> American unions worked in the industrial age. They’re not a great model today.
You're seriously going to contend "unions don't work for knowledge workers today" right after the new WGA contract drops?
> their brand is trashed
Yeah because you're out here writing lies and borderline advocating scabbing.
I agree.
> answer isn't to reject the concept of unions. Without unions, we're all hosed
Strongly disagree. Unions are, today, a convenient sideshow in which the fates of a falling minority of workers, most of whom don’t have the true leverage of collective action due to unionised competition, are shown as signs of worker empowerment while living conditions for the vast majority pitter along.
American unions worked in the industrial age. They’re not a great model today. More problematically, their brand is trashed. Want to kill a worker’s rights bill in a federal context? Brand it as a union fight.
Unions are one mode of organisation. At this point, they seem a dead end. What we had in the early stages of open-source coöperatives and Silicon Valley start-ups strikes me as closer to the truth, albeit with European enhancements. (Simple : give the ESOP voting Board seats with e.g. merger vetoed and pay transparency.)