Not sure how you square those two. Could you elaborate? Any less durable form of organizing seems likely to have its work undone by the very well-organized and durable cadre of owners/management
To characterize unions-- especially contemporary unions in the United States-- as limited strictly to collective action functions, is factually incomplete and wