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Re:Amazon Warehouse Workers to Decide Whether to Form Compan... by rayiner on Friday January 15, 2021 @04:27PM (#25796763)
It’s not “anecdotes about isolated abuses.” Even parents I know who are solidly on the left are outraged by how completely inflexible teachers’ unions have been during the pandemic. Even people I know who are ardent Democrats in states like Illinois grumble quietly about the government having no money because they’re crushed under pension obligations.

The problem is that, in the US, most peoples’ experiences with unions is with public unions, which are the worst kind of unions: https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2019/10/29/coolidge-and-...

> For decades, that was the mainstream Democratic view, too. “The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service,” President Franklin D. Roosevelt affirmed in 1937.

Re:Amazon Warehouse Workers to Decide Whether to Form Compan... by quadrifoliate on Friday January 15, 2021 @04:57PM (#25797081)
> Even parents I know who are solidly on the left are outraged by how completely inflexible teachers’ unions have been during the pandemic.

As a dueling anecdote, I know plenty of libertarian/right-leaning folks who privately tell me that they totally understand that teachers (regardless of unions) should not have to face a highly infectious disease in classrooms just so a bunch of double-income parents want to keep doing their office jobs over Zoom. The current problems have almost nothing to do with unions directly.

Re:Amazon Warehouse Workers to Decide Whether to Form Compan... by aetherane on Friday January 15, 2021 @07:00PM (#25798322)
Though you don't need unions for that. Enough teachers at a local school refused to go in individually that the administrators were forced to make sane policies.
Re:Amazon Warehouse Workers to Decide Whether to Form Compan... by guerrilla on Friday January 15, 2021 @04:51PM (#25797019)
"It's not only anecdotes" and giving more anecdotes isn't an argument.
Re:Amazon Warehouse Workers to Decide Whether to Form Compan... by dahfizz on Friday January 15, 2021 @04:59PM (#25797106)
They said "It’s not anecdotes __about isolated abuses__". At a certain point, anecdotes become universal experiences, and therefore inform general political views.
Re:Amazon Warehouse Workers to Decide Whether to Form Compan... by boomboomsubban on Friday January 15, 2021 @06:00PM (#25797697)
>At a certain point, anecdotes become universal experiences, and therefore inform general political views

In reality though we just went from one anecdote to two. We are unable to tell when something is universal experience just by hearing more anecdotes.

Re:Amazon Warehouse Workers to Decide Whether to Form Compan... by ardy42 on Friday January 15, 2021 @07:18PM (#25798493)
> In reality though we just went from one anecdote to two. We are unable to tell when something is universal experience just by hearing more anecdotes.

And even if we somehow got to negative universal experiences, those very well could be:

1. Part of a conscious tradeoff (e.g. firms being less profitable due to higher labor costs). A lot of anti-union rhetoric seems to amount to complaining about not being able to have one's cake and eat it too.

2. Artifacts of law (either direct or indirect) that could solved through legal reform. My understanding is that at least some of the "adversarialness" of US unions derives from the requirements of US law, and German unions (for instance) operate very differently (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany).