Re:Inspired by Alabama’s union battle, Amazon workers elsewh...
by dragonwriter on Tuesday March 09, 2021 @03:42PM
(#26403911)
> Why are unions given any special allowance in law?
Because people got tires of capitalist exploitation enabled by the combination of the balance of wealth in capitalism and the absence of those special allowances.
> I feel like unions are just a separate service company
They aren't, in fact, and your feelings don't change that.
> but with a monopoly granted by the law.
Unions may be granted a monopoly with very tightly defined scope with a prescribed mechanism for removal, but unions exist without such monopolies (unions can be formed and exist before winning a certification election.)
> If people want to "organize", why not form their own service company that contracts out their labor?
That's called a labor cooperative, and it's a completely different thing than a union. Unions exist within labor coops (and many organizations promoting labor coops promote unionization both in general and within coops.)
> Otherwise, the entire notion feels like a serious abridgement on the freedom of those who own the company.
Insofar as the “freedom” of capitalist property rights are—both in practice and, despite some facially class-neutral post-hoc rationalizations, in the original motivation for which they were sought by the mercantile class against the traditional structure of the feudal economy a mechanism by—a mechanism by which a particular narrow class exercise dominant power over the rest of society, that's the whole point of not only legally-empowered unions, and also the rest of the changes since the peak of capitalism in the late 19th Century by which the developed world has abandoned pure capitalism for the modern mixed economy.
Because people got tires of capitalist exploitation enabled by the combination of the balance of wealth in capitalism and the absence of those special allowances.
> I feel like unions are just a separate service company
They aren't, in fact, and your feelings don't change that.
> but with a monopoly granted by the law.
Unions may be granted a monopoly with very tightly defined scope with a prescribed mechanism for removal, but unions exist without such monopolies (unions can be formed and exist before winning a certification election.)
> If people want to "organize", why not form their own service company that contracts out their labor?
That's called a labor cooperative, and it's a completely different thing than a union. Unions exist within labor coops (and many organizations promoting labor coops promote unionization both in general and within coops.)
> Otherwise, the entire notion feels like a serious abridgement on the freedom of those who own the company.
Insofar as the “freedom” of capitalist property rights are—both in practice and, despite some facially class-neutral post-hoc rationalizations, in the original motivation for which they were sought by the mercantile class against the traditional structure of the feudal economy a mechanism by—a mechanism by which a particular narrow class exercise dominant power over the rest of society, that's the whole point of not only legally-empowered unions, and also the rest of the changes since the peak of capitalism in the late 19th Century by which the developed world has abandoned pure capitalism for the modern mixed economy.