Preventing workplace deaths is pretty good. Virtually every foundational worker protection exists because of unions, and these laws are written in blood.
Edit: The article is great, and everyone should read it completely (skip the parts about matrix multiplication though)
mebesasporfa on
Unions were needed for about 5 minutes in 1880, but now they primarily exist to cartelize labor as a means to extract rents at everyone else’s expense.
Goldmule1 on
I’m glad you raised the point about the mere threat of unionization having a big impact on employers behavior. I feel like that threat is greatly under-recognized and hard to quantify in discussions of unions and their pros/cons.
Beyond the mere cost of fighting a unionization effort or the cost of raising benefits if the unionization if successful, even the threat of a coordinated unionization campaign can have a significant impact on the way that investors see publicly traded companies for example.
SanjiSasuke on
Well, for one thing they are a force multiplier when an employer needs punching in the mouth. They provide access to lawyers and a broader support base for grievances.
For example, my union negotiated a contract that said, if the sister union gets a bigger raise (their bargaining was on-going) you will match it for us. Plain language, no legalese.
Well, they got a tiny bit higher raise, 0.1%. The employer burned the entire time from ratification to the end of the required timeframe and the union took it to arbitration. At the arb case, the employer didn’t even argue. They just openly sandbagged until the arbitrator made them pay out.
Now if you don’t think they simply… wouldn’t have paid out in a world without unions, I don’t know what to tell you.
And there are countless individual cases where the employer just plain ol didn’t want to honor policies and contract terms, and an individual employee would have had to basically wager their job on suing if not for collective action from the union.
Basically, in modern terms r / nl can understand: a union is a big mecha that an employee can use to fight the kaiju that is a big powerful employer.
Alarming_Flow7066 on
No discussion of unions is complete without a discussion of police unions. One local to me is back in the news for suing a city for the firing of a police officer who killed a man experiencing a mental health episode. These unions have a significant force in encouraging police brutality, increasing incarceration rates and protecting police from accountability for their actions.
glitch241 on
Fuck public unions. Scumbags picking out pocket for shitty results
7 Comments
Preventing workplace deaths is pretty good. Virtually every foundational worker protection exists because of unions, and these laws are written in blood.
[Unions stop their grad student employees from being fired by Red state universities for being trans and doing their jobs as instructors of record.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_University_of_Oklahoma_essay_controversy)
Edit: The article is great, and everyone should read it completely (skip the parts about matrix multiplication though)
Unions were needed for about 5 minutes in 1880, but now they primarily exist to cartelize labor as a means to extract rents at everyone else’s expense.
I’m glad you raised the point about the mere threat of unionization having a big impact on employers behavior. I feel like that threat is greatly under-recognized and hard to quantify in discussions of unions and their pros/cons.
Beyond the mere cost of fighting a unionization effort or the cost of raising benefits if the unionization if successful, even the threat of a coordinated unionization campaign can have a significant impact on the way that investors see publicly traded companies for example.
Well, for one thing they are a force multiplier when an employer needs punching in the mouth. They provide access to lawyers and a broader support base for grievances.
For example, my union negotiated a contract that said, if the sister union gets a bigger raise (their bargaining was on-going) you will match it for us. Plain language, no legalese.
Well, they got a tiny bit higher raise, 0.1%. The employer burned the entire time from ratification to the end of the required timeframe and the union took it to arbitration. At the arb case, the employer didn’t even argue. They just openly sandbagged until the arbitrator made them pay out.
Now if you don’t think they simply… wouldn’t have paid out in a world without unions, I don’t know what to tell you.
And there are countless individual cases where the employer just plain ol didn’t want to honor policies and contract terms, and an individual employee would have had to basically wager their job on suing if not for collective action from the union.
Basically, in modern terms r / nl can understand: a union is a big mecha that an employee can use to fight the kaiju that is a big powerful employer.
No discussion of unions is complete without a discussion of police unions. One local to me is back in the news for suing a city for the firing of a police officer who killed a man experiencing a mental health episode. These unions have a significant force in encouraging police brutality, increasing incarceration rates and protecting police from accountability for their actions.
Fuck public unions. Scumbags picking out pocket for shitty results