It’s not free health care if you have to forgo your wage to access it.
That would be a pertinent observation if there was any evidence that the allocated sick days were insufficient. AFAIK there was no such case being made.
Personally I really dislike concepts like a quota of “sick days” or the related idea of requiring a doctor’s note if an employee is off sick. It all stems from a basic distrust in the employer-employee relationship, which is an unfortunate reality in too many workplaces. I don’t remember whether in this latest strike the union was demanding more sick days or just the right to bank them from year to year, or maybe both. “Banking” of course gives the workers more opportunity to be conveniently “sick” when the weather is especially nice. I make no moral judgments against either side for these silly games, except that it has very little to do with actual health care.
Like almost all IMHO.
I’m sort of flabbergasted that anyone could be opposed to paid sick days. I do not want you on the worksite if you’re sick - I want you at home not infecting anyone. I want you to be paid so you have no incentive to ignore your illness because you have to pay your rent and can’t afford to be off. This is just public health 101. And if you happen to burn one on a mental health day - I really don’t give a shit, as long as you don’t come in when you’re sick.
One of the many things I find appalling about American labor laws is along with no mandated vacation time anywhere (not even in my oh, so progressive state of California), there is no Federally mandated paid sick time (California is one of 15 states with a mandated minimum, in this case an entirely inadequate 3/year). It’s frankly barbaric.
Hey, just to show how awesomely even-handed I am 
… CUPE was just in the news, and in this situation I’m 100% behind them! Pierre Poilievre is the leader of the Conservative Party of Canada (currently the official parliamentary Opposition) and on a recent Westjet flight, was somehow allowed to make a short campaign speech over the airplane’s PA system. Only flight crew are supposed to be allowed to use the PA system, and certainly not for political purposes. CUPE (which represents the flight attendants) is demanding an apology from the airline, and is objecting to the fact that flight crew are being blamed for this terrible lapse in judgment. And I say, go CUPE! Just goes to show that there’s always an upside to unions, as I’ve said repeatedly.
P.S.- Total side note for fellow Canucks who may not closely follow politics. It’s easy to get Pierre Poilievre mixed up with Pierre Karl Péladeau, who is a former Quebec politician and far-right asshole. Poilievre is the newly minted leader of the Conservative Party and is only a moderate asshole with some actual progressive views.
More union news … the UAW, which crippled the once-thriving US auto industry, seems to be on track to wiping it out entirely …
The UAW has 383,000 members who will vote on a strike. On the one hand, we have one of the very few democratic institutions left. On the other hand, we have doomsayers criticizing them from the sidelines, uncriticially amplifying not the words of the factory workers, but the words of a multi-millionaire who made his fortune off their labor.
To be fair, this is the first time that any company man has ever predicted doom if the worker’s demands are met. It’s never been done before, so it’s gotta be a true and unbiased perspective from Mr. Fields.
…so what would be your suggestion here? Should labour unions not negotiate on behalf of their members? GM’s chief’s compensation rose by 32% over four years compared to the median GM employee that rose by 2.8%. The new Ford CEO got an 18% pay jump. Ford profits have risen by 50% since 2019 at Ford, and 50% at GM.
If the US auto industry gets “wiped out” I wouldn’t be blaming the UAW. Because one of the reasons why unions exist is because there is a huge power differential between the worker and the people who profit from the worker. For every UAW there are millions of workers who have nobody to fight for them.
Here is one of the people who profits from the worker who accidentally said the quiet part out-loud.
Watch the video before reading the text of what he said because the video tells you he means what he says.
Based on the behaviour we have seen from the people at the top over the last few years I have no doubt that this sort of thinking isn’t isolated, its the norm. They think that “workers should know their place.” The recent spate of tech lay-offs weren’t motivated by anything other than telling the workers “who’s the boss.” (It was Angela.)
So if the American auto-industry fails because the workers tried to get a fair deal? Then perhaps we should put the blame on the people who run the actual business.
There are things that I don’t like about unions (in general, because unions can mean different things depending on where you are in the world). For example, I don’t like the word or the usage of the term “scab.” But on the grand scale of things? I’m not going to jump into a debate to complain about the use of the term. Not when the scales here are so out of balance. Not with people like Gurner and Iger and Musk etc in charge.
UAW are in a labour dispute. Negotiations are ongoing. This isn’t a bad thing. And strikes are okay.
…can’t edit the post, but I was supposed to write “Fords profits have risen by 34%”, not by 50%, my apologies. The GM figure is correct.
Also from that article, here are some interesting bits:
To paraphrase: if workers here ask for a decent living, automakers will take factories somewhere else where they can pay poverty wages, so that the wealthy can concentrate even greater wealth at the expense of the workers.
The solution isn’t less unionizing. It’s a combination of international connections between unions, and adding labor protections to trade agreements. That means electing pro-labor politicians, and that means organizing labor on a scale that we haven’t seen in many decades.
Oh no, whatever will the institutional investors do?
I’m afraid we don’t have a pearl clutching emoji, but here’s a fainting couch in case you require one.
