Sorry, I wasn’t clear. A collective contract, backed up with a union with the resources to enforce that contract. And the ability to strike if necessary.
There’s always new people coming through the system with the required education.
And the converse side of it is that having invested that much preparation in a career, an attorney has that much less flexibility to change course. So if there doesn’t happen to be a flush market in her field at the time, she can’t expand her horizon by looking to do something else.
But most companies use such people for the “grunt work”, so it works out fine this way.
You are wrong about the benefits part of it. Unionized workers generally have far better benefits than white collar professionals.
But even that is almost besides the point. White collar professionals invest a lot of time and effort to get to the point they are in, as you noted. My point is that having gotten there, their bargaining power relative to their employee is relatively weak, as compared to unionized employees. So if for example there’s a downturn in the economy and the company is looking to cut costs, this is one relatively easy place that they can do it.
Ah, so it has absolutely nothing to do with unions being good or bad, and, in fact, nothing to do with unions at all. It’s that the long-timers wanted a promotion to management for themselves, not for an outsider.
I’m guessing you meant employer instead of employee.
Anyways, the bargaining power between employee and employer is irrelevant. It’s the bargaining power between employee/worker/contractor/freelancer and the GLOBAL LABOR MARKET that matters.
Why do Marxist disciples insist on constraining their worldview to their one-and-only employer as the be-all-end-all-source-of-lifetime-income? I’m always puzzled by this – why handicap yourself with this restricted viewpoint? All it does is promote victimhood and a defeatist attitude.
Well when she told me the story she blamed the union for this but I did not get a lot of details. Maybe the union somehow also lobbied against her getting the job.
Let’s see. FP says that “[white-collar workers’] bargaining power relative to their employee is relatively weak, as compared to unionized employees” (which rings true to me), and he’s a “Marxist disciple”?
It’s possible there was union involvement. One possibility (given that it was a public service job) is that there was a system allowing appeals against appointments and promotions. If one or more people working in the office appealed against the appointment, they may have been represented by a union delegate or officer.
In some offices, a system like that is seen as part of the rules of the game, and people don’t bear grudges regardless of who wins or loses; but in other places, people can hold grudges, and the union can be seen as supporting one side and not the other, in an unfair way.
Here’s a sentence out of the OP:
"…what’s needed more than ever is some organized resistance by the proletariat. And this applies to lawyers and accountants as much as it does to electricians and plumbers.
I added the bolding to show the OP already equated proletariat with “white-collar workers” such as “lawyers” and “accountants.”
Who else uses the term “proletariat” … Ayn Randian disciples?
Are we going through the motions of Marxism 101 remedial school or was there some other point you’re trying to make that I totally missed?
Just off the top of my head, I can’t see white-collar folk embracing any serious or effective moves toward unionizing. The game would have to change too much.
Obligating employers to provide fair salaries, benefits, and rights, using the tools unions now have, is going to put way too many restrictions on individuals’ freedom to pursue opportunity, polish hi/r resumé, try for promotion, etc. - and even more importantly, on management’s freedom to hire, fire, change job descriptions and benefits eligibility at will, and demand theoretically unlimited hours and productivity from the salaried weekly/monthly employee.
At best, it would be realistic for entry- or low-level workers. The further up you, the white-collar worker, get from bullpen peonage, the more you identify with the goals of management. Or else you don’t go any further up at all. The boss, in a very real sense, holds all the cards.
Chief, you should probably avoid using words like “Marxist” which means “related to the philosophy of Karl Marx” unless you’ve actually read Marx (and no, the Faux News Cliff Notes don’t count). Had you done so, you might have realized that, say, The Communist Manifesto, for instance, is about how capitalism’s relentless expansion into new markets all over the globe will ineluctably lead to the streamlining of social classes into two final groups, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, and the inevitability of their violent confrontation. That is to say, Marx’s most famous and most accessible work repudiates the very point you are making and thus results in your looking like a dope because no one has clued you in that “Marxist” is not an all-purpose epithet for “things I don’t like.”
You may consider this Ignorance Fought.
You’re welcome.
That’s really irrelevant to the matter. The individuals there were offended by her appointment (for unfair reasons, apparently) and used whatever means they had to make her want to leave. That one of those means they had at their disposal was the existence of a union is a mere fact. It doesn’t say anything about “unions.”
