tension between thinking about which of these is more valuable. Of course the sewing machine owners and payers are all going “Hey, the sewing machine belongs to us. You got compensated for your work, that should end your involvement with it. You can't tell us kind of clothes we should be making!”; whereas the people who sew the shirts are going “Without our collective work, you're going to be able to sew maybe one shirt a day, and you don't even know how to sew. So listen to us!”.
The increasing interest in unions (FAANG is hardly a good representative of jobs across the software industry, let alone the entire US) seems to indicate that the needle of society in general has moved more too far in advancing interests of the sewing machine, and the people who sew don't have enough of a say in how things are done.
When one gets more money, the other gets less. There is no way out of this, as long as owner of the machine and whoever makes the thing are different people.
You're conveniently ignoring the part in which I'm also paying the other person to do something, after the other person freely agreed to do said thing in exchange for being paid. Would you mind replying to what I'm actually saying?
I disagree. It is not historically controversial for the owner of property to decide what is done with it.
With what, the slaves? /s
But when someone comes into my house I have some control over what they are allowed to do within my house and I can ask them to leave with the support of the law if they don't obey my wishes.
When I enter a voluntary employment agreement and give an employee access to my equipment the same thing applies.
From a third party perspective, this is just weird. Society sees two people associating, one providing labor, that other capital, no matter how money is flowing within the association. Weirdly enough our system only allows capital owners to have any say in the running of the system (via shares and the board). Within this system, unions are one way in which the owners of labor get a say in the running of the corporation.
Yes, generally there is a contract that stipulated what can and can't be done with the sewing machine so that the machine is not completely destroyed.
Generally employment contracts do not give employees the right to do whatever they want with the sewing machine.
Why do you mind if they have a say? If you don't plan on abusing and exploiting them, there's no harm, right?
EDIT: to put it into words I would think someone like you might understand better (power and money instead of empathy and solidarity) - because if you don't let them have a say, and exploit them, you might end up in a gulag, on guillotine or in wherever mass grave Mao put landlords.
We've had to ask you repeatedly in the past not to break the site guidelines. Would you please review them and stick to the rules when posting here?
If there is healthy competition among employers then workers have a real choice. If not then declining your money could mean: live destitute or starve.
As companies consolidate and collude (intentionally or subconsciously) even cushy office workers may face exploitation.
I own a sewing machine and I choose to sew clothes on it myself then sell it. Am I exploiting myself?
I own a sewing machine and I choose to not hire anybody to operate it and it sits unused. Someone that could operate it is sitting unemployed and unable to eat even though I could hire them. Am I exploiting someone?
I own a sewing machine and offer someone an amount of money if they operate it and produce the clothing I ask them to produce. Am I exploiting them?
I'm glad fringe maniacs that consider employment exploitation aren't taken seriously.
As it should. If they don't accept your power, they starve (or not get healthcare if we're talking about contemporary USA).
How is that any less violent? Because when you kill someone by starvation it's less bloody? Your kind are already using violence against us, you're just good at not caring about others or lying to yourself.
So while some tech jobs might be quite cushy, I’ve yet to see any rational or coherent defense of why these (or any) companies should function like dictatorships. It would seems that increasingly, more and more tech workers share this perspective.