On a more serious note, am I supposed to weep for the potential loss of jobs? Unemployment is at historic lows, and the people already in those jobs aren’t satisfied with them. If they were, they wouldn’t vote to strike. Nobody owes GM a perpetual source of labor.
Discipline in the factories!
In 1943 Kalecki argued that capitalists would rather have higher unemployment even if full employment meant higher profits, simply because they would lose power under such an arrangement. And here we are:
[U]nder a regime of full employment, the ‘sack’ would cease to play its role as a disciplinary measure. The social position of the boss would be undermined, and the self-assurance and class-consciousness of the working class would grow. Strikes for wage increases and improvements in conditions of work would create political tension. It is true that profits would be higher under a regime of full employment than they are on the average under laissez-faire ; and even the rise in wage rates resulting from the stronger bargaining power of workers is less likely to reduce profits than to increase prices, and thus adversely affects only the rentier interests. But ‘discipline in the factories’ and ‘political stability’ are more appreciated than profits by business leaders. Their class instinct tells them that lasting full employment is unsound from their point of view, and that unemployment is an integral part of the ‘normal’ capitalist system.
Italics are mine. The desire to engineer high unemployment as a means of keeping workers in line is self-evidently the bosses’.
Well, it’s a compromise to accommodate the needs of workers during temporary illness while not encouraging the development of perverse incentives by permitting workers unlimited time off for anything they choose to report as illness.
If workers were striking for removal of sick day quotas and doctor-verification requirements, on the grounds that they undermined trust in the employer-employee relationship, you’d probably be grousing that those greedy freeloaders were just trying to wangle more opportunities “to be conveniently ‘sick’ when the weather is especially nice” without anybody checking up on them.
Hmmm, sounds as though you’re totally in favor of union actions to help do the work of enforcing safety and protocol regulations to protect civil rights. All you object to are the kinds of union actions that specifically try to make workers’ jobs better.
It’s okay if union workers’ effective job duties are increased to include being watchdogs monitoring permissible political speech in the workplace, for example. But heaven forbid that they should negotiate employment contracts entitling them to more paid sick days than you happen to think they really need: that’s just playing “silly games”, apparently.
If those “union thugs” would just realize that their true purpose is to be improving conditions for you as a citizen of society, rather than improving conditions specifically for themselves and their fellow workers as wage-earning providers of labor, you wouldn’t have a thing to say against them.
Yeah. On balance I find myself agreeing with the several other posters in this thread who don’t see eye to eye with you on the interpretation of what it means to “support unions”.
There must be a name for the creative style of argumentation that I’m seeing here, which seems to consist of a nifty two-step process: (1) take a selected comment completely out of context, so that the original intended meaning is lost, and then (2) subject what remains to the most cynical and uncharitable possible interpretation.
My point about sick days was made in the larger context of the principle of civil disobedience, of when such actions may be justified and when they are not, and of the validity of using Martin Luther King’s statements about it as blanket support for illegal strike actions. Specifically, this is what I said, with the proper context restored:
So it wasn’t really about “sick days” at all, but about the threshold to which injustices must rise before it’s morally justifiable to defy the rule of law. In this case, the union demand was even more frivolous than I misstated in my example; they were apparently content with the allocation of sick days, and were demanding the right to bank them from year to year. They also had a few other goals related to seniority and job security, all of which were small potatoes in the larger scheme of things and certainly not monumental social causes, yet they staged numerous illegal strike actions that sometimes endangered public safety.
Maybe I missed something but it seems the issue was not a union tactic to get paid more for less work but rather the union fighting the city’s proposal to take away the ability they already had to bank sick days and cash them out at retirement ( which is not at all uncommon in government jobs). And banking sick days doesn’t really give people more sick days - most people I know who get a set number per year without being able to bank them make sure to take all or almost all of them each year whether they are sick or not while people who can bank the sick leave try not to use it unless they must *. Because they want to cash it in ( or gain some other benefit ) when they retire and they want to have a lot of sick time in case they have a medical problem and must be out of work for months.
* To the point where I had a job where supervisors were instructed to make sure employees used sick time ( not vacation leave or holiday leave or personal leave) when they called in sick.
Not really seeing how the context makes it any better, tbh. Or, really, different at all.
Jeez, heaven forbid you get to carry over sick days and accumulate time to use frivolously on a major health event. Like my brother who went out for a month and a half with a stomach cancer, but still was paid and had a job afterwards thanks to his diligent saving of sick leave.
I’m afraid your definition of frivolous and mine are pretty far apart. ‘Use it or lose it’ sick leave policies actively encourage people to burn their time on “nice days.” That’s a lot more frivolous than encouraging people to save them up for a rainy day or a retirement boost (when applicable).
Errr. He fought some racial oppression. The majority of it, he was quite cool with, initially.
I acknowledge your point, and the similar one made by @doreen. The union world is not my world. As either employee or manager, I’m accustomed to a world where, when you’re sick, you take the necessary time off, and get paid for it. However, that was incidental anyway to the main point I was making – see my next post below.
The context makes it clear that my argument wasn’t about the merits of any particular union demand, it was about the justification for civil disobedience, and the threshold of consequential importance that a cause must meet before flouting the rule of law becomes morally supportable.
I disagree that this is at all clear from the full context.