Comment on Cathy, do the math.
Objection@lemmy.ml 1 week agoOne of the benefits of being in the union is that they can’t just lower your wages and they may have issues firing you for bad reasons.
Not until everyone leaves the union to get extra pay and the union loses all its bargaining power.
In the image, it’s quite likely that the extra 50¢ is union dues,
That doesn’t make any sense. If it’s about union dues, the union pay is what should be higher.
The workplace is deducting the union dues from union workers checks automatically.
Unions loosing membership causing them to be weaker in negotiations is entirely irrelevant to why companies don’t just lower union pay outside of negotiations.
There’s no faster way to get downvoted than to complain about being downvoted, particularly if you’re weirdly smug about it.
Unions loosing membership causing them to be weaker in negotiations is entirely irrelevant to why companies don’t just lower union pay outside of negotiations.
OK, here’s the source of the confusion.
What the fuck did I say that made anyone think I was talking about cutting union pay outside of negotiations? Literally where is anyone getting this from??
There’s no faster way to get downvoted than to complain about being downvoted, particularly if you’re weirdly smug about it.
Most of the downvotes I got (so far) came before I added that part.
Because referring to changing pay rates for union workers as a policy change pretty heavily implies it’s not a negotiation, and “why wouldn’t the company just get the union to agree to a significant pay cut” is an even more asinine point. They obviously would have if the could have. The assumption that you didn’t know unions negotiated contracts seemed more charitable than thinking you didn’t know how bargaining worked.
Most of the downvotes I got (so far) came before I added that part.
Okay.
Because referring to changing pay rates for union workers as a policy change pretty heavily implies it’s not a negotiation, and “why wouldn’t the company just get the union to agree to a significant pay cut” is an even more asinine point. They obviously would have if the could have. The assumption that you didn’t know unions negotiated contracts seemed more charitable than thinking you didn’t know how bargaining worked.
But that’s not how bargaining works. What unions are able to negotiate is a function of how large, powerful, and organized they are. Rejecting what the company offers can mean going on strike, and if they aren’t powerful enough for that to be a credible threat (because people left the union for higher pay rates), then that means they have very little power to negotiate or say no to what’s offered.
So it’s more like, you don’t understand how bargaining works, so you jumped to the completely absurd conclusion that I didn’t know unions negotiated contracts? What?
tacobellhop@midwest.social 1 week ago
Replace leaving the union with going to college instead and you get why we have a 3 generation straight loss in union membership.
People told their kids to chase more money and then spent that money on cheaper foreign products and the whole house fell down within 20 years.
This was the plan by the way for capitalists.
Objection@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
Aren’t people with college educations more likely to end up in a union? One of the reasons some places don’t want to hire “overqualified” people is because they’re afraid of unionization.
There’s a variety of reasons for the decline of unions in the US, the main ones being:
Anti-union laws and propaganda (Mike Rowe being a big one)
Offshoring of manufacturing jobs
Major unions defanging themselves by purging radicals/communists to prove they’re “one of the good ones”
Madison420@lemmy.world 1 week ago
No most higher education jobs aren’t union. Do you bother to lookup anything by yourself before you speak about things?
Objection@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
Literally not what I said at all. I said that you are more likely to be in a union if you have more education. Do you bother looking anything up before trying to incorrectly correct others?
At this point it’s extremely obvious that you’re just trolling.
JustZ@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Well, also, a lot of the union jobs simply don’t exist anymore. Not very many boilermakers, steamfitters, carmens, or glazers around anymore. So obviously union membership is going to be down.
tacobellhop@midwest.social 1 week ago
There are. They just don’t work in the western hemisphere. That was the idea. Let us starve and fight for the scraps as the most educated generation in human history.