C/D: Labor Unions

I fail to see how a closed shop - one of the few ways a union has to keep the boss from undermining its power - is antithetical to the 'spirit.' The 'spirit' is getting the guy on the factory floor as much power as the guy writing the checks. If the boss can simply undercut the union at every step, there's not much in the way of bargaining power.

Since I'm quasi-self employed I have no union to join, but I keep thinking about sending in IWW dues.

That said, the union often sucks, not because of its existence, but because of the number of members who demand that they work solely to make their jobs more easy. I'd loved be the union rep at my workplace except I can really see myself going to bat for a lot of the "concerns" many of my co-workers have.

The two problems with Ed's position, as I see them. First, his assumption seems to be that opposition to closed shops comes from workers - they're upset about being forced to join. I've never seen that - right to work laws are passed at the behest of the bosses who don't want unions to have equal footing. Second, I question whether 'free association' is possible in contemporary capitalism. There's always going to be someone who needs the job to live and is willing to take less in order to do so.
In an ideal world, where the capitalists don't exploit, say, immigrant (illegal or legal) workers and use them to weaken labor, yes, closed shops would be a dud. In our world, given that the state continually works with business to erode union power, they're almost a necessity.

my justifications for closed-shops would be (a) as long as it's a fair and democratic vote among people to be covered under the collective bargaining agreement, then if the anti-union people lose in the election they are nonetheless covered as part of the covered workforce. after all, if the CBA is NOT approved then those who are pro-union won't be covered either and also have to abide by that decision. the same way those of us who didn't vote for dubya have to accept that he is president, whether we like it or not.

(b) as milo pointed out above, the "no closed-shop" argument goes hand-in-hand w/ "right to work." "right to work" laws were enacted by business-friendly state legislatures for the PRECISE purpose of limiting the effectiveness of labor unions. in states w/ right-to-work rules, those who are covered by the CBA but who "opt out" don't have to pay union dues even though they get the SAME BENEFITS as the dues-paying workers. ergo, they are (rightly) seen as freeloaders, b/c they're getting s/t (union-scale wages and benefits and CBA protections) for nothing (not paying union dues, ergo stiffing the union for negotiating the CBA in the 1st place).

Union law is different over here. It only takes a simple majority of workers to gain recognition for one or more unions over here. there are fairly strong laws protecting those who organise as well. Wal-Mart couldn't get away with their strong arm tactic over here. It's not perfect by any means. Secondary industrial action is still banned here, which does limit the effectiveness of industrial protest.

Unions are a very good way for workers to buy and hold stakes of the companies workers work for, the best way of workers gaining control and companies motivating workers.

Union law is different over here. It only takes a simple majority of workers to gain recognition for one or more unions over here. there are fairly strong laws protecting those who organise as well. Wal-Mart couldn't get away with their strong arm tactic over here. It's not perfect by any means. Secondary industrial action is still banned here, which does limit the effectiveness of industrial protest.

Unions are a very good way for workers to buy and hold stakes of the companies workers work for, the best way of workers gaining control and companies motivating workers.

because they are rarely classic anymore, because they operate closed shops, because they rarely see the forest for the trees, and because they stand firmly in the way of educational reform. I'm not against them (I've been a proud member) but if I have to pick between C and D they are D.

word. exactly what good was the closed-shop union i belonged to in high school doing me when i paid $35/month dues, was paid minimum wage, and had no benefits/did not get 40 hours a week?

In general though I dig unions, this is a big union town and it's exciting to see what they can do.

Yeah, and that's the problem. A lot of the people talking about "reform" are really pushing wholesale dismantlement, because they think taxpayer-supported education is socialist. (Which it is, obviously, in a good way.) But that allows the public teachers unions -- who can be total territorial dickheads, no doubt about it -- to treat all reform proposals (merit pay, charter schools, whatever) like they're just stalking horses for privatization. The whole debate, such as it is, is driven by unreasonable people on all sides, and the serious reformers can barely get a word in.

But that's a somewhat particular issue, and it really has to do with the inadequacy of public schools as a whole. And teachers definitely need union protection, as anyone who's been exposed to the vipers' nest of school administration politics could tell you. Unions protect the bad teachers along with the good, true, but what makes anyone think that without unions it would be the bad teachers getting fired?

My experience has only been with an urban school district, and this is my antecdote, told to me by a higher-up in administration: This person took a tour of a middle school one day with the principal, and stepped into a classroom where the day's lesson was HOW TO MAKE PLURALS OUT OF ADVERBS.

The article is here:

http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050606&s=gordon060605

What confuses most of us in Canada is this idea of performance of schools or teachers is the American model of SAT scores and standardized tests, and the wondering of whether teaching to the test can lead to huge "holes" in a person's formal education

How would you "reform" education?

Well, part of the challenge is devising better ways of measuring performance and more comprehensive tests that go beyond rote learning.

June 13, 2005
Five Unions to Create a Coalition on Growth
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
Five labor unions that are highly critical of John J. Sweeney, the president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., are planning to announce this week that they are forming a coalition aimed at unionizing large numbers of workers, several union officials said yesterday.

Labor leaders said they were planning this move because they want to form an aggressively pro-growth coalition and because they believe the A.F.L.-C.I.O. is doing too little to organize nonunion workers.

This new coalition will be formed by the Service Employees International Union, the Teamsters, the laborers, the food and commercial workers and Unite Here, which represents hotel, restaurant and apparel workers, two union officials said. These officials insisted on anonymity because they feared some union leaders would be angry at them for disclosing the plan before it is announced Wednesday, after union leaders meet in Washington.

The five unions represent more than one-third of the membership of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., an umbrella federation of 57 unions and 13 million workers.

The union officials said the new coalition - tentatively called the Change to Win Coalition - would not compete with the federation. Rather, they say, it will complement the federation to give new energy and excitement to the flagging labor movement. Just one in 13 workers in the private sector is in a union, down from one in three a half-century ago.

But federation officials said yesterday that they feared that this new coalition would be competition and create an unnecessary distraction. One official questioned how effective the coalition would be in unionizing workers, considering that four of the five unions, except for the service employees, have been losing members.

The service employees' union, with more than 1.7 million members, is spearheading efforts to form this coalition at the same time that it is threatening to secede from the A.F.L.-C.I.O. At a meeting in San Francisco on Saturday, the service employees' executive board voted to give its top leadership authority to quit the main federation, if necessary.

"The union movement must focus on uniting with us the 9 out of 10 workers who have no union," the union's board said in a statement. "Without doing so, we not only cannot build a broad movement for social and economic justice, but we can't even win consistently at the bargaining table or in the legislative arena for the small minority of workers who still have a union."

Andrew L. Stern, the service employees' president, has said repeatedly in recent months that unless the main federation becomes far more aggressive about organizing nonunion workers, his union would pull out and seek to "build something stronger." Mr. Stern has also warned that his union would secede if Mr. Sweeney wins a new four-year term.

Mr. Sweeney, who has headed the labor federation for nearly a decade, said he had enough support to assure re-election at its convention in Chicago in late July.

Responding to the five unions' plan to create a new coalition, Mr. Sweeney said yesterday: "We all have the same goals, and we need to commit to work together to resolve the differences because if ever there was a time for the union movement to be united, this is it - with working people under the biggest assault in 80 years. Disunity just plays into the hands of the worst enemies of workers."

Mr. Stern has said that he hopes any new pro-growth union coalition will someday include the International Brotherhood of Carpenters, which quit the federation in 2001.

Union officials backing the new coalition say it will engage in multi-union organizing drives - something rarely done - seeking to unionize tens of thousands of workers at various major companies.

In recent weeks, several officials from the Teamsters, the food and commercial workers and Unite Here have hinted that their unions might also secede from the federation. But some of Mr. Sweeney's supporters say those threats are largely designed to increase pressure on him not to run for re-election.

wow

really interesting piece. enjoyed the lol crazy stuff, but the author is totally wrong in his most fundamental assumptions:

By now, most serious studies on education reform have concluded that the critical variable when it comes to kids succeeding in school isn’t money spent on buildings or books but, rather, the quality of their teachers. A study of the Los Angeles public schools published in 2006 by the Brookings Institution concluded that “having a top-quartile teacher rather than a bottom-quartile teacher four years in a row would be enough to close the black-white test score gap.”

the brookings institution research can't demonstrate that having a high-quality teacher is the most important factor in improving schools, because its measure of the quality of teaching is... student achievement (weighted by intake). so it just begs the question. "most serious studies" are supposed to prove this point, but the writer can't even find one to quote: brookings wasn't a study designed to determine the critical variable in education reform, anyway.

"sack bad teachers" is the rallying cry of the tories in britain too. but who hired all these teachers in the first place, apparently unable to detect their incompetence? you've either got a whole layer of incompetent school managers as well (in which case, who hired them? and so on, all the way up to the mayor) or maybe it's not quite as simple as that: no one even has a definition of a good teacher which stretches beyond, "i know one when i see one".

the nyer piece ignores the fact that there's a lot of evidence that other factors are proven to be hugely important. so the top-quartile teachers may well be benefiting from something other than their own raw teaching genius, and their talents may not transfer to other schools where they might magically be transformed into average teachers, or worse. (this should be obvious: clearly some teachers may be cut out for stretching highly academic kids and others are better at engaging disaffected ones.)

for instance, when labour took power in the uk in 1997, they commissioned a guy to do a meta-analysis of all the research into the factors determining educational success up to the age of 11. the answer was that the single most important factor was whether a child had parents who regularly took time to have conversations with him/her. the impact of differences in schooling up to that point was minimal. similarly, the link between educational attainment and poverty is very well-documented, but no one wants to talk about that because you'd have to pursue a more economically equal society and that's just not done.

best just bash the teachers instead, because at least it looks like you're doing something, even if a few careers do get ruined in the process. (for all the union's clearly self-serving agenda, the education boss's pride in refusing to re-employ exonerated teachers was kind of sinister.)

Brill's most fundamental assertion is that it's nearly impossible to get rid of bad teachers in NYC. His underlying assertion was that unions prevent this.

yeah, i think he demonstrates some of those pretty well - but the passage i quoted is him explaining why all this matters, because bad teachers are the main cause of kids not succeeding at school. not only is this not proven by the research he cites, there's plenty of other evidence that it's wrong.

when you take into account the education authorities' decision that they'd rather see the pendulum swing the other way, and see good teachers' careers ended in order to ensure that they catch all the bad ones, the issue of whether the existence of a certain number of bad teachers really does have a critical impact on students' chance of success is pretty much to the point.

tenure sounds crazy if you have to pay for teachers to sit around doing nothing. but that's more of a fiscal issue than one about educational quality.

the concept of tenure kind of runs against the concept of meritocracy, which Brill sort of alludes to. It's a pretty standard charge against unions--that seniority generally trumps merit in a union environment...seems especially reasonable under the guise of illustrations such as the Rubber Room. And Brill also points out that it's not just a fiscal issue when budgets get cut and administrators are then basically forced to hire bad teachers.

