They might be annoying and less fun than just freewheeling without one, but when the consequences come down the line, you’re going to wish you’d taken the minimal steps to be in one
When I worked at Best Buy I attended two full paid meetings about the horrors of unions when the Obama administration made it easier to create a union.
They even cancelled all our in home jobs one day for an anti union meeting
Holy crap I don’t know who at Best Buy wrote all those presentations but the language they used was a master class in brainwashing. I probably would be a flat earther of they spent enough time crafting their wording 😄
Sadly, with recent events, all I can think about with this is how Linus Sebastion would go on the WAN Show and say things like, “You don’t need a union unless you have bad management, and I never want my employees to need a union.”
I mean, a union is simply a way for workers to organize independently from management. While it’s useful for countering bad management and things like that, that’s not its only purpose. And anyone saying that it is either doesn’t know as much about unions as they think or is anti-union while trying not to say as much directly.
It also gives a voice to everyone and establishes a single bargain. If you have 50 employees and you’re negotiating with each of them separately how sure are you that you’re really being fair to all of them and not having any biases impacting your treatments? How sure are you that they agree? If you agree with the union about compensation and conditions of that compensation you know it’s fairer. If every management action has a steward as a witness you know that someone else who knows the rules you agreed to will speak up if you break them. You know that you aren’t about to get hit with an accusation of misconduct behind closed doors unless the steward agrees you misbehaved.
And as you say there’s security against management changing. You get someone with a union job with a pension and it’s hard for them to willingly leave. It’s a level of security that you know you aren’t getting elsewhere even if you’d be promoted.
If a “good boss” is being an actual good boss, the worst they should have to expect from the union is having the occasional friendly meeting with them to discuss any minor workplace concerns and contract negotiations.
The fact many “good bosses” immediately start sprewing hell and brimstone at the mention of a union hints maybe they ain’t as good and benevolent as they claim to be.
I completely agree. A good boss would likely appreciate a union, because the kinds of minor concerns that might be raised at a meeting are the kinds of things that individuals wouldn’t mention because it’s not worth the stress to flag it - even under a good boss who you trust would take even minor concerns seriously, it still costs time and brain energy to raise a thing, and the union being the middle man between the boss and the worker can be a boon in terms of collating concerns.
Not least of all because one of the concerns may be about a thing that is genuinely too trivial to make a thing of, if it’s only affecting one person. A union has the ability to go “hey, so this is only a small thing but a few people have mentioned it to us and we went around asking and it does seem quite widespread”
I do actually agree with his initial statement, which was “if my workers need a union to stay safe, I will consider it a personal failure.”
…absolutely agreed. His conclusion of that his workers shouldn’t need one though, is the problem. They should have one. However, if the union needs to step in because he’s being a dick, then he has failed indeed. Guess it was a good thing they had a union though, right? Oh wait…
We need an FOIA for employees. For example, if one employee thinks they’re getting paid less for their job than they should be, they should be able to request what somebody else is making and then be able to know she negotiate past that.
How reckless, encouraging inheritance like that. My personal demon college tutor instructed me on the ways of Malbolge. In the end, life is just a list of self-modifying instructions.
Blasphemy! Unions are just algebraic data types without any guardrails. If the programmer misuses them, that’s their own fault for b$:, 9^\⊂ƒ~>[→ZzF™×#
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
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