I use “Marxist” to label a group that think a certain way – not as a critique of its formalized philosophy.
I realize that using the term in this way is not “historically rigorous” but it’s what many people do and most people understand the context.
When we say “liberal” today, it does not mean “classic liberalism” as in Thomas Jefferson’s day. Word usage evolves to identify the groups of today that fit them.
I didn’t know a Cliff Notes of “Communist Manifesto” exists. My copy of Communist Manifesto (unabridged) is only 50 pages long – which much less than any Cliff Notes I’ve ever seen.
I would have supposed that someone who thought he could expound intelligently on Marx would at least know that he wrote more than the CM, such as Das Kapital, the Grundrisse, The Eighteenth Brumaire, the Theses on Feuerbach, &c. &c.
So, I guess you could say you’ve repaid me the favor of Ignorance Fought!!
Sure seems as though certain of the like-minded have made a strawman of Onkel Karl, and are now attempting to set him alight in an effort to divert the discussion.
True, sorry.
People are not commodities. It’s not always easy to find a new position, especially without some serious discombobulation, e.g. relocation.
In addition, the worker loses the benefit of established relationships & institutional knowledge, and in some cases lose pension value, as well as service credit for retirement benefits.
That’s a given in the white-collar world.
I don’t know how much you know about White-collars, but that’s pretty much a given. Nobody I know expects any kind of retirement except what we earned ourselves. And very few people get a pension at all anymore.
Not sure what you mean with this.
Not so, there’s still quite a lot of DB plans out there, and the places that have these plans tend to have stingy or no DC plan.
Of course, there are a lot more such plans in the union world, which supports the point.
Workers are commodities.
Children are not commodities. Parents are not commodities. Any family or spouse relationships are not classified as commodities.
However, people need to accept the fact that employees are not “family.” Employees are definitely commodities. That’s just the way the world works. You can’t expect an employer to treat his employee like his child or brother.
I do understand that you don’t want employers to treat workers as commodities. I get that. However, that’s irrelevant to the fact that they are. The business world has proven this over and over.
I have always considered myself to be a “commodity” or a “prostitute.” I just hope do ok as a penthouse prostitute instead of a street whore. This self-labeling has kept me on my toes. I do not ask for “humane” treatment from my employer or client. That’s irrelevant and pointless.
You can lose pension value even with union membership.
Read the excellent posted by cedman today: post #4 in What happens to Chrysler workers pensions if Chrysler tanks?
These days, General Motors workers unions are getting smashed amid bankruptcy threats and the government has given them a hard line about getting their wages in line with Toyota which does not have unions. Again, the Global World Labor Market has rendered judgement and the artificially boosted wages promised by the union can’t even find refuge in the government.
As I’ve said many times before, workers who pin their hopes on union organizations and politicians get what they deserve. All you can really count on is your own discipline to manage your resources and your actual value to the labor market without artificial support of a union.
Care to contrast “pinning one’s hopes on unions” with “using collective bargaining along with any other available tools in order to improve one’s bargaining position”?
If you claim that some gains won through collective bargaining is “artificial support” isn’t it also the case that there are forces in the market than can “artificially depress” your bargaining position?
Regardless of specific circumstances that merely tautologically indicate that unions aren’t a panacaea and a a magical genie godfather (which no one claims anyway), a single employee faced with an employer faces a bargaining disadvantage. Unions can help reduce such a disadvantage. It’s simply a tool, and one that could probably be used by many more people than are using it now.
In some ways yes, in some ways no. Businesses make all sorts of decisions that are not based on purely theoretical supply-demand concerns.
Having workers band together so as to weaken the ability of the corporation to confront them as a group of individuals and have to face a united front is just one of them.
You can die in a car crash if you don’t drive drunk.
Absolutely true. You can only expect so much from a union. If you hold the company hostage and get your compensation and other demands to the point where you’re not competitive and the entire company collapses, then you’ve pushed your luck too far.
But given the situation these days, with capitalist pig (;)) CEOs sucking up a greater and greater pecentage of the goods produced, some more balance in the other direction is needed, IMHO.