Asserting that teachers are the critical variable is a huge stretch (and one that, surprisingly, should have been caught at edit) but the conclusion of that paragraph you quoted stands without it anyway: "But, in New York and elsewhere, holding teachers accountable for how well they teach has proved to be a frontier that cannot be crossed.".

similarly, the link between educational attainment and poverty is very well-documented, but no one wants to talk about that because you'd have to pursue a more economically equal society and that's just not done.

funny how the decline of labor unions in most sectors of american society (education and professional sports excepted) has gone hand in hand with a huge increase in inequality between the top and bottom earners

and by "funny" i mean profoundly depressing

the concept of tenure kind of runs against the concept of meritocracy, which Brill sort of alludes to. It's a pretty standard charge against unions--that seniority generally trumps merit in a union environment

but that's the thing. the article isn't arguing that stopping the support for a thousand or however many deadbeats would be good for the other teachers who won't have to carry them anymore or pick up the pieces - which is probably true and is a genuine dilemma for a union, which is necessarily at its weakest when its members' interests are divided.

it's arguing, along with the educational authorities, that getting rid of bad teachers is necessary because THINK OF THE CHILDREN OMG and that moreover, it would be worth getting rid of good teachers if there was any suspicion around them just to be sure. this isn't supported by the evidence, which suggests that poverty and parental attitudes to their children make far more of a difference than the varying quality of their teachers.

making a meritocratic system for teachers isn't easy and isn't necessarily desirable. (the word meritocracy was coined as a pejorative for exactly the self-fulfilling reasons we've been discussing here. what defines merit? success! therefore all success is merited.) for a start, while they can influence their outcomes, teachers can't determine them - that's up to the students. any accountability system based on results tends just to lead to more gaming of the system by teachers or outright cheating.

is there any other industry where all its failings are habitually assumed to be the result of an incompetent workforce? usually we look at structural and managerial problems where failure is endemic (if it's accepted that's what we have in education). there's also a reluctance to admit the consequences of an assumption that poor teaching is common.

i've already mentioned the possibility that principals who are unable to successfully identify good teachers might themselves want to look for alternative work. but perhaps the pool of available teachers contains too few who are competent overall. in which case, the only proven way of attracting better candidates is to raise the pay. an education authority that was in good faith about trying to raise the quality of teaching would offer the union's members higher pay in return for an end to tenure.

and that moreover, it would be worth getting rid of good teachers if there was any suspicion around them just to be sure

where in the article is this argument being made?

is there any other industry where all its failings are habitually assumed to be the result of an incompetent workforce? usually we look at structural and managerial problems where failure is endemic

as I noted further, this is an argument often proffered in a union environment (auto manufacturers, pilots, etc.) Managerial/structural problems are often constrained by workforce environments in those situations, which is why management in those environments often blames the unions for an inability to adapt to market conditions.

an education authority that was in good faith about trying to raise the quality of teaching would offer the union's members higher pay in return for an end to tenure

...and a union in good faith trying to raise the quality of teaching would be willing to relent on tenure, but neither side trusts each other enough to consider something like that.

and that moreover, it would be worth getting rid of good teachers if there was any suspicion around them just to be sure

where in the article is this argument being made?

“Sometimes if they are exonerated in the courts we still don’t put them back,” Cerf said, adding that he was not referring to Ostrin in particular. “Our standard is tighter than ‘beyond a reasonable doubt.’ What would parents think if we took the risk and let them back in a classroom?”

i'm not really that interested in picking sides between the union and the employers: the union is defending an indefensible status quo in the tenure system as described. but the idea that students are not doing well enough because of bad teachers is a myth, so even if the education authorities get what they want, it won't achieve their intended outcome. but this is a point about education rather than unions per se, so i'll stop derailing.

i think we ought to start blaming the children frankly

I believe that children are our future
Teach them well and let them lead the way

so, our public sector union has just called a day of strike action for next month.

it can't really achieve anything- it will only make the already hugely unpopular public sector even more loathed, and the govt haven't got any budgetary room for manoeuvre anyway.

will be interesting as an experience, but i wouldn't swap it for a day's pay tbh.

Being in a Union's a lot like being married, sometimes you go along with questionable decisions just for the sake of keeping things pleasant.

and every now and again you get fucked?

ah I wouldn't know about that kind of thing sir

noodle 'deliberately' vague, they call him

it will only make the already hugely unpopular public sector even more loathed

The public sector is loathed in Ireland?

at the moment, yeah. there's been a highly successful campaign of 'private vs public' since the shit hit the fan.

Yeah, same thing being attempted here

On-going campaign since at least 1979 more like

it's practically govt policy here, i dunno if that's the difference.

I do recall a lot of anti-public sector sentiment on the radio last time we was over there.

On-going campaign since at least 1979 more like

Of course, but it's been ramped up in the last year

Fireman have already had it in the neck from right wing arseholes, so waiting for nurses to get it next (lazy, dirty, foreign etc), but the real test would be the police force, the last time they were in dispute the RWAs managed to get away with blaming the government

i don't think we have a RWA 'party', as such, which is probably why i cross swords as often as i do with you guys, who are used to there being an actual 'them' to point at.

we have a builder's, farmer's and banker's party, that- get this- are also the 'working class' people's party too. and they're the bad guys.

But do you have a RWA media - like we overwhelmingly do here?

I was gonna say this earlier and it's a simplification but yeah Ireland tilts a lot heavier to the rural than the UK and much as I enjoy them in other ways fuck a farmer's politics tbh

We have the Irish Mail (they put the word 'Irish' before 'Mail' on the front, and that's about it) and The Sun, and maybe the Independent (I don't read it, tbh, so amn't up to speed on affiliation there).

But I don't think there's a clear cut LW/RW press either, or at least certainly not in the fairly concrete manner you have. When I read the paper, I read the Irish Times which would be a left wing, middle class joint as far as I can tell.

The farmer's unions here are heavily influential, and I do think that someone interested in UK politics would need to see that to believe just how strong they are alright. Fuck those guys, and that's from someone that comes from the most rural village on the most rural island in probably the most rural county.

fuck a farmer's politics

Amen to that. Hello SNP.

We do have a proper Labour party, though- and that's growing exponentially. I wouldn't be surprised to see the Labour leader as our next Taoiseach, a concept that would stun most people here I think. Same as UK, I suppose in that respect)

The problem is our other 'left wing' parties are the usual collection of loons, much as I admire them (Socialist Workers Party, frinstance) with an added dash of the "I was blowing you up 15 years ago, will ya think of me on June 6th there's a good man" brigade.

starting to look forward to striking. any tips, ilx?

use the word "scab" freely to describe anyone who displeases you

was kinda hopin for stuff i wouldn't normally do tbh

Boring (mostly) sensible stuff: The press will be looking for footage of people yelling 'scab', so don't give 'em it. The correct approach to someone crossing the line is more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger: make eye contact, try to engage them in conversation, ask them why they are going in, but don't lose your rag.

Hook up with your union branch first, and find out when and where you will be needed. Get phone numbers. You are going to be standing in the cold for a long time, so dress accordingly and get a good breakfast down you first. You may want to suss out places that are open early for food and refreshments afterwards. If you're on the picket line with people who have done this before, you may find yourself stumbling out of a postie's pub you didn't know existed twelve hours later. Whatever you do, remember you have taken this day back for yourself, so enjoy it, one way or another.

Best of luck and KNOW YOUR RIGHTS!

all good advice, thanks- we've been posted 2 1/2 hour time slots and there'll be a few old heads there to look after me. i'm gonna enjoy it, i think.

best of luck!

i'm gonna bring some kettle crisps, i think :p

wha' hapen??

not til tuesday! just gearing up for it.

just been informed that we can't use the carpark at work on tuesday, as it would consitute passing the picket.

i mean.

this has been a disaster, as expected. after picketing for 2 hours, everyone went shopping, OUTSIDE OF THE COUNTRY.

And another one Thursday, unless negotiations between unions and govt prove fruitful.

Latest proposal- 10 extra days leave per year, unpaid.

I'm a union member, but we can't strike because of a contract between our union and the contractors. It's odd.

they are acting on ur behalf & in ur interests, now stop asking questions or else

And another one Thursday, unless negotiations between unions and govt prove fruitful.

now cancelled.

Latest proposal- 10 extra days leave per year, unpaid.

I am finding this a rather tempting proposition.

eh, how does 12 unpaid days 'strike' you? although cowen is denying all knowledge since the backbenchers revolted.

Anyone have any interest in the British Airways strike (now postponed)? It tangentially affects my own job and whether or not I have any work to do next week or not, so I sorta do.

Holding a somewhat unfavourable view of this particular trade union tbh.

There are all kinds of things one can say about labour unions.

I was however struck by a Facebook friend who said that up to now he has been a lifelong Labour voter, but now he will never vote for them again, because they are too in the pocket of organised labour.

Back to the unpaid leave offer thing... basically I liked the idea of unpaid leave as a sweetener for taking paycuts. It certainly seemed better than the "Fuck the lot of you" we ended up with.

Well, that's a given really.

"How would ye like 12 days off? Well tough, you're just getting a pay cut instead."

I was however struck by a Facebook friend who said that up to now he has been a lifelong Labour voter, but now he will never vote for them again, because they are too in the pocket of organised labour.

"A lifelong Labour voter". Aye, right.

Though I suppose what you mean is a lifelong New Labour voter, so could easily be a Tory

I'm going to continue voting Labour, but may very well dabble in Socialist Worker's Party if they run a candidate anywhere near me next time.

Labour Taoiseach FTW, Ireland. Let's make this happen.

I think unions can in theory be incredibly valuable, within larger organisations, to redress the imbalance of power between labour and capitalist, stopping the worker getting stamped in the face forever and ever amen etc*. it seems to me that in the instance of ba (as well as with most recent high profile examples where industrial action has been called or taken place), however, the union seems to serve no interest but the perpetuation of its own power over the workforce: "resist change and fuck all the rest" being the catchall strategy.

these various secretaries and union officials cannot be completely oblivious to the financial crisis their members' employer is experiencing but they do seem to be, as they tediously roll out their "this could all be avoided if ba would just give in to all of our demands" line by rote. its not like there are company executives and directors lining their pockets while demanding sacrifices from the bottom rungs. can't they see that this is probably the best deal that they're going to get and resisting these cuts in this manner is only going to lead to more drastic measures being taken down the road?

kinda feels gross to find myself on the side of the corporate interests but meh.

*as ever, willing to concede that my understanding of the history of trade unionism is really not what it should be.

as well as with most recent high profile examples where industrial action has been called or taken place

Such as?

its not like there are company executives and directors lining their pockets while demanding sacrifices from the bottom rungs

This is a joke, right?

i was thinking specifically of the tube and postal strikes. perfectly happy to be corrected on any/all of my points.

You obviously didn't see the Panorama programme on the postal service. But nice that you are so willing to swallow the Daily Mail line, hook, line and sinker , let's just give Cameron the keys to No. 10 right now and forget about holding an election.

"this could all be avoided if ba would just give in to all of our demands" line by rote

I haven't heard anyone say this

In our case, the unions had very little to do for so long that they are having real difficulty returning to confrontational negotiation. Their relationship with the government at the moment is akin to an abused spouse that keeps returning for more.

Why am I living in this horrible right-wing country?

and not really, no. of course the execs earn a fuckload more than anyone else but they're not running of with the assets of the company at the expense of its survival. as i understand it cuts at ba are occuring top to bottom with everyone in the company taking a month unpaid or working a month for free, all managers having to essentially justify their jobs etc etc.

don't get me wrong, i don't think either side comes out of this looking good but the union really doesn't seem to be looking out for the longterm interests of the majority of its members if it thinks enacting a strike, especially now, is a wise move.

and sure, i'll strike the royal mail from the above list. tbh i am just thinking about ba in this case and maybe should have avoided making generalisations.

*ill-informed generalisations

tom: you have to find one that isn't first. how d'you like france?

Scotland.

As I understand it, there's a dispute within the union about what form of industrial action should have been called for, 92% of its members had no doubt however that some was required however. What do you think these union leaders do? Go round in armed gangs forcing its members to vote the way they want them to?

What do you think these union leaders do? Go round in armed gangs forcing its members to vote the way they want them to?

speaking for my own union, they harangue, lambast and harrass, and generally come to the table to tell you the courses of action with a yes/no option, and no discussion or alternatives.

every employer i've had, tbh, has been more reasonable, intelligent and considerate of the opinion of staff.

tom: you have to find one that isn't first

Finding a country that is less right wing than England would be pretty easy, I reckon

every employer i've had, tbh, has been more reasonable, intelligent and considerate of the opinion of staff.

Lucky you!

well, don't look at me i didn't vote for blair

yeah, i meant to add an acknowledgement that that wasn't the norm worldwide or anything. we've got pretty good legislation/practices over here.

