People want to better pay and benefits, more power over what they do with their lives 40+ hours per week. You can't be afraid to push for yourself in any negotiations, and you need leverage to get as much as you can. Without a union, you have all the leverage of a lone individual.
What's crazy to me is seeing Boeing treated like a god coming down to bless the land with their beneficence, whom we must please and obey. They are a business who will use whatever leverage they have to get what they can; you need leverage too.
Unions don't magically create leverage out of thin air. They steal it from those outside the union by constraining the the supply of labor. The most effective unions are those that do this to the greatest extent. For example, SAG-AFTRA forces productions to give speaking roles to union members and also restricts union eligibility to those that receive these speaking roles.
That sounds like a perspective from one of Amazon's workplace signs. Union leverage is based on two things (off the top of my head, and afaik): significant control of the labor supply, and the political power of many votes and of many people to advocate for candidates. However, people can join the union; they aren't exclusive clubs.
Much of management's power comes from controlling the job supply and the political power of money, and they use that leverage to their advantage. When we live in a happy world where management stops doing that, I'll agree that unions shouldn't either.
SAG does not force productions to do anything. The production can either use union or not use union. What they can't do is use cherry pick talent. Your best talent is going to be a SAG member. And since it's a union you either get all or none.
I'm merely applying the same language people use here to attack corporations.
>And since it's a union you either get all or none.
Everywhere else this would be a clear violation to antitrust.
What?
Sounds like a clear antitrust case to me.
Can you explain how this works? In Europe Unions just represent the rights of those the Employer chose to hire. The employees are not required to be members of a Union, and usually they won't join until they have already started working.
They are competing against other parts of the world in terms of labor supply. I don't know how you overcome that without either demonstrably higher productivity or protectionism.
Remember the Amazon HQ2 race to the bottom?
So a taxpayer subsidy from everyone in the region in order to produce 25,000 jobs at the above prices. Worth it? Not really sure, it seems to me like Virginia might end up fairly well off but I have a harder time imagining that creating another 25,000 jobs in NYC is worth $75k a piece to the city given that they are already out of housing. Kind of seems like it might be better put into other things on balance.
Pitching it all as a public auction really accentuates the point that this is a race to the bottom with competition between people that should instead be natural allies. It would be brilliant if it were an intentional commentary on how much harm we are doing to ourselves by letting companies pit entire states against each other for profit.
Right. But what people are missing is that "those who directly benefit from the lack of unionization" is most people who actually live in the region. The jobs are there because the unions aren't, and people want jobs.
Obviously people would rather get paid and not have to work, but that's not relevant to the context.
People attribute qualities to "jobs" that are actually a consequence of jobs, not a quality of the jobs themselves. Correctly identifying cause and effect is important for understanding the truth. Never conflate them.
I apologize if I'm missing some nuance of this argument, but if it's there it's not apparent.
The nuance is that you're presupposing a frame. There are alternative economic systems to American crony capitalism that give people the results they want without having to surrender to their corporate masters.
If you take the fact that the system we live in was invented by humans for granted, and assume it's the only way things can ever be, you can easily dupe yourself into believing that it's as natural as breathing.
However, just because something is the default choice in modern society doesn't mean it can't be different.
I care about this distinction. It might seem pedantic or stupid to some people. Even if you like capitalism, it's important to recognize it as a choice, not a consequence of natural laws.
Which is why they are anti-union. Ideology aside they lack sufficient leverage (aka they are getting a good deal sans union.)
A job is not a goal in itself (except in some puritan morality I guess) but a mean to several ends: Security, income, participation, etc.
How much of that does a business bring to the region and what guarantees that it will do so in the future?
> Down here, people want businesses. They want jobs. They want corporate customers to sell services to.
What kind of "people" are you talking about? This sounds as if the whole region consists exclusively of solo entrepreneurs.
The South-East might be cheap enough today. Until somewhere else bids lower…
Did you seriously just invoke Marie Antoinette's "Let them eat cake" logic as applies to capital access? I'm fairly sure you couldn't have meant it, but God bless, that rang across loud and clear on my end, as someone whose been deep in startup culture for a while, and spends many hours trying to help places pull things off workably on shoestring budgets.
Workers have been resigning and making startups. They still have to raise capital to pay the overhead costs of getting stuff done. Traditional Capital tends to be more concerned with growth hacking rather than solving problems that society really needs solved, which means access to Capital is typically of the VC or philanthropic type, which both have deleterious consequences on how one has to treat the people they hire to make sure the spigots stay on. The meat grinder, in that sense, is real, and an omni-present threat threat to any workplace daring to deign to raise the bar on Quality.
The central gall of the Capital class is that just because of the happy accident of being located astride yesterday's money Hoovers that that means their job is done, and they aren't responsible for keeping that wealth moving, solving problems, and making riskier investments. I'm not saying go play helicopter money, but if you aren't making money move, you're part of the issue.
Say the Alabama workers decided to unionize, I don't think amazon could easily relocate warehouses to a another state/country in the same way that Boeing could do with manufacturing. There just isn't that much cheaper labor available in the country.
I love it. Unions are going to be a major driving force again and it's gonna be good for the work force. As a country we have to make it tougher for companies to exploit labor unfairly. The government has failed. The people know it and are finally taking action.
A true democracy would have strict regulations on companies which guarantee good living conditions for the people that live in it. The game of capitalism must be regulated, because it's a sociopathic construct. It's only goal is to make more money... as soon as possible. Left unregulated it exploits people.
> Unions are going to be a major driving force again
All of those positive changes and benefits you cited are happening without an increased union presence, though. What makes you think unions are going to be a compelling option when the non-union alternatives are rapidly changing in response to market conditions without any need for union bargaining?
I think it is far-fetched to say that all of this has occurred without unions whatsoever.
Just like Lenin's "reserve army" of the unemployed keeping workers motivated to keep working, so too does the "reserve threat" from labor organization motivate many of the 20th century improvements in labor conditions.
One of the biggest things that attracts businesses to setup shop in the south is low cost of living and lower salary requirements as a result. The same things that cause businesses to setup shop overseas.
When unions get involved with promises of higher wages, it disincentivizes the business from growing in that area because it has effectively no benefit over the higher cost areas.
I’ve witnessed this first hand in South Carolina ever since Boeing opened a location here. The union tactics have been crazy. Everybody down here is thrilled to have Boeing and all of the peripheral benefits to the area that come with them. Great jobs, supply chain effects, etc. Then union officials show up when it’s time for a new vote and start telling people how bad everything is. Around every vote there are always crazy news articles and sensationalized events that try to drum up union support and paint Boeing in a bad light. And then it stops until it’s time for a new vote.
Down here, people want businesses. They want jobs. The want corporate customers to sell services to. They want economic development and they want practices to incentivize that.
What people don’t want are practices that will slow that down, especially when the non-union work pays better than most everything else in the area already.
It gives the appearance to everyone, somewhat obviously, that the union is only interested is strengthening itself.