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Re:Amazon reportedly has Pinkerton agents surveil workers wh... by andybak on Thursday December 03, 2020 @03:33PM (#25294384)
Nobody claimed a utopia. Extracting natural resources is always going to be a tough job that is ripe for exploitation.

Did unions improve the lives of members? They certainly did where I come from. American labour history is more complex (union corruption and take over by organised crime seemed to run deeper)

Re:Amazon reportedly has Pinkerton agents surveil workers wh... by syshum on Thursday December 03, 2020 @04:06PM (#25294935)
That depends, sure you can point to examples where the Union did improve peoples lives

But then i can also point to examples where they did not, where they ended up driving business out, bankrupting people

Where unions are more focused on their own political power than helping workers

Or even if in general the union helped the "average worker" the collectivist nature of unions means not everyone will be better off. For example Seniority, and "personal connections" are often more of a driving factor in Unions than merit or work performance. In fact highly efficient hard workers are often driven out of unions or forced to "work slower", etc.

Re:Amazon reportedly has Pinkerton agents surveil workers wh... by DFHippie on Thursday December 03, 2020 @06:48PM (#25297104)
>That depends, sure you can point to examples where the Union did improve peoples lives But then i can also point to examples where they did not, where they ended up driving business out, bankrupting people

The answer to this is not airy theorizing or anecdotes but statistical evidence. There are many people who do this. See for example figure 9 here:

https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/