I don't think it's made controversial to say that Trade Union leaders have on occasion had a shaky relationship with democracy, tbh.

that should be "mad controversial"

fascist

I can't think of anything less controversial in Britain than criticising trade unionists, the first phrase babies are taught to say is "Winter of Discontent", followed by "Bodies lying unburied"

Well as you know I am one of the most outspoken Tories on here so I swallow this shit hook line and sinker but a little more Socialism and a little less Stalinism might've helped out the cause at various points down the line.

honestly the idea that labour unions are the last gasp bastion of left wing ideology is pretty insane tbh.

(nb. i don't think that's what tom is actually saying but while we're willfully picking and choosing and misinterpreting others' statements...)

No, that's not what I'm saying. There are plenty of people willing to give trade unionists a kicking, I can't be bothered joining in, that's all.

there are people queueing up to give the tories a shoeing too, that's no badge of honour.

Oh yeah, it's really tough for the Tories, everyone in the media is against them, and they are so powerless to fight back

"this could all be avoided if ba would just give in to all of our demands" line by rote

to be fair, they code it in terms like "commit to negotiations" as well as
"Unite will not accept the imposition of new and inferior conditions on cabin crew." but unless they intend to offer alternative areas where costs can be cut, what the hell do they expect to negotiate?

all i'm really saying is that industrial action of any kind, at this time, is surely in the long term interests of no-one, and in the short term interests only of those 1 in 15 long-haul staff who would otherwise be made redundant.

i'm not a daily mail reading tory ffs.

AFAIK, the union offered to negotiate, the management refused. Which is what happened in the postal dispute too.

Oh yeah, it's really tough for the Tories, everyone in the media is against them, and they are so powerless to fight back

neither group is some kind of martyr association, is the point.

of course they're offering to negotiate and i believe the quote in the above post (taken from the unite website btw) demonstrates that I get that.

but what the hell do they have to offer, other than "we won't strike if you change your mind on imposing these reforms"?

too many "the hell"s. scratch that last one.

I think the problem is that there was no consultation with the workforce, I don't think they should necessarily strike either but then neither do quite a lot of the union leadership!

neither group is some kind of martyr association, is the point.

I don't think comparisons are particularly useful in this case

I'm not sure how it's the union's responsibility to identify what areas can be cut, sold off, etc. I mean, isn't that management's job? The union's only task to to fight for at least the status quo in terms of working conditions, benefits and wages for employees. And in that, most unions are a bit like the Terminator, they are trained to try to accomplish that regardless of anything else. That's fine by me. Employers always hit wages and headcount first, fuck them.

I'm not sure how it's the union's responsibility to identify what areas can be cut, sold off, etc. I mean, isn't that management's job? The union's only task to to fight for at least the status quo in terms of working conditions, benefits and wages for employees.

Of course, but isn't this an example of the status quo being untenable, given BA's £292m losses in the first quarter? ostensibly isn't the survival of the company (and granted, Willie Walsh may be bluffing about how fucked they actually are as a political tactic) in the broader interest of the entire workforce?

cuts are only ever going to come from staff layoffs and wage cuts, aren't they?

Exploiting the fact that your workforce are shit scared of losing their jobs in order to force through a lot of stuff that you previously hadn't been able to get away with - that's always a classy move. Particularly if, somewhere down the line, you go ahead and sack them anyway!

BA's £292m losses in the first quarter

And this the fault of pilots, ground crew and stewardesses??

If there's too many of them for the business the company is getting, 'fault' doesn't really come into it

BA made more profits in 2008 than in any year of its history.

probably paid more wages, too?

I might be a little more sceptical about this dispute if this was some horny-handed hairy-arsed workforce renowned for its bolshiness and militancy

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2009/08/25/article-0-062CD4BF000005DC-965_468x306.jpg

Anyway, I think we'd all better get used to strikes, 'cos there's going to be a hell of a lot more of them to come!

yeah, neither of those points appear to me to be relevant, Tracer. Of course BA could go back to those shareholders to whom it dished out dividends in 2008 and say "umm, could we please have them back?" but that's hardly realistic, is it?

of course bad management is to blame for the position the company's in but the bulk of its working costs is staff and like it or not, when a company's in trouble, where else do you suggest they go to recover them?

They could put prices up *ducks*

I agree with you but they did that already.

I don't work for BA but I imagine this is mostly about people being treated with a modicum of respect

of course bad management is to blame for the position the company's in but the bulk of its working costs is staff

What a sweet set-up!

Anyway, I think we'd all better get used to strikes, 'cos there's going to be a hell of a lot more of them to come!

yeah, tbh i wish management of large companies/organisations was better, i wish government was better, i wish unions were better. seems that between the three parties being utterly shit at working reasonable solutions out quickly, everybody gets fucked.

of course bad management is to blame for the position the company's in but the bulk of its working costs is staff

What a sweet set-up!

― Tracer Hand, 18 December 2009 12

your solution to that is of course to cut staff costs as a % of overall costs?

redundancy or wages, up to you?

tbh people should fly less.

"Of course I gambled away our savings and drink all day, honey, but you're the one with the job so who ELSE is going to buy the cheetos"

xp ba management should just say that

tbh people should fly less

Why is George Monbiot not an idiot?

ba also no longer offer a meal on short haul flights that of less than two hours that leave after 10.30am. that'll save em, ooh I dunno, about forty quid.

free trade fucking sucks + we are locked into system that makes people work harder and in less secure positions. also people should fly less -- most people flying BA are business people anyway. pick up a phone, dicks.

ba also no longer offer a meal on short haul flights that of less than two hours that leave after 10.30am. that'll save em, ooh I dunno, about forty quid.

― what kind of present your naked body (Upt0eleven), Friday, December 18, 2009 12:46 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

well, probably more. they're competing with cheapo airlines, and i guess the more people fly the more willing they are to use the shitty & cheap option.

Efficiency efficiency efficiency will save us all... apparently

It's just astonishing that a company could have its most profitable year in history and then a year later be like "soz, employees u r screwed"

can we not say exactly the same about the banks? and it's not like BA are the only airline suffering; how many have gone under so far?

It's just astonishing that a company could have its most profitable year in history and then a year later be like "soz, employees u r screwed"

United Kingdom plc

can we not say exactly the same about the banks?

Why... yes, yes we can!

soooo you're astonished about... what, exactly?

one of the guardian's contextless random factoid graphs earlier in the week had BA cabin staff earning twice as much as industry averages. that kind of made me go o_o

you know what's o_O?

that Virgin cabin staff make an average of £14,400. yes, you read that right.

once again, that number is £14,400.

BA's selling point is their "excellence"? And I imagine that goes for the cabin crew too? After all, when bosses pay themselves enormous amounts of money their excuse is usu. that they want to attract the best talent.

You pay peanuts, you get monkeys Ryanair

i mean, £14,400!

BA's cabin crew makes an average of £29,900. which is a sensible, middle-of-the-road wage. it won't exactly allow you to save up for the downpayment on a house, but you can live pretty well on it.

it's weird, i always kind of assumed that cabin crews were pretty well paid.

They're only women, for the most part, after all

Don't forget those equally frivolous gay men, Tom D. BA figures contain the per diems paid to cabin crew while btwn flights and the Virgin figures do not - I think Virgin cabin crew get their per diems in cash? However it should bug everyone that the basic is so low, considering the safety/security aspects of their jobs.

However it should bug everyone that the basic is so low, considering the safety/security aspects of their jobs.

Bloody unions not doing their job on behalf of their membership. STRIKE!!!!

Though I suppose what you mean is a lifelong New Labour voter, so could easily be a Tory

well, this is the Irish Labour Party, so the New Labour concept does not directly map onto here.

Oh of course, apologies

No worries, brother.

£14,400 is a pittance agreed but there are tons of people earning that or less, I don't think cabin crew are especially skilled workers. That doesn't make that wage not shit but hey guess how many millions of people are on shit wages.

£30k for a service industry job = seems like quite a lot actually

more than i earn

quite a lot more than i earn actually

Almost as much as Willie Walsh earns, I bet

I don't know why I keep being surprised when people feel entitled to judge the salaries of people working in entirely different professions as too high, but it always happens in the run-up to a strike. And I'm always kind of gobsmacked. When MTA subway drivers were going to strike a few years ago in New York, TV was full of people who seemed scandalized that they made $60,000 a year. You could hear the gears in their heads creaking.. "It's practically... MANUAL labor for god's sake!!" Now, being a flight attendant doesn't require the same level of training as driving a train, obv, but I think it's pretty arrogant to feel yourself qualified to tell an entire lower-middle-class profession that they earn too much.

Bankers on the other hand..

It's part of the victimy bullshit beloved of the Thatcherbaby complainer, and nothing annoys that cohort more than being 'inconvenienced' apart from being 'ignored.'

Thatcherbabies never, ever complain about bankers - the suckiness of companies' services is always blamed on workers, not management or 'shareholder demands'.

It's part of the victimy bullshit beloved of the Thatcherbaby complainer

gee thx!

but I think it's pretty arrogant to feel yourself qualified to tell an entire lower-middle-class profession that they earn too much.

bankers = no class profession

... I am such a hypocrite, bankers/lawyers pay my wages basically!

Hahahaha it's just that every time one of them moans that THEY don't have a trade union I feel like saying how do you like your free market NOW?

But trade unions are inherently evil, everyone knows that

we are locked into system that makes people work harder and in less secure position

than when, exactly?

£30k for a service industry job = seems like quite a lot actually

this, too. before you start, <£15k sounds ridiculously low too.

Since the 80s? (xp)

1980's? i'm no expert, but i'm not sure that the 1980's wasn't the decade for massive upheaval in the jobs market/unemployment/strikes etc.

£14,400 is £277 a week before taxes. £6.95 per hour if that's a 40-hour week.

1980's? i'm no expert, but i'm not sure that the 1980's wasn't the decade for massive upheaval in the jobs market/unemployment/strikes etc.

No, what I meant is that's when being made to eat shit and be grateful for it started in earnest

yeah, that's ridiculously low (bearing in mind that i'm in an economy where stuff is more expensive and euro based, so i don't have a great concept of comparison). no arguments.

but we're coming close to the tuomas level debate of "if people will work for it, paying more isn't great business"

xp fair enough tom!

I'd wager most up ILX would not be up for what it takes to do cabin crew, "service-level" or no.

tracer yr idea of a 'sensible, middle of the road wage' is just about enough to get you into the top 25% of UK earners

Average wage is what? £25,000+?

I am looking at this from a London perspective. In other places I suppose that goes a hell of a lot farther.

But even so, personally I have 0 problem with cabin crew making £30,000. Like I said, I doubt I'd be up to it. I don't have the stamina or the patience or the tolerance for hotel rooms.

But ultimately this isn't about what OUR judgments are about their wages, it's about management having agreed that cabin crew were in fact worth that, and now changing its mind once their colossal mistakes have put them on the edge of a cliff. Sorry dudes, if your employees were worth that a year ago, they're worth that now.

are we gonna put our balls on the table hear and post our incomes?

No

Sorry dudes, if your employees were worth that a year ago, they're worth that now

eh....

I mean what the fuck is a fucking wage. It is payment for a certain kind of work done over a certain amount of time. Often this agreement is even written into a fucking contract. The work required has not changed. The time required to do the work has not changed. It's like if somebody walked into a watch store and was like "you know what, the price of petrol went up last year and really ate into my savings so even though you've got a price tag of £100 on that watch I am only going to give you £75. Besides, I doubt that watch was worth £100 to begin with. I mean, it doesn't even have an alarm on it. Oh, and if you don't sell it to me for £75 I'll have you fired."

a year ago they were posting record profits, whether that was bullshit numbers or not.

now they're posting losses, and to expect that not to impact on the wages or numbers is fairytale stuff.

xp the work done is not the only input into deciding a wage, come on.

i mean you could just as easily argue that wages ought to be a set % of total expenditure/profits whatever, pro rata with the success of the business.

in reality, it's something like a mix of the two, and will always be linked to the wider economy.

