36 Reasons Why You Should Thank a Union...

Great Debates
61

Yes I’m sure I could convince GE, Boeing, or any number of successful companies to ignore labor laws. Think things through please I have little time for silliness.

It would make me a wage slave if I brokered a deal in which I secured a higher wage for suboptimal working conditions? Marxist neologisms aside, do you actually have a point?

I find great irony in the idea that if I would turn down Social Security benefits in order to keep the money and invest it at my own discretion I am a wage slave.

Child labor was an unfortunate fact of life for centuries upon centuries of human life. It has largely disappeared in developed nations because of capital accumulation and an enhanced division of labor characteristic of capitalist economies.

And after the Civil War, optional. Welcome to America.

Unions were seeking protection by eliminating competition from those willing to work longer days than them. Every item on the list was advocated by unions to protect their own members at the expense of non members.

You’re being too loose with the slavery term. Maybe it’s because of a subconscious desire to not be taken seriously.

I get it, ok? You want to be father to every child. The facts of life during the time of widespread child labor were.such that the labor of the parents alone were not enough to provide for the family. Pulling the child out of a paying position at this point would mean starvation for the family. Of course the Benevolent Father has only the most virtuous of intentions.

No actually capital accumulation solved the problems. Investment in capital made workers more productive, which allowed for more downtime, shorter work days, safer operations, and yes, higher real wages so that the children could stay home and live the life previously enjoyed in the pre-capitalist days only by the aristocracy.

No I’m not choosing to be abused in my hypotheticals. I’m making tradeoffs I feel any thinking person should have a choice to make. You naively assume these 36 things come with no cons. A short reading of real deal economics would help you mightily. Start here: http://bastiat.org/en/twisatwins.html

You’ve bought the establishment narrative hook, line, and sinker, I wish you well in your reading of Bastiat.

62

You’re welcome. You can do it all on your own and you should. Stop relying on union supporters for your hard work and entertainment.

63

Nothing comes without consequences. I prefer to have the consequences of union benefits in our society. You want me to read a long “Bastiat” article? I’ll pass. If you can’t make a concise argument, then it is a burden you will have to bear. You don’t get to hand out reading assignments. The facts are the facts, and all 36 off those achievements are reality, and I didn’t call you liars (not that you would appreciate it) because the forum rules don’t allow it. But do I think that? I suppose it is possible that you don’t have enough self-insight to realize you live in a fantasy world of alternate history. But I’m disinclined to give your crowd the benefit of being involuntary fantasists. Your minds are as far up your backsides as Sarah Palin’s is. And you should be called on it for what it is in public forums. But Sarah Palin is much smarter than you are, she is a paid spouter of fiction, you haven’t managed to make it pay in some ruggedly individualistic fashion.

The difference between union busting and getting along with unions is the difference between Frick and Carnagie. I’ll take Carnagie.

The fact of the matter is that you don’t work 18 hour days 7 days a week, you aren’t allowed to hire children at slave wages, there is social security, etc. And you have no choice about it. I particularly like that you have no choice about it. One, it means that you are not allowed to coast on the benefits earned by others and not earned by you, and secondly, for you libertarians, it means that you are coerced into obeying the law “at gunpoint” (really no one has put a gun to your heads, but you are such drama queens) into bearing the same communal burdens as everyone else. You can’t have your lawless stab everyone in the back country here because the law prohibits it. Please do go Galt. We don’t want or need people who take all the benefits badmouthing how they got those benefits and then expect us to treat you politely. You are scabs and hypocrites. When you refuse the social security, the unemployment benefits, the 8 hour workday, the weekends, the safety protections and the child labor laws and do so for the rest of your life, then come back and brag about how pure you are. But until you refuse those benefits personally, you are hypocrites and nothing more.

You libertarians are not lonely rugged individualist heroes, you are whiny, hypocritical smug folks who don’t have the slightest understanding that the very roads you drive down every day, and virtually every other thing in our modern lives is utterly contrary to your libertarian principles. You have substituted a simple system of principles of greed in place of human compassion without the courage of your convictions. You don’t work 18 hour days for your employers, you don’t work for less than the minimum wage, you don’t work every weekend, you are entitled to social security (and will take it) and are hypocrites for calling them (and unions, the people who organized to get them) drains on society.

Until such a time as you personally do all these things, you are hypocrites of the worst kind. You are what they call “defectors” in academic studies of game theories. In the prisoner dilemma, your position is the one that always, but always sells out your counterparts because it benefits you personally. That everyone else contributed communally makes no impression on you, you think those people are chumps. In labor organizing there is a word for your kind: scab.

64

Huh?

How can I possibly look up something that is clearly impossible.

You rather foolishly insisted that unions were responsible for public education in America and even more foolishly insisted that anyone who doubted this was either stupid, a liar, or both.

I asked you how unions could possibly have been responsible for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts of 1852 requiring compulsory education of children when the major unions of the 19th Century hadn’t even come into existence and wouldn’t for almost twenty years later.

It is obvious to every right thinking person that you made a foolish, obviously false claim that you couldn’t back up.*

If I’m wrong it should be easy to do so. Please provide a cite to show that unions were responsible for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 1852 requiring compulsory education or admit you were wrong.

If you can’t it’ll be obvious you’re simply unwilling to admit you were wrong.

