I love being a union member. Every few years they just negotiate me a better wage. If my manager acts like an asshole I bring my rep to a meeting. My manager tried some shit with me a couple of years ago, so I just filed a workload report and she had to meekly explain herself to my rep and why it wouldn’t happen again and what plan she would put in place to ensure it didn’t. It’s so nice to have enforceable rights.
Where *does* the money come from?
Submitted 17 hours ago by zedgeist@lemmy.world to workreform@lemmy.world
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/2d3dfd18-03f6-485c-84b1-0490e38d1b72.jpeg
Comments
BonesOfTheMoon@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
reabsorbthelight@lemmy.world 50 minutes ago
Man that’s so nice. I would love to have that
BonesOfTheMoon@lemmy.world 25 minutes ago
Not perfect, but it’s so nice just to really be yourself at work because you don’t have to impress your manager.
markovs_gun@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
This is a math problem. $1/hr for 40 hr/wk, 52 wk/yr for 10,000 employees = $20.8 million per year. If a company can prevent that with $20 million in one time anti union spending then they will because it’s simply cheaper to do so.
damnedfurry@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
Yeah, I was reading this OP, wondering if the poster thought that the end result of successful unionization would be one worker getting a $1 raise, lol.
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
Stoping a union is a one off cost.
Increasing wages adds to costs for every future year.
udon@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
If you spend hundreds of thousands once, you could instead spend a dollar each on 100 employees for ~80 years. They don’t work that long usually, but just in case
MajorasMaskForever@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
Your math is right but scales are off.
Dollar raise a year? Yeah, $1 * 100 * 80 = $8000, and to a lot of businesses that’s peanuts. It’s also peanuts to the individual employees, if you work full time federal minimum wage you make $15600, an extra dollar wont make a difference there.
Increase hourly wage by a dollar, and to the business that becomes $1 * 40 * 52 * 100, that’s $208,000 annually they’re paying out
ALoafOfBread@lemmy.ml 17 hours ago
The reason for this is pretty simple: necessity.
Companies have a fiduciary duty to maximize profits for shareholders.
If no union exists, that means depressing wages as much as possible while meeting staffing needs.
If a union is forming, it means spending as much as you need to stop it since, if you don’t, you’ll be unable to depress wages over the long term.
When a union exists, well then they have to negotiate to continue operations and so workers get paid more fairly.
birdwing@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 hours ago
Only public companies have that ‘duty’.
Co-ops don’t, their duty is to maximise wellbeing for all workers in them and concurrently society.
ALoafOfBread@lemmy.ml 3 hours ago
True! Co-ops are great
Cruel@programming.dev 2 hours ago
How did society get in the equation? If they’re maximizing the wellbeing of their workers, how are non-workers (society) benefitting?
anon_8675309@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
They have a fiduciary responsibility to the corporation and the shareholders. Increasing salaries to retain talent is part of this responsibility. However it is common for CEOs to mostly focus only on shareholders.
ALoafOfBread@lemmy.ml 5 hours ago
It also depends on the state the company is incorporated in, but yeah that’s true.
And it is a duty to the corporation (legal entity), notably not to the workers themselves; so while the interests of workers and the corporation may align sometimes - you don’t have to do what’s best for the workers if it isn’t best for the company.
You still need to operate lawfully, and you can’t pay so little that you can’t hire/retain anyone, and you need to pay enough that you can hire people skilled enough to do the job, but you need to pay (ideally) only that amount and no more. Anything else takes away from profits and, you could say, makes the company less likely to succeed - if the company doesn’t succeed, then no one would have jobs. Or so they’d argue.
The same as for goods, the price of labor is treated by employers as “what the market will bear”. For goods, that means higher prices, for labor it means lower prices.
elbiter@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
It’s not about the money. It’s about power, control and submission.
Cruel@programming.dev 1 hour ago
It’s ultimately about money though. If they believed ceding power/control to workers would get them more money, they’d do it. Workers are rarely invested in corporate success unless their pay is also tied to it. And even then, they’re not nearly as invested as the founders and initial investors.
hector@lemmy.today 6 minutes ago
There is something to preventing the union in the first place. In the same way they oppose single payer health care. They pay out of the nose, more than civilized countries’ employers pay for better health insurance, but they oppose it out of general dickish principle. They are good tribal pricks, and that is what the tribe expects. That follows to almost all of the tribes too, it’s only our little junior tribes that the big tribe has nothing but contempt and fear and hate for, that supports paying less money for more and better health care.
Because of Tribal Loyalties, same as with Unions, it’s the principle of the matter and they don’t want to be seen as the first ones to cave. Then John Galt might not bring them to liberatiland where they obviously prosper because they are so much more capable than all of the schlepps they abuse by virtue of being hired as a dickhead higher up.
RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
It’s both. Trust me.
Having worked in a union shop where we were constantly told we should think ourselves lucky to have a job and there was no money for raises or any other benefits for more than a decade, and they even broke us in bankruptcy proceedings, but when faced with a huge worker shortfall they started throwing huge wage bumps, bonuses, and rapid career advancement tracks to attract new people…fuck them. The money is always there when it matters to them.
reabsorbthelight@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
What tactics do companies use to prevent unions? How do you fight these?
Tower@lemmy.zip 2 hours ago
reabsorbthelight@lemmy.world 52 minutes ago
Oddly I saw this and thought it was a pro union ad because that’s pretty cheap
HumanOnEarth@lemmy.ca 2 hours ago
Yep this is the main line of attack.
“UnIoN DueS wILL sTeAL yOUr wAgEs”
$700 per year is 37 cents per hour, and you’re sure as shit to get a better raise than that every year in a union (on average).
Every sign like that just needs a little sticker: “That’s $x.xx per hour and they work to get you better raises”
Propaganda defeated
T00l_shed@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Divide people, threaten them with punishment for organizing unions and discussing wages. Fire organizers. Misinformation etc.
hesh@quokk.au 17 hours ago
If not millions
wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 hours ago
Lol yeah. I have a friend who started a movement to unionize a local botanical garden/performance venue years ago. They napkin mathed it out that roughly 1.5M has been spent on the union busters, as the execs have just kept them “on retainer” for like half a decade now, occasionally doing displays of force whenever murmurs start up again about unionizing.
HumanOnEarth@lemmy.ca 2 hours ago
I was radicalized when I worked (as a supervisor) for a big box electronics store, and there were staff interested in joining a union.
Boy let me tell you how many anti-union trainings I had to attend. And the way they villified and attacked the person who was the “leader” of the people interested.
I’m not sure exactly what they were expecting from me/us as a leadership team, but I came away from that with a crystal clear understanding of how scared corporations are of unions. And so I’ve been staunchly pro-union since.