I don't know why I keep being surprised when people feel entitled to judge the salaries of people working in entirely different professions as too high, but it always happens in the run-up to a strike. And I'm always kind of gobsmacked. When MTA subway drivers were going to strike a few years ago in New York, TV was full of people who seemed scandalized that they made $60,000 a year. You could hear the gears in their heads creaking.. "It's practically... MANUAL labor for god's sake!!" Now, being a flight attendant doesn't require the same level of training as driving a train, obv, but I think it's pretty arrogant to feel yourself qualified to tell an entire lower-middle-class profession that they earn too much.

― Tracer Hand, Friday, December 18, 2009 2:03 PM (52 minutes ago) Bookmark

well, duh, obviously it's because wages get reported before a strike. i don't have an opinion on this strike's justice/likelihood of success, but it shouldn't have been legally overruled on spurious grounds.

£29k *is* actually a lot of money for a not very highly skilled job. of course, next to bankers, barristers, high-ranking council officials, etc, perhaps not. but next to most people i know, it is. but it's hard to work out what their real wages are, what with their unusual living arrangements and per diems, etc.

"we are locked into system that makes people work harder and in less secure position"

than when, exactly?

― stop grieving, it's only a chicken (darraghmac), Friday, December 18, 2009 2:21 PM (51 minutes ago) Bookmark

than the 30 years after the war. some people, and not just the very rich, benefit for the new set-up, in other ways. anyone who takes a cheap flight, for example. lots of the people who moan about it also benefitted. but dockworkers, steelworkers, shipbuilders, auto workers... less so.

standard function of something becoming more widespreadly popular/available though? marginal prices drop but more production overall- the more people that work in a sector the more competition for jobs etc, the more available those skills are and so on.

tbh i'm not sure where we're even going with this any more.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51TFiqdtanL._SL500_AA240_.jpg

yes yes all well and good.

i'm just not sure that the point of a labour union is to argue that workers in an industry should be paid at rates that reflect the peak levels of that industry interminably.

if this was a thread about management and executive levels in large organisations, i'd argue anyone that wanted to defend their mistakes too, but ILX doesn't tend to need those threads tbh.

i'm just not sure that the point of a labour union is to argue that workers in an industry should be paid at rates that reflect the peak levels of that industry interminably.

actually im pretty sure it is! we don't live in a very co-operative society. because management and capital will do all in their power to push down wages, it follows that the union has to push for whatever it can get.

Wages AND conditions

well yeah that's fair, given that everybody argues in bad faith.

it's just that management and govt seem to have all the good arguments I'M THE PRODUCT OF TEH SYSTEM

no-one has a coherent alternative system in mind + the old alternative had its downsides. look at the parking lot!

The thing is that Trade Unions were created to protect workers from the worst excesses of unscrupulous employers and that seems to inevitably lead to conflict with free market economics, inasmuch as the blurred facsimile of the free market that exists today is the main tool employers use to exploit their workforce. Therefore it isn't obvious or inevitable that a Union's first duty is to maximise the profitability of its members' employer, even if the consequence of fighting for pay and conditions is detrimental to the employer - and therefore the employees.

Consensus politics wd make more sense here if Union members had any belief that companies had their best interests at heart, but companies don't and they aren't intended to. Labour relations in a Free Market economy can't really be anything else but a permanent Mexican stand-off.

Sorry I see my mayne NRQ covered some of that while I was typing.

Therefore it isn't obvious or inevitable that a Union's first duty is to maximise the profitability of its members' employer

no, i accept that wholeheartedly, but your follow on to that has to be taken into account in the economic circumstances. again, i suppose you have to be ready to take all information/accounts/figures fed to you by management with a pinch of salt too.

Consensus politics wd make more sense here if Union members had any belief that companies had their best interests at heart,

double standards here though- if your first point holds true wrt unions/members, then companies should also be expected to play their part wrt pushing proift/efficieny agendas. the balance will shift from time to time with economic circumstances, but that's probably where govt should be on hand to act as the clumsy meatfisted invisible hand.

again, i suppose you have to be ready to take all information/accounts/figures fed to you by management with a pinch of salt too.

Refer you to last night's Panorama on the Post Office

and consensus politics have well and truly fucked ireland, because it led to unions becoming just another member of the 'fuck the general public' elite.

for all that i'm not a union person, i have a particular fear/suspicion of them when they're in the tent pissing out. the unions should always be an obstructive pain in the arse- if they aren't pissing reactionary RW merchants like me off they're probably not doing their job all that well.

sorry tom, didn't catch that. was probably sitting glaze-eyed through my third 'samantha who', yet another bastard product of bertie aherne's loins.

I don't know if it's a double standard, I should be honest and say that I believe that the current political system that the UK and most of the world operates within is adversarial and that one side will always "win" at the expense of the others. I'm against the side that's winning.

You mean the side that always wins?

I'm against the side that's winning

against the side that's winning right now, or against whatever side happens to be winning at any time?

I meant "winning" in the sense of the last 400+ years Tom.

who's on what side? because again i don't tend to put 'unions' on the same side of the line as 'joe public', so simple adversarial 'one side or the other' doesn't wash with me tbh.

Postie dude was on R4 this morning saying that carriage figures were based on each 'grey box' they were using containing 206 pieces of mail. The posties in his sorting office thought that was a bit wrong; next year the gov't gave the box estimate as 160 and then they did their own count of the boxes coming in. Their average: 267 items a box. Posties think whatever books Royal Mail management are using are totally cooked and that managers are running them down on purpose.

managers are running them down on purpose.

This would seem to be the case - but guess who becomes the bad guys when the workers try to do anything about it?

well that's where the strong independent regulators step in.

right?

Well they are the bad guys if you're in favour of a privatised mail service

who's on what side?

This is why I talked about sides - there are clearly more than 2, and the lines are blurry as fuck.

I'm vague because it's difficult for me, as somebody who would at one time have instinctively called myself a Leftist or a Marxist, to choose correct language from the rubble of Left politics in 2009. I don't wanna affiliate by accident with doctrinaire positions or dogma swallowers. I still believe in large chunks of Marx's critique of Capitalism but so many of the people who've believed in and acted on that in the last 150 years have ended up defending tyranny or slaughter that I think one needs to be v. careful, unless you're a fan of tyranny/slaughter.

I know more or less what I believe in - more equitable distribution of the world's resources, more democracy, more individual freedom from oppressive power. I firmly believe that capitalism actively works against all those things. I firmly believe that the people and organisations who have the biggest accumulations of wealth and power now will not willingly give any of that away. I have no idea what the best way is for people who feel like me to work for change, now.

Failing badly at expressing half of what I want to say here.

no short answer to that. AFAIK, everyone below millionaire status wants all of those things, but there's obviously significant lack of consensus on how to best achieve it.

that's where everyone above millionaire status has an advantage- consensus isn't really a huge priority there.

AFAIK, everyone below millionaire status wants all of those things

If only that were true!

Who Wants to Be a Millionaire

The public side of what air stewards do may not be that skilled and be 95% of their job but they have to be highly trained individuals, responsible for passenger safety in the event of and accident. Whether this is worth what BA or Virgin pays them I couldn't say but to dismiss the role as being all about serving drinks is a little facile.

BA has overstaffed its planes and now wants to cut staffing number down to industry norms and I'm sure it wants to shed those at the top end of the payscale whilst doing it. An interesting thing that came up in the news this morning is that BA staff were balloted on industrial action in general and that some staff were unhappy that Unite then turned round and called a 12 day strike, which it seems a significant number of staff members thought was excessive. Presumably this is the wedge that BA has hoped to drive with the court case as a lot of these cabin crew will now vote no in the re-ballot.

Not a particularly edifying performance from either side really.

xp you got me- i don't know anyone that isn't a millionaire

actually, most of the millionaires i know would be reasonably left-leaning too, if a little strong on the subject of unemployment.

ed- this is kinda what we're dealing with with our union at the moment- they're trying to pull fast moves on us just as much as the govt, and it leaves you feeling pretty fucking cold on every side tbh.

BA has overstaffed its planes and now wants to cut staffing number down to industry norms

Gatwick-based crews already reduced for some years to the level they are trying to reduce Heathrow-based crews to. Was BA's record profit year the year they punted the lion's share of their UK domestic operations to FlyBe?

Hmmm.

I've just been invited to become a union rep. Can't see that working out, so no dice.

Starting work-to-rule on Monday, and tbh I just can't see how that's going to make any significant difference across 90% of the public sector. It's gonna be nurses, gardaí and the like carrying the can for us again, which is a cop-out.

I have become perplexed by the question of when everyone started hating Labour Unions.

We are also on this work to rule thing next week, but in my place - THERE ARE NO RULES. So god only knows what will happen.

I don't know what it's like in your place, but in my mine my colleagues are amazingly un-militant. Or rather, they are very militant against union head office, but are very accomodating towards The Man.

I'd say 'tired of union head office/reps being indistinguishable from THE MAN' is closer to it. At least THE MAN is doing his job in the whole sorry mess.

Also, our union rep is some kind of ridiculous student newspaper standard prose wannabe and his frequent frothy mails to us read like the most a parody of ridiculous frustrated leftwing propaganda speeches.

"We are down to-day, at rock bottom. Unimaginably punished for crimes we knew nothing about.

We are completely demotivated at work, bitter, disgusted and raging with a furious anger. We are in the depths of despair.

That is when Trade Unions are seen to their greatest effect. That, members, is why we exist!

The fightback in what will be a bitter protracted war starts to-day.

We must remain completely united in the face of the campaign of unprecedented hatred against us.

"

taster

I also don't understand why people hate unions. I hate to think it's due to misinformation. I've been in my union for 4 years now, and having worked non union in my kind of work as well, it's worth it. My health care is amazing, my pay is more than I ever thought I would make, and safety is always important, sometimes to the frustration of the clinet. I know what my work is like without being in a union and it's not a nice picture.

I didn't mean to write I hate to think.

Some people dislike Unions because they are instinctively conservative, no doubt. Lots of people who aren't instinctively conservative distrust them because they tend to ape the hierarchical power structures of the guys they're supposed to be fighting against, and the first rule of hierarchical power structures is that the unscrupulous, self-serving and stupid tend to rise to the top.

cf. that little blurb darragh quoted up there. Fuck discussing tactics with some guy who thinks he's in Henry V.

Yeah, and god forbid I should be the follow up to a guy like that, because as NV also says, "Lots of people who aren't instinctively conservative distrust them because they tend to ape the hierarchical power structures of the guys they're supposed to be fighting against".

i would be fucking murder on the people i work with, and 90% of the problems they'd be bringing me.

In what way are Unions conservative? And I understand that people think unions mirror the structure they are fighting against, but do they really? At our union meetings we vote on which healthcare we want, who will represent us, basically everything is in our hands.

My mother is IN a union and she has been known to tell her non-union manager(s) that she will always vote with the mgt, because she's not one of THEM even though her job requires her to be enrolled. And it's not with malice, she really believes thinks unions are for lazy, quarrelsome, unmotivated people who want more than their fare share, and that no problems can be solved by refusing to work, when the work needs to be done regardless.

i was working somewhere -- as a long-term temp -- and they tried to de-recognize the union because too few people actually belonged to it. we had a meeting and i argued it should stay recognized (it did), but i was surprised by how much young people especially disliked them. stuff like darra's post gives a pretty good idea why.

I guess there are people like that in unions, but those people are everywhere else too. I do agree with you mom on the last point. One thing that does make me made at work is the trouble I've gotten into because I saw something that needed done, but it wasn't my craft. I still did it, and I have almost been fired because of it. Every client is different though, and some will tolerate that kind of work, but the union doesn't. There have been times when we have had to stop work for more than an hour to wait on someone to do something that I could've done in minutes. Yes that's absurd, but is that a reason to hate all unions?