*. This isn’t to indicate you were lying. You were clearly wrong and simply unwilling to admit you’d made a mistake. I don’t see why since we all make mistakes.

65

Anyway, once again you didn’t answer the fair questions Novelty Bobble and I asked after you indicated you defended thuggish and threatening behavior and believed that 19th Century Chinese immigrants and Jim Crow era African-American migrants to Chicago were the equivalent of Nazis.

Could you please answer them?

Once again, thank you in advance for your answer.

66

No. Don’t like it, tough. If you think the criminal acts of individuals are attributable to everyone, then why aren’t the criminal acts of Halliburton and BP in the Gulf Oil spill attributable to all corporations for all time. You choose to focus on abhorrent criminal acts and call the whole movement criminal. I don’t think that I will dignify such poor levels of thought with a response.

Now, I’ve asked you many times to start working 18 hours a day 7 days a week and start sending your children to work in factories, never apply for social security or medicare benefits, etc. Why haven’t you done that yet? Thank you for your response.

67

Why? I still haven’t seen a decent reason why I need to support or be in a union just because unions in the past got some benefits for me. I have’t heard a decent reason why I need to not use those benefits. As I asked before, what is it that they’re currently doing that is worth my support, or 2% of my salary?

68

Of course I never claimed and don’t claim the entire movement was criminal.

You’re the one who claims to be a lawyer while defending stalking, harassment and other types of threatening behavior.

You’re also the one who foolishly compared workers who ran afowl of unions to Kapos.

We both merely asked what would be your reaction to physical violence being taken against people who crossed a union picket line.

The fact that your response has been insults and to effectively declare “I’m going to pick my ball up and go home” is quite telling.

Er… Your logic is beyond stupid. Where have I ever suggested that unions hadn’t done some worthwhile things. I also never suggested that unions weren’t responsible for that.

I merely have asked you provide for your foolish assertion that unions were responsible for public education in America. I asked you to explain how unions could be responsible for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts making education compulsory in 1852 when the Knights of Labor weren’t even around until the late 1860s.

Rather than admit you were wrong you merely started making a number of rude comments and again basically declared “I’m going to take my ball sand go home.”

69

I can’t help but think that the reduced role of labor unions is the primary driver of this trend.

Unions can track profitability and demand their members get a cut in ways that a single worker cannot.

70

I’m very much in favour of unions. Someone has to protect the workers from the overweening psychopathy of business.

Are there bad unions? Sure. But there are also good unions. And bad unions can be fixed by the members. Or the members can vote with their feet.

71

If unions suddenly went away, would we have to work 18-hour days? Nobody thinks that. So why bring it up?
However, if the Republicans went away, I bet we’d have slavery again. Sure thing.

The Second Stone, is your purpose here actually to make people dislike unions? Because if so, you’re doing a bang-up job, and actual supporters might like you to knock it off.

72

Business is not inherently psychopathic. Business is a collection of managers and workers, some good some bad. Trying to paint all business that way is as idiotic as suggesting all unions are bad.

In my experience as a worker, manager and message board user, those who trumpet the benefits of unions and call for stronger influence (certainly in the UK) like to paint themselves as left wing and liberal but don’t see anything wrong in harassing and abusing those who choose not to join a union (and so legally and legitimately go about their normal daily work).

They seem to have difficulty grasping the simple concept that…If I’m not in a union then it is your picket line, not mine. It has nothing to do with me and if you hassle me about it then there is only one of us occupying the moral high ground. And it ain’t you.

I’ve said my piece about the pernicious mentality surrounding the word “scab” but I look at it this way. If jobs of the striking workers can be filled so easily and cheaply then it calls into question the worth of the strikers in the first place, If, however your skills are critical to the survival of the business then the management will soon cave in and you have nothing to fear from the workers coming in.

73

There’s LOTS of news reports about it. The biggest battlefields have been on the state level lately , like Wisconsin and Ohio.

You are known as a “freeloader.” You’re like the guy who takes cookies from the jar but doesn’t put any money into the cup next to it. You are free to do so, but you should be ashamed.

You may also find that in the future, when you lose the benefits you have, you wish you had pitched in to protect them. That requires the ability to think beyond the present as well as beyond yourself though.

74

Of course we wouldn’t work 18-hour days - at first. It would happen slowly.

75

Because you can lose those benefits without a union to protect them.

As most workers have been experiencing in the last few decades as their pay has stopped growing and their benefits have shrunk, in direct correlation with the decline in unions.

76

Which is obvious nonsense, because non-unionized industries have not lost access to public education or Social Security and employees don’t work 18 hour days.

Herewith a few reasons to blame unions, all much more applicable than the foolishness of the OP -
[ul][li]Greed[/li][li]Corruption[/li][li]Organized crime[/li][li]Unemployment[/li][li]Violence [/li][li]Segregation[/li][/ul]
Regards,
Shodan

77

Second Stone

This says a lot about your condition.

78

Public education and SS are not union benefits.

As for 18-hour days, no, not YET. But worker productivity has indeed grown without a corresponding growth in wages. That is reality.

This part of your message shows me that you’re probably not worth taking seriously.

79

That graph says it all.

80

The article that accompanies the graph discusses five plausible explanations for the trend, so assuming that it’s due to the state of unions without further evidence is pretty thin soup.

ETA: It also appears to only be counting wages as compensation, ignoring the role of rising costs of employer-provided health insurance.