Yes, a Hollywood dramatization of a specific incident in the history of American organized labor is definitely the best place to glean this understanding, as opposed to, you know, reading any of the numerous academic works about the history of US or world labor struggle...

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...

Academic works like this one by an NYU law professor? https://muse.jhu.edu/book/10740

> 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.

You can litter this thread with as many comments about organized crime and labor as you like, but it no way describes the entire history of labor struggle in the US and elsewhere or it’s overall bent (you admit this yourself in relation to European unions). And is it actually your supposition that a union at a place like Google is going to be taken over by the mob? Who do you expect to believe this line?

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.

I didn't say it "describes the entire history of labor struggle." But you were responding to someone who listed his views on the bad things about his experience with unions. Discussions of the merits of unions in the U.S. are incomplete without mentioning their ties to organized crime. (And I strongly suspect that, if those links hadn't existed, unions would be stronger in the U.S. today, as they are in Europe.)

This is not a great argument, since (1) The Irishman is based on what experts seem to believe is a work of total fiction (its subject claims to have been instrumental in the Bay of Pigs, the Kennedy Assassination, Watergate, the killing of Jimmy Hoffa, and the killing of Joe Gallo), and (2) the industries that were mobbed up when unions were ascendant remain mobbed up now; of course the unions were infiltrated, you couldn't engage with those industries without engaging with their unions.

It's a good movie and all. I just wouldn't draw a lot of public policy lessons from it.

Fair enough. Probably shouldn’t draw too many conclusions from movies and Wikipedia. I find the organized crime involvement in American unions very interesting, though, because from what I’ve read it’s different than the case often is in Europe. I find unions a somewhat interesting alternative to government regulation (such as in Scandinavian countries which have no minimum wage but broad unions). But at the same time I tend to view organized crime as being the most dangerous thing to a civilization.