For Puritans/Midwesterners who see nothing wrong with working incredibly hard every day just to get by, and are damn proud of it (possibly misguidedly, but there you have it), there is nothing more contemptible than being "afraid" of hard work and/or being an obstacle to getting work done.

It's hard-headed and short-sighted, but there are a lot of people who wouldn't take "charity" for themselves unless they were starving...they MIGHT take it for their children, but it would be shameful to accept anything for themselves. They don't like unemployment, either, and they HATE welfare. They'd rather work 3 jobs and be taken advantage of by unfair labor practices at all of them, than admit "defeat" by asking for an easier way.

I mean, I don't know what happens to that viewpoint when people with this outlook ACTUALLY starve, I'm sure it ends up all different ways, and I don't know anyone who DID starve at any point later than the Depression. But I know our church took care of a lot of people quietly who were barely getting by on food stamps or whatever.

I understand that completely. My grandfather and his brothers were the same way, although they were big union men. Steel workers, oil men and welders, yet now in the south most of the union work is longer in those trades. Although there is a welding union still strong in the south, but it's mainly for pipefitters. Unemployment in my union comes out of my pay each week and goes into a fund. Because we know at the end of the job we will get a layoff and time inbetween jobs can sometimes be more than a month. But the money is money we worked for, so it's not charity or a hand out. If that makes sense.

I need my coffee before I start posting, I meant the union work is no longer in those trades now.

I know but unemployment payments for EVERYONE are exactly that: something you pay into against the threat of worse times. That doesn't mean you can't stigmatize actually ACCEPTING it. O_o

Not answering the phones between 9-1 today :) this is GREAT can't believe i don't rep for unions more often.

^ This again today. Hurrah.

Also jettisoned the problematic citizen smith union rep quoted somewhere above. communication and strategies much better now. yay for unions O_o

http://llia.co.uk/images/finalyrblog/sitm_logo.png

y 2 brake internet explorer at work NV?

It wasn't me, it was The Man.

damn just remembered 3/5 and now it's like woah, y'know

A:

I'd say 'tired of union head office/reps being indistinguishable from THE MAN' is closer to it.

At least THE MAN is doing his job in the whole sorry mess.

Also, our union rep is some kind of ridiculous student newspaper standard prose wannabe

consider yrself... DECONSTRUCTED

referred to senior union officials over here, tbh, and the 'partnership process' of the past 20 years that has seen most of them become slick, rich and well-suited upper-middle market following douches who thought they could play politics with the big boys and have therefore been inactive/useless while we're getting screwed.

that's a pretty separate issue to our guy in the office being a kitchen sink drama queen that can't keep us even basically informed.

BTW labour unions are useless

sometimes, not always. often they are essential.

they are very different in USA and UK. i think you are from the UK.

think this refers to the deal just agreed by the Irish public sector unions, summarised here:

what the union representatives agreed to:

1. No restoration of pay cuts
2. Longer hours for the same wages
3. 7-day work weeks resulting in no overtime
4. Redeployment of workers at Government's discretion
5. Staff reduction
6. Outsourcing of public sector jobs at Government discretion
The Government, in return for these concessions, will consider in 2011 whether they might start thinking about restoring some cuts to the lowest paid workers, but only if their overall budget is looking good. The earliest lower paid workers could hope for a restoration of wages would be in 2014.

whaaaaaat

oh yeah i'm the lowest paid worker btw, pleased to meetcha

"Hi ****,

I'm replying to your invitation to submit our comments on the agreement reached with the government.

I'm merely curious as to why a union representative was needed at the negotiations.

I sincerely hope that the union intends to ballot us on this agreement, as this has been questioned in early press reports.

Regards,

Darragh"

it's been a big day in ireland- this is just baout half of the kick in the teeth, personally.

A senior Irish Congress of Trade Union official has said the only alternative to the public sector pay and reform deal is an industrial relations 'war'.

ICTU public services committee secretary Tom Geraghty said that while several major unions were recommending acceptance of the deal, it will be difficult to sell to many members.

Speaking on RTE's Morning Ireland, Mr Geraghty said the unions cannot do much better in the current circumstances.

count +1 vote for 'industrial relations war' ta

fuckers are even doing the govt's press releases for them now.

So our national union executive has met and decided that it can't recommend to members the deal it negotiated a week ago.

?

via the time-honoured threat of approved strike action my union just got management to reverse their "offer" of retroactively reducing redundancy pay to the statutory minimum. these "negotiations" (management: "that's our offer"; union: "well what about (x)"; management: "that's our offer") have been ongoing for like a year. re fucking zult.

this explains our differing views on unions, i think- yours are useful & necessary! fair play.

Saw Made in Dagenham last night -- a nice but watery pro-labor film starring Sally Hawkins as a completely unconvincing strike leader. I liked her in Happy Go Lucky but I didn't know she played EVERYTHING painfully twee.

Anyway, a renter I guess.

hated her so much in the awful, AWFUL happy go lucky that i could not bring myself to watch Made In Dagenham, but kudos to bob hoskins, who wore a baceball cap supporting current union protestors at the Ford plant in Dagenham, to the movie's premiere.

just a for instance:

If your organisation was planning redundancies and held a meeting informing the union of this last week, would you expect to hear about it from one of those august bodies first, or to read about it in the paper yesterday morning?

the union will probably have been told on the condition that they let the employer make the announcement to staff. but that said, it was presumably their officials who leaked it to the paper, so yeah, poor show in not getting word out to staff first. our company used to inform the union 24hrs before they made the announcement, a week of limbo is ridic.

anyway, good luck.

Damn, heard this on the news (like yourself I suppose) and I wondered if you would be affected. Best of luck, darraghmac.

thanks. Am KIP in '11 and considering the pluses either way so we'll see

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/18/business/18target.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

sucks, idk

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/18/target-union-vote-reject_n_879668.html

Betsey Wilson, a Target worker for two years, said Friday that she would not be voting for the union.

"What I'm afraid of is someone coming in here and controlling me," she said. "I'm my own union. I represent me."

Wilson said she earns around $20,000 a year and receives food stamps, yet she expressed satisfaction with her pay.

"I don't mind being on food stamps," she said. "I pay taxes, I deserve them."

good for her

"A union is for people that don't want to work anymore," she said.

wow, the propaganda is working. most depressing thing ever.

Foreign students with J1 visas work for low/no pay in Hershey warehouses

http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/index.ssf/2011/08/state_department_probes_claims.html

"We have not to my knowledge ever encountered an issue like the one that’s occurring right now in Palmyra and Hershey," said Rick Ruth, acting deputy assistant secretary of State for private sector exchange.

...

The National Guestworker Alliance, which organized Wednesday’s picket action and posted an online video interviewing several of the foreign students, said the students wanted to be repaid for the costs of their trips and wanted the warehouse jobs to be given to local workers.

The students and the labor organization have vowed to continue their strike until the parties involved agree to meet with them.

Stephen Boykewich, a Guestworker Alliance spokesman, said solidarity rallies by other state labor organizations were being scheduled for today in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.

Longshoremen wild out at Port of Longview, WA

About 500 longshoremen stormed the new $200 million terminal in Longview before sunrise Thursday, carrying baseball bats, smashing windows, damaging rail cars and dumping tons of grain from the cars, police and company officials said.

Later in the day, more than 1,000 other longshoremen shut down the ports of Seattle and Tacoma by not coming to work.

Officials with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, while claiming they had not authorized the actions in Seattle and Tacoma, said the ports would reopen on Friday.

Members of the union are livid that the Longview terminal’s owner, EGT, is seeking to export grain without reaching an agreement with the union. Instead, EGT hired a contractor that uses workers from another union

“It’s certainly getting more and more violent,” said Jim Duscha, police chief of Longview, a small community almost 40 miles down the Columbia River from Vancouver, Wash. “The terminal’s security guards were outnumbered by people with baseball bats. People were busting windows out of the guard shack. They took a security guard out of his rig and drove it into a ditch.”

You know what? I support that kind of shit.

Wow.

Of course we have no way of knowing what happened here, but we can look forward to more round robins and pontificating on Facebook from non-experts. Of course this is an appalling thing to do on the anniversary of 9/11, I suppose.

Er, what does this have to do with 9/11?

well, it's 9/9 for a start

And it happened on 9/8.

I'm in complete suport of those guys. I wish my union was stronger and wasn't a state by state contract.

We also have a clause that we can not strike as long as the contract is agreed upon by both our business agents and president and the contractors. But my local union covers Texas, Oklahoma, and Sante Fe and I rarely work in those states. I'm always working under different union rules in each state because my union has no national contract. If only we had negotiating power to take force and demand a national contract we would. But we all know we would be quickly replace by apathetic workers who are more than happy to work for our wages without any complaints.

You know what? I support that kind of shit.

^^^

I support sit-ins and walkouts but not vandalism.

how do you feel about scab labor

Horrible time scraping one off below my knee.

also it sounds like the union has been expressly forbidden from doing a sit-in here re: the legal injunction against blocking entrances. and they've already done a walkout, and the EGT hired scab labor. so what other tools are they supposed to use?

I'm not sure but vandalism won't win them national support.

I think the larger goal is to inflict economic pain on EGT, who doesn't want to pay their pensions. Maybe once it becomes more expensive to absorb the damages than it is to pay the union members their pensions, EGT will give in.

what's the point of a walkout/strike if it doesn't disrupt business and damage the management's bottom line?

that bastion of reactionary thought NLRB is not on the union's side.

Eh. I'm going to read a couple of the local papers before I offer a considered opinion.

the union isn't even on the union side! they can't be, they'll be legally liable

wildcat strike etc

Oh I recognize the union's political gamesmanship here.

I have worked w/Teamsters and I'm always a bit wary of the more thuggish unions. In certain circumstances, however, I can understand the vandalism if it's the only way to get a big corporation's attention and if it's a way to show that the union is serious. I think this may backfire, though.

http://www.salon.com/2012/02/24/occupy_helps_labor_win_on_the_west_coast/singleton/

re: Longview

classic in theory, mostly dud in practice

xpost

great article, thank you!!

classic in theory, mostly dud in practice

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Friday, February 24, 2012 2:32 PM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

LOL.

for real

"well, they did get us the 40-hour work week, but on the other hand there's some dude from the teamsters over there who seems to be napping on the job." = basically every MOR anti-union argument i've ever read

well, tbf, there's also "there were useful at one point in time, but now they're just an excuse for corruption and inefficiency."

bullshit either way

^^^^ hear this twaddle all the time

OTM xp

well, tbf, there's also "there were useful at one point in time, but now they're just an excuse for corruption and inefficiency."

bullshit either way

― Little GTFO (contenderizer), Friday, February 24, 2012 3:01 PM (19 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

as if once you've achieved this benchmark of basic labor protections you can just sit back and assume that bosses are just gonna roll with it until the end of time.

^^^^ THIS

If not for labor unions, I'd probably have died seven years ago.

without the union, i would have lost my job thanks to one particularly nasty supervisor. it wasn't the union actually that ensured that i wasn't fired without due causes; it was a higher-up in the organization -- but my union helped me navigate the bureaucracy so that i could find the right folks to talk to. otherwise i would've been lost.

the Big Lol in that target propaganda video was along the lines of "unions have accomplished many great things in our country's great history! but those battles are over."

those battles are far from over in my line of work. Each year it gets worse actually as non-union companies bid jobs super low, hire string crews and rush jobs. We basically don't work in the south anymore.

those battles are resurfacing, joined by exciting new battles, in my line of work, but most uk publishers don't recognise the nuj and my main publisher actively discourages collective negotiation. THANKS MAGGIE THATCHER AND RUPERT MURDOCH YOU UTTER CUNTS.

Doug Henwood, post-WI-recall:

A major reason for the perception that unions mostly help insiders is that it’s true. Though unions sometimes help out in living wage campaigns, they’re too interested in their own wages and benefits and not the needs of the broader working class. Public sector workers rarely make common cause with the consumers of public services, be they schools, health care, or transit.

Since 2000, unions have given over $700 million to Democrats—$45 million of it this year alone. What do they have to show for it? Imagine if they’d spent that sort of money, say, lobbying for single-payer day-in, day-out, everywhere.

http://lbo-news.com/2012/06/06/walkers-victory-un-sugar-coated/

one line of argument seems to have really taken hold, which is that it wasn't big money but rather a general antipathy to recalls among the electorate that was to blame for walker's victory.

this angers me because the two things are intimately connected. most WI voters probably didn't have defined attitudes about recalls (what they are best for, whether they are desirable or not) before the last few months. however the GOP ads and talking points routinely brought up the idea that the recalls were unnecessarily divisive, a waste of public resources, etc. etc. and those ads were all over the TV and radio and internet in the months leading up the recall vote. and i imagine that a lot of people bought these ideas, especially since their opinions on recalls were probably unformed prior to them. as a result i think you had a significant number of people voting for walker in order to voice their opposition to the very idea of this recall.

the dems didn't really have an effective counter to this GOP strategy. i think they should have played up walker's "bad government" actions more--the fact that he has abused patronage, abused secrecy, done a rear-end against many good-government laws and conventions, etc.--in order to show that policies aside he is a corrupt Bad Actor who needs to be removed. that would provide "independents" with a putatively non-ideological alibi for voting against walker. but the dems and their allies didn't really push this. probably they didn't have time to come up with a coherent strategy in a few weeks/months.

i guess to put this simply i think that the idea that somehow antipathy to recalls was (1) non-ideological and (2) preceded the current election is wrong.

i think the GOP realized that some voters needed a supposedly non-ideological ("non-partisan") reason to vote walker, and they gave it to them. the dems failed to really do this. i don't know if there are any long-term lessons here but i think that a lot of people, and a lot of pundits, got played.

700m doesn't put much of a dent in the bigger constraint to single payer, which is not 'not enough $ lobbyists or tv ads', it's 'too many people are happy with their insurance and extremely risk averse' (including many union members, who had to be nudged into supporting the ACA to begin with http://www.salon.com/2010/01/14/healthcare_deal_2/)

this article is going around on conservative sites. i've only skimmed it so far myself

http://www.phillymag.com/articles/busting-philly-unions-pestronk-brothers/

Three union (I assume) dudes affiliated with the epic strike against Hyatt (http://www.hyatthurts.org/) were hanging around our 80-kid pre-school the other morning, descending on parents dropping off their kids on a cold morning and handing out pamphlets protesting the Association Montessori Internationale meeting in Tampa in a month. I told them there are better ways to gain sympathy, and probably also better ways to spend union money. My friend also pointed out that the last thing parents want to see at their pre-school these days is police out front, let alone strangers loitering around their kids. The guy I talked to kept saying he wanted to have a discussion, but all he gave me was smug, well-practiced boilerplate. I told him I get it, but there must be more effective/efficient ways to get the message out. Then I walked away.

via Doug Henwood:

http://doughenwood.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/strikes.jpg

"Second Amendment fetishism aside, there’s an old saying that the working class’s ultimate weapon is withholding labor through slowdowns and strikes. By that measure, the U.S. working class has been effectively disarmed since the 1980s...."

http://lbo-news.com/2014/04/02/a-working-class-disarmed/

super duper recommend jefferson cowie's stayin alive: the 1970s and the last days of the working class

interview w/cowie:

http://www.wskg.org/episode/stayin-alive-1970s-and-last-days-working-class

I'll never forget early 2011, when you could turn on the news and have talking heads bashing teachers, and saying they were overpaid and had it easy, etc. That was a great moment in making me severely disillusioned with American politics & media.

last weekend at my house a few of the organizers involved in the UAW push in Chattanooga held a panel where they broke down their impressions of why the drive to unionize the plant failed. really, really interesting stuff. UAW was 'looking past us' to the BMW plant about to open--for the UAW, the VW loss was just a strategic prelude to the BMW drive. for the workers who didn't know that their drive was being undermined and sabotaged from within, the VW loss (3 months after they had a supermajority of union votes!) was a shock that demoralized the whole crew and might have ruined the factory for another drive for years, if not a decade or more.

buddy spent a big chunk of last year in TN with these guys and filed this great story out of it

must-read if you're interested in labor, the south, the future, etc

http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/16420/the_battle_for_chattanooga_southern_masculinity_and_the_anti_union_campaign

thanks for the link hoos

so i work for one of these now

and can i just

“These guys are our version of climate deniers — they’re global economy deniers," the aide said. "You can bury your head in the sand and pretend that the global economy doesn’t exist, but that won’t make it so.”

http://thehill.com/policy/finance/trade/236203-liberal-dems-vow-to-block-obamas-trade-bid

fuck you, buddy

defend the indefensible: longshoreman's strike

seriously, I will probably lose my job because of it. I'm genuinely curious as to what possible positive spin you could give it.

the longshoremen's "strike" is complicated--as you probably know, it wasn't a strike per se but a contract impasse that got dirty with an unsanctioned work slowdown by the rank-and-file attempting to goose the International to fix the contract. the PMA eventually countered that long slowdown with retaliatory holiday season lockouts that hurt businesses everywhere.

PMA has been strongarming the ILWU with lockouts at every opportunity over the last decade or so, and ILWU has started to react like a cornered cat: they've squabbled with other unions over jurisdiction & have regularly insisted rank and file guys crossed picket lines of actually overworked & underpaid immigrants driving drayage trucks, to get back to the docks.

their last sticking point in these negotiations was that they be given the right to unilaterally fire the arbitrators used to settle workplace issues among workers--they were demanding it because (even though the arbitrator at the biggest port was actually a former ILWU guy himself) the arbitration decisions haven't been going the union's way lately, and they want to be able to throw him out. see here, for ex, where the PMA accuses the ILWU of actually witholding the details of a contract from voting by the rank and file over this particular demand: http://www.joc.com/port-news/longshoreman-labor/international-longshore-and-warehouse-union/pma-says-ilwu-preventing-members-voting-contract-offer_20150209.html

so in short while the actions of the PMA has a lot to do with the ILWU's mindset, their current mindset (no real class solidarity, breaking ties with other unions, actually demanding that contracts increase the power of the international at the expense of rank and file) **is** indefensible.

tldr i like the ILWU historically but rn they are fucking the fuck up

thanks man. it's the whole "everybody making less than us can get fucked" mentality that really gets me. I have supported them in the past through direct actions, rallies, etc, but I feel like that bridge has been burned.

yeah they've gotten really good at burning bridges lately

re TPP, retired NY Times labor writer says labor will lose...ugh

GREENHOUSE: Yes, Don. The Obama administration, like the Clinton administration, think trade deals are great. They help bring in cheaper foreign goods that help American consumers. They create investment opportunities for American companies. And they say, look, labor, manufacturing jobs are going to go overseas anyway because labor costs are cheaper in Mexico or China, and it's not trade deals that are doing it. You know, labor unions say no, these trade agreements really accelerate this, and we don't like it, and we want to slow it and maybe stop it.

GONYEA: These are tough fights for unions to win.

GREENHOUSE: Yeah, so when Democratic presidents align themselves with the business community to push through trade agreements, Republicans are generally 95 - 100 percent aboard. Some Democrats are aboard - the Chamber of Commerce, many business groups. And it's extremely hard for labor. Even though it throws its body down to block the whole thing, it's really hard for labor to block this and labor comes out of this kind of feeling proud that it put up a good fight, but it also comes out being very bruised.

http://www.npr.org/2015/03/18/393870615/trade-policy-vote-could-affect-organized-labors-role-in-2016-election

interesting stuff on the LA port mess hoos, thx

curmudgeon--i think that reporter's skepticism is right on, but as of right now? labor is winning. the admin doesn't have the democratic votes to pass trade promotion authority (aka fast track) and without fast track, tpp is dead. that's why the admin launched their BS astroturf group--they know they're losing, and they're trying to make up ground.

the "progressive coalition for american jobs"--who's in the coalition? right now all they have is a website, and no one is claiming membership. organizing for america and their PCAJ front group are trying to left-wash the TPP as being ~progressive-friendly~, trying to argue that opponents are unhinged right wing opponents, but it isn't working. the tide could turn their way, but right now all we have to do is hold on to the votes we have and they're gonna stall out without even bringing it to a vote. it'd be too embarassing to bring it up and fail.

always love inside baseball labor politics from hoos

i'm really interested in labor unions and wanna learn more about the history + politics + economics of them but i find there's a gulf between hardline boring leftists who just parrot "rank-and-file" ad nauseum and economists/industrial relations ppl who just think of them as a labor market friction that needs to be removed or industry-specific interest group creating distortions. i read jefferson cowey's stayin alive last summer & it rocked my world. i want to read more stuff like that. nuanced detailed critical stuff that puts things in context

(the book was maybe even a little too rosy-eyed in its depiction of unions themselves, like it kind of unproblematically portrayed them as a force for Economic Justice (it paid lip service to how unions upheld occupational segregation in construction, but it was like half a page), the only criticism it went into significant depth about was the role of the white ethnic union vote in ending the new deal coalition (which it did superbly))

(i even get whiffs of sketchy nationalism from stuff like that npr TPP excerpt. the whole rhetoric of: protect US manufacturing workers from "foreign cheap labor" is just creepy to me. i'm not sold that the tradeoff between reducing inequality in a rich country by protecting industries vs reducing global inequality by allowing those industries to move to poorer countries, a la krugman 'in defence of cheap labor') is justified)

feel like part of my current disillusionment with the left is partly to do with its obduracy on this issue, kind of a general unwillingness to think seriously about how unions could change, not only to reverse their decline but to be more inclusive, more adaptable, more efficient, more congruous with 21st c labor markets, etc. and if they do it's only in the vaguest of terms, the fear of being called out for being neoliberal definitely strong. on the lbo blog doug henwood posted an e-mail he had gotten in response to a piece on the union wage gap that was your standard fare union criticisms; make it harder to fire, cut investment in innovation, etc. all the comments were just sneering disgust, which ok whatever, obviously doug's intent in posting it was to sic his readers on this blasphemer. but like, where are "we" having that conversation with those people? i made a comment saying "hey, shouldn't you guys have good answers to these questions? this is basically the man-on-the-street's take on unions" and it never got approved >:(

feel like part of my current disillusionment with the left is partly to do with its obduracy on this issue, kind of a general unwillingness to think seriously about how unions could change, not only to reverse their decline but to be more inclusive, more adaptable, more efficient, more congruous with 21st c labor markets, etc

I think part of what the SEIU has done in the last 15 years has kinda rocked trad labor's world--a lot of efforts to organize workers that haven't traditionally thought of themselves as people who'd be represented by a union. Obv we're in a ~service economy~ now and that's why there's been such a deliberate shift to organizing workers in industries you wouldn't typically think of as being part of a union: finance, front-line retail, call centers, digital media. The reality ime is that a lot of "the Left" such as it is hasn't really caught up with this shift in a political sense--the unions have done just fine with it.

btw flop Bill Fletcher's book "They're Bankrupting Us! And 10 Other Myths About Unions" is pretty polemical but very good at addressing a lot of the man-on-the-street-union-critiques that you're talking about. his writing in general rules and i highly recommend him.

"they're bankrupting us" is, i think, a popularization of the stuff in a much more academic-style book of his i haven't read called "solidarity divided"--i should probably pick that up, will let you know if its worth checking out.

here's a review of that latter book: http://labornotes.org/blogs/2009/10/book-review-solidarity-divided

my dad knows bill fletcher!

sick thx hoos i will check that all out

https://soundcloud.com/cwaunion/how-we-won-at-fairpoint-and-building-local-coalitions-to-stop-the-tpp

gd the guy upstairs gets on here around 23 minutes to rip on the TPP and it kinda got me fired up at my desk

just don't stand up for 10 minutes or so and no one will notice

my dad knows bill fletcher!

― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Friday, March 20, 2015 4:20 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i have never met him but he leads local reading groups and stuff here, i should really try to get in on one of those

just don't stand up for 10 minutes or so and no one will notice

― j., Friday, March 20, 2015 5:28 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol

I'm currently kinda being dicked around by a union w/r/t a hiring decision and it is piiiiiissing me off.

:(

I applied to work at a law firm that represents unions (and also employs one of the editors from baseball prospectus) and they never called me back after my first interview so fuck them

=(

thanks hoos for some good info and links

of course from my vantage in wisconsin (which only last week became a right-to-work-for-less state) it seems like labor is being dealt a death blow but from friends in california and even in the south the trends are much more complicated. the messy dockworkers stuff aside there's some reason for optimisim in the growing unionization of service workers (esp. hotel workers) in the los angeles area, i understand.

i meant to write, from friends in california and even in the south i hear that the trends are much more complicated.

Does anyone really think that labor organizing has a healthy future in male-dominated manufacturing? I think collective actions/bargaining have huge potential and we'll end up with something involving them eventually (coming out of feminized labor & service jobs unless I miss my guess) but anything that looks like what unions look like now can be destroyed with the same tools that are dismantling them right now (and have since the 1980s).

do you mean that manufacturing is dominated by males or that unions will have a hard time in industries that largely employ men in manufacturing?

I mean the visible face of labor unions as electricians, carpenters, dockworkers, etc. Americans already said with their votes & policies that it doesn't care about those guys or their families (even when they are "us").

Where does the radical visionary future lie w/r/t unions in America?

man, when the act 10 stuff was happening in wisconsin, i made all these phone calls and i'd get these retired blue-collar guys who had been in unions (and were probably receiving pensions that their union negotiated once upon a time) who would say "i'm sick an tired of these unions, all they do is take and take and take. wisconsin can't stand it anymore! you're going to run us into the ground!"

now i'm sure some of these folks had bad experiences with their unions, but sheesh.

the visible face of labor unions as electricians, carpenters, dockworkers, etc

not so!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3mw49mk_x0

That voiceover accent is really lamentable.

it's a parody

...Yes, I got that part. I mean it's a terrible attempt at a "wise guy" accent or w/e.

#1UNextUp is a conference happening today for young organizers & union activists in DC, been watching some of it from my desk--looks great.

man, when the act 10 stuff was happening in wisconsin, i made all these phone calls and i'd get these retired blue-collar guys who had been in unions (and were probably receiving pensions that their union negotiated once upon a time) who would say "i'm sick an tired of these unions, all they do is take and take and take. wisconsin can't stand it anymore! you're going to run us into the ground!"

now i'm sure some of these folks had bad experiences with their unions, but sheesh.

i have worked two unionized jobs in recent years, both in (different branches of) state academic unions, and i get the point of them and can recognize that their existence has made pay and conditions better here than in neighboring states (like yours—tried to negotiate pay for a UW system job and what they could offer was atrocious), but still… i'm at the absolute ass end of the setup, with pretty much no power and no status, no future prospects, where i need every dollar, to the point where even if there were some use to 'being involved', i can't really afford to pay the full dues that would get me privileges in the union. so when they just take out fair share dues automatically and don't seem to do much of anything on the level of my job, it doesn't seem like i'm ~getting~ anything for it, more like i'm paying a subsidy for the legacy advantages they managed to negotiate back when. rather, like the well-established union members are defraying some of the costs of their operation by taxing the transients who have to take what they can get.

unless it were an actual calculation, that that kind of union suicide would be more worth it than the status quo, it does seem crazy to forego the advantages, but i would not be surprised if they were frustrated by any appearance of a stalemated state of affairs and just felt like saying fuck it.

it doesn't seem like i'm ~getting~ anything for it, more like i'm paying a subsidy for the legacy advantages they managed to negotiate back when

...all the more reason why it's a bit gross that union /retirees/ would be upset with unions for "bankrupting the state" when i call them to help fight scott walker. if anything, those guys got the best of it.

well, once they got it, they're probably only thinking about taxes : /

oh, it's completely understandable from a "i got mine, fuck you" perspective, but geez...

although it mostly speaks to the class resentment that republicans are so good at playing on... get a bunch of blue-collar union dues to hate the white-collar gov't employee unions (teachers and shit)... divide and conquer.

Where does the radical visionary future lie w/r/t unions in America?

― Orson Wellies (in orbit), Friday, March 20, 2015 7:11 PM (19 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

whoops sorry my last post was supposed to be an answer to this--there's a lot in the discussions at the conference (and the Bill Fletcher books I mentioned) that touch on these questions

I'm looking at it on twitter! Is there a livestream or were keynotes etc recorded?

not as far as i can tell, i'm just kinda surfing the #1UNextUp hashtag--there might be stuff up later?

here's their schedule of workshops if you're curious to get a sense of what's being discussed

http://www.nextupsummit.org/#!/workshops/campaigns

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka on March 18 said the fight over renewing Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) -- also called fast track -- will be settled this year "one way or the other," but signaled optimism the labor federation and other opponents will prevail in defeating the bill, based on several key factors.

Trumka predicted that few Democrats would buck their labor constituents and vote for fast track, and touted the unprecedented unity of opposition among all U.S. labor unions.

He also highlighted what he described as a strong contingent of opponents ranging from ultraconservative to liberal who will pressure an equally diverse group of politicians to oppose TPA. He said the diversity of opposition will come together in "sentiment," though maybe not as a formal coalition.

When asked if the current hyper-partisanship in Congress is making coordination among diverse groups harder, Trumka said there has never been "great coordination" among left and right-leaning critics of fast track or trade deals in the past, signaling that this dynamic has not changed.

His comments on the fast-track fight, however, were carefully worded, and Trumka never expressly said that the unions would be successful in defeating TPA. But he stressed the labor group's total opposition to the bill. "Fast track is wrong and undemocratic, it's a rotten process, and the American labor movement intends to kill it," he said in a speech to the Peterson Institute of International Economics.

Asked after the speech whether he expected to keep the Democratic opposition to fast track intact, Trumka responded that he expected to "lose a couple" of members. He refused to elaborate, but opponents and even some fast-track supporters say there may be as few as five House Democrats now who would back a fast-track bill. One opponent speculated that, at best, 13 to 15 House Democrats will vote in support of a TPA bill.

somebody just hit 'go' at Fight for the Future headquarters

http://i.gyazo.com/9f259957572cef2e47d2988d04bc2ed1.gif

its been going like this for half an hour, never seen anything like it

this review of a couple of new books in The Atlantic is very long and very good and has a very stupid title

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/04/why-workers-wont-unite/386228/

here's a section that speaks to some of what flopson was talking about earlier:

Burnishing his credentials as a critic of an older unionism focused only on collective bargaining, Geoghegan invokes as models unions like National Nurses United and the Chicago Teachers Union. Both have sought to position themselves as leaders in social movements, not just as the representatives of their members’ immediate financial interests. Each aims for a broad political coalition and embraces a big agenda.

For National Nurses United, that means urging a greater say for nurses in how hospitals operate. The Chicago Teachers Union, which staged an unexpectedly popular strike in 2012, connected teachers’ concerns about health benefits and the ways in which their work would be evaluated to larger questions. The union broached the topics of funding for education, privatization of public schools, overly large class sizes, and the lack of support for art, music, and special education. At stake was the whole question of teachers’ role in determining educational policy. It’s no accident that such unions represent service-sector professionals, disproportionately women, whose labor serves a greater public good; trained in professions that have their own ethical codes, these workers are pushing for more socially engaged autonomy. Such unions weigh in with confidence against corporate interests, committed to the idea that participatory activism counts.

Nurses and teachers might seem to have little in common with low-wage, blue-collar, or temporary workers, whether farmhands or clericals. Still, Geoghegan sees these unions as important and relevant examples of a willingness to depart from the mid-century template for collective bargaining. Any real revival of organizing, in his view, is bound to require a jettisoning of older models. There is little alternative, given the right-to-work laws on the books in 24 states and the hostility toward union-election campaigns: winning a majority vote is an uphill battle even if many in the workplace want a union.

Where there are union stirrings, workers are indeed experimenting with new strategies. At companies such as Walmart, employees have struggled to join forces to advocate for better pay and more-stable schedules so that they aren’t forced to rely on food stamps and public assistance to supplement their low wages. Aware of how hard the company will fight formal union recognition, they aren’t seeking to hold an election anytime in the near future. Instead, they welcome whoever wants to join them in pressuring the company through demonstrations, strikes, and Black Friday protests. The “Fight for $15” campaign by fast-food workers, airport employees, and home health aides (supported by the Service Employees International Union) has adopted similar moves. Participants have simply taken to the streets to make a moral appeal to the public and demand change. For the moment, they’ve bypassed the lengthy, often futile process of filing for an election, winning union recognition, and bargaining over a contract.

WIKILEAKS RELEASES TPP INVESTMENT CHAPTER: 'WikiLeaks has released a purported draft of the investment chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership that shows the United States is relying largely on its model bilateral investment treaty for controversial investor-state dispute provisions,' POLITICO Pro's Adam Behsudi reports. 'The document is dated Jan. 20, 2015, and updates an earlier version of the chapter that was leaked in 2012. Similar to the U.S. model BIT , the leaked document shows the U.S. is pushing for language that would protect "Buy American" laws from being challenged by foreign companies.

lmaoooo

sat in on a cool discussion with some teamsters folks today about how they're winning truck drivers back from the "independent contractor" model they've been operating under since Carter by adopting some gradual strike escalation tactics from Fight for 15 folks, like one-then-two-then-three-day strikes. also being strategic about where they picket a trucking company so that they simultaenously impact other trucking companies who use the same thoroughfares, extending the effect of the strike to all the companies who use certain entrances/exits.

"we've really only adopted this stuff in the last year and we're at 6% of the workers in these ports organized now and still accelerating. 6% is low, of course, but at least at the national average in the private sector--before these new tactics we were well below that."

also this

http://www.nationaljournal.com/congress/free-trade-democrats-face-campaign-pressure-20150331

several progressive groups are openly talking of lining up a primary challenger to Sen. Ron Wyden, the top Finance Committee Democrat and a key player in the ongoing TPA discussions. "Wyden is in a position where he can decide whether or not there is a bipartisan fig leaf on fast-track authorization," said Democracy for America's Neil Sroka. "It would be a lot harder to talk about a primary threat if there weren't such opposition to TPA. … We're making clear that there will be consequences."

With or without Wyden's support, most observers expect TPA to pass the Senate—but the outcome in the House is still an open question. "The most obvious place that there's a real opportunity to stop this is in the House," Drake said, but acknowledged: "We are in the uphill battle position."

well well

www.gawker.com/why-weve-decided-to-organize-1698246231

when somebody posts to the facebook page asking how they can join the union

http://images.complex.com/complex/image/upload/t_article_image/jjwtck4bzokmlrpk19e4.mp4

smh

is there a better rolling-labor-shit thread?

http://www.buzzfeed.com/sapna/victorias-secret-getting-rid-of-on-call-scheduling#.qtz7Qwej8

not afaict

http://www.culinaryunion226.org/news/press/teamsters-and-unite-here-announce-initiative-to-organize-ufc-fighters?utm_source=&utm_medium=&utm_campaign=

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/28/business/labor-board-says-franchise-workers-can-bargain-with-parent-company.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

fuck yeah they did

nlrb killing the game lately

Wasn't sure exactly where to put this vid, but it's completely blowing my mind right now:
https://archive.org/details/AV_359-DEMOCRATS_DIRECTION-_GROVER_CLEVLAND_OR_FDR

“One major way the US sort of has lost out in international economic competition, is that the American defense budget and foreign aid policies go to regimes in the third world that essentially wipe out independent trade unions, and in effect they hold wages down and they use the resources of the United States to do it.
A huge amount of the American tax problem, the fiscal problem, is about how are you going to divide the costs of empire in the population, and the plain facts are that we spend a huge amount of our money and time supporting regimes in the third world that basically make it attractive for businesses from here to move.”

The reason this hit me so hard is that you always hear the argument "Well US manufacturing unions were bound to die, because of inevitable competition from cheap labor abroad." And I'd always think, "well you wouldn't have that problem if you could unionize labor abroad to level the playing field a little." But our own foreign policy has been aimed at stopping that from happening. We've literally supported dictators and funded wars to depress our own workers' wages and our own corporations' labor costs.

that sounds rather conspiratorial, i think you'll find this is all just the pendulum of history

(i watched this the other night too! co-sign yr recc.)

so Bill Clinton was the new Cleveland after all eh

Things you learn on a Friday night: US unions used to strongly oppose the Boy Scouts and wouldn't let members be involved with them because Boy Scouts were often used as strikebreakers pic.twitter.com/zuFdfrYRNl

— Micah Uetricht 🌹 (@micahuetricht) January 27, 2018

Somebody(Alex Press on twitter?) posted an excerpt from a book talking about the reason why they call them “police patrolmen’s associations” was because they were so trained to fight unions all the time they wouldn’t join anything with that name.

the anti-closed shop stuff at the start of this thread, from over a decade ago, is making me mad, haha.

i worked in the public sector in scotland. offices aren't closed shops - i believe this is against the law in the EU due to regulations (and certainly will remain so in brexit britain). the majority of permanent workers in my office were not in the union, neither were any of the temps. we had a strike one time (due to among other things pay freeze and hiring ban), the majority of staff went to work. it was completely toothless.

I'm now a shop steward in my closed shop university administrative job in canada. we're still getting shafted to an extent but the power of being able to effect a really disruptive strike is the biggest bargaining chip you can have as workers.

http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2018/01/democrats-let-unions-die

Erik Loomis/Blog discussion of Eric Levitz article in NY Mag

The ultimate problem with labor is a complex conglomeration of issues that include automation, free trade, globalization, capital mobility within the United States, the decline of some American industries to more efficient foreign competition, terrible union leadership in some unions, the fact that for many workers racial and gender and heterosexual identity matters more than class identity, harsh corporate opposition that has funneled many millions of dollars against them for decades, a Republican Party that hates them, and yes, Democrats who didn’t understand how badly they needed unions for a successful party.

Distilling this down to another article blaming Democrats is an oversimplification that really just doesn’t help us move forward to create an economy with justice for all. It’s a piece of the problem. But it’s the piece much of the left most wants to hear instead of dealing with the tricky problems of globalization or the fact that sizable portions of the white working class is easily led to vote for politicians who make them feel good about being white.

I think the economic freedom/mobility argument that most people in government believe in has backed the ability to enforce labor standards into a corner. The laws and politicians are completely toothless

I think it's a difficult balance because ideally, you have to recognize some level of job loss and mechanization is inevitable but also the fact that a company can come in, benefit from tax breaks and public good will, and then say "whoops, we're still profitable but we need to be more profitable so we're cutting employment from 1000 people to 100 people" breaks some sort of social contract

I only have some hand-waving thirdhand anecdote about how a German company wanted to downsize and law forced them, if they genuinely wanted to diminish their workforce, they were legally forced to pay for worker education and/or relocation. Where are things like that in place, and do they work?

http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2018/01/democrats-let-unions-die

Erik Loomis/Blog discussion of Eric Levitz article in NY Mag

The ultimate problem with labor is a complex conglomeration of issues that include automation, free trade, globalization, capital mobility within the United States, the decline of some American industries to more efficient foreign competition, terrible union leadership in some unions, the fact that for many workers racial and gender and heterosexual identity matters more than class identity, harsh corporate opposition that has funneled many millions of dollars against them for decades, a Republican Party that hates them, and yes, Democrats who didn’t understand how badly they needed unions for a successful party.

Distilling this down to another article blaming Democrats is an oversimplification that really just doesn’t help us move forward to create an economy with justice for all. It’s a piece of the problem. But it’s the piece much of the left most wants to hear instead of dealing with the tricky problems of globalization or the fact that sizable portions of the white working class is easily led to vote for politicians who make them feel good about being white.

― curmudgeon, Monday, January 29, 2018 3:07 PM (fifty-one minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Very few of these factors explain why there isn't more service sector unionization, why government unions are struggling, or why, for that matter, unionization hasn't been more successful in other countries that we "compete" with. The answer is that our government actively works against unions at home and abroad--to a far greater extent under republicans than under democrats, to be sure, but even under democrats. And where democrats haven't outright kneecapped unions, they've certainly been tepid in their defense of them.

Loomis' defense of tepid Dems, is that Dem majority is partially reliant on blue-dog, red-state Dems who hold unionization back

given the unpoplarity of unions in their own states for much of the 20th century, it’s hardly surprising. And it was still very much a thing in 2009. Let’s say Obama made the Employee Free Choice Act his #1 political priority. How would he have possibly gained 60 votes for it? What was going to make Blanche Lincoln and Ben Nelson and Mark Pryor vote for this? Where were the unions in Arkansas and Nebraska to pressure them from the left? They weren’t nearly powerful enough, especially in the wave of Republican backlash overwhelming the nation by that fall. Now, let’s say that Obama succeeded somehow in getting those 60 votes and he signs the bill. How is labor that much different now than it is anyway? Sure, organizing would be a little easier. But what stops all those states such as Wisconsin and Michigan and Iowa and Kentucky and West Virginia from becoming right-to-work? Who can tell, but I don’t see any clear path. All of a sudden Wisconsin unions organize thousands of workers and Scott Walker doesn’t get elected?

Well but ya know what if they had done a better job supporting unions all along? Then you'd have more union organizing for pro-union democrats and more fundraising for pro-union democrats and hence more pro-union democrats in office, see how that works?

trying to figure out how he came up with that list of states, some of which already were right-to-work pre-Obama and some tumbled into right-to-work during Obama's term

He goes into slightly older US history to explain things too:

The failure of Operation Dixie in 1946 was followed up upon by the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, outlawing much of what the CIO had done to organize the big northern industries, allowing for right-to-work states, and forcing the communist leadership out of the unions. Remember, this was passed over Truman’s veto. In 1948, Lyndon Johnson won the Senate in no small part by lying about his opponent’s love of unions

The comments, as usual on LGM, add terrific points too.

here's where I again recommend Ira Katznelson's Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time

From a comment:

Just got around to reading this and agree with much of your analysis. But you never even mentioned an additional albatross that labor saddled itself with as far as my generation was concerned: George Meany's unwavering support for the Vietnam war. This war meant an entire generation of working class males were drafted to die for something that by the end none of them believed in. Many came home with heroin habits and never reconstructed their lives. It was always right to get behind labor, but darn hard seeing where big labor had positioned itself when it meant life or death.

DIIIIICKSSS

Columbia U issues letter saying they will not recognize their grad students' union and will fight it in court. They also seem to grasp the reputational damage this decision could inflict. pic.twitter.com/wy9f1r16FT

— Dave Jamieson, LLC (@jamieson) January 30, 2018

I only have some hand-waving thirdhand anecdote about how a German company wanted to downsize and law forced them, if they genuinely wanted to diminish their workforce, they were legally forced to pay for worker education and/or relocation. Where are things like that in place, and do they work?

thanks Wes! I learned something new

https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2018/6/27/17510046/public-unions-janus-reforms-fees-decline-reform-supreme-court-hope

Kind of a wonky question, maybe too technical for this forum, but would the "accounting change" proposed by this article (charging the agency fees directly to the employer instead of making each employee pay them) be something achieved by legislation or through contract negotiation? Because it seems like a simple great idea.

The next phase of the conservative campaign against unions is a series
of class action lawsuits that would bankrupt them. And they're
being masterminded by a man trump has nominated to run a federal
agency. https://t.co/gpNN5tJMW8 pic.twitter.com/9aXcp2VmLF

— Noam Scheiber (@noamscheiber) July 19, 2018

The viral story of the Mexican worker walkout at the Indiana UPS hub and the guy that filmed it is pretty inspiring:

https://jacobinmag.com/2018/08/wildcat-strike-indianapolis-shut-down

In the last two weeks, we've seen unions in NY griping about the Amazon deal blowup, and now...

this is some retrograde crap https://t.co/pWUlUHtuFL

— Doug Henwood (@DougHenwood) February 22, 2019

lol fuck off @Delta pic.twitter.com/fMNOeW9uFG

— Eoin Higgins (@EoinHiggins_) May 9, 2019

hey, working person: why not block out intrusive thoughts about improving your material conditions through collective action by spending your leisure hours playing halo

love delta xox

Not sure where else to post, but this thread, in which some idiot brags about her pinkerton aunt, is making my day
https://www.reddit.com/r/OldSchoolCool/comments/c1g6bv/my_aunt_betty_was_a_pinkerton_detective_in_1960/

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/09/kickstarter-to-workers-and-project-creators-drop-dead

Former ILXor Yanc3y is a union buster.

he's ex CEO fwiw

my bad, when I Googled Kickstarter CEO to double check Google returned his name

extremely shameful behavior in any case, nobody should use kickstarter

Whole Foods is keeping an eye on stores at risk of unionizing through an interactive heat map, according to five people with knowledge of the matter and internal documents viewed by Business Insider.

The heat map is powered by an elaborate scoring system, which assigns a rating to each of Whole Foods' 510 stores based on the likelihood that their employees might form or join a union.

The stores' individual risk scores are calculated from more than two dozen metrics, including employee "loyalty," turnover, and racial diversity; "tipline" calls to human resources; proximity to a union office; and violations recorded by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

The map also tracks local economic and demographic factors such as the unemployment rate in a store's location and the percentage of families in the area living below the poverty line.

The stores' scores on each metric are fed into the heat map, which is a geographic illustration of the United States peppered with red spots to indicate high-risk Whole Foods stores.

The heat map reveals how Whole Foods is using technology and data to help manage its vast workforce of more than 95,000 employees.

It also provides a rare look into corporate labor-tracking activities, a common practice among large companies but one rarely discussed publicly.

A statement on the map describes its purpose as specific to monitoring unionization among its employees, which the company calls team members.

"The [Team Member] Relations Heatmap is designed to identify stores at risk of unionization," the statement reads. "This early identification enables resources to be funneled to the highest need locations, with the goal of mitigating risk by addressing challenges early before they become problematic."

this is the first good business insider article i've read in at least a year

https://www.businessinsider.com/whole-foods-tracks-unionization-risk-with-heat-map-2020-1

One interesting side effect of the coronavirus here in Tennessee is some movement toward organizing by local restaurant and service workers. Not necessarily unionizing at this point, but what started as Facebook groups to commiserate and support each other has turned into growing anger as places are reopening without adequate protection for workers. I don't know what if anything it will lead to, but it's interesting to see.

There was no teacher gender pay gap in Wisconsin until it ended collective bargaining in 2011

Research by @BarbaraBiasi @saskatchewin shows women lost ground in male-run schools

Female teachers were less likely to negotiate salaries & even when they did, less likely to succeed pic.twitter.com/Li9dJ1cGge

— Ben Zipperer (@benzipperer) October 5, 2020

Very nice news from this month on my end -- our union had to do a little pressure after the old contact expired earlier in the year but the new one is very welcome:

https://teamsters2010.org/2022/10/21/teamsters-ratify-powerful-new-cx-contract/

(And I've been at this long enough now that I qualify for the further signing bonus on top of the initial one. So yes, join 'em, form 'em, use their power.)

This story seems to be taking off:

A new Iowa bill would roll back child labor laws, allowing 14 to 17-year-olds to work in mining, meatpacking, demolition, operating guillotine shears, and other dangerous jobs. Under the business-backed bill, employers wouldn't be civilly liable if kids are injured or killed.

— More Perfect Union (@MorePerfectUS) February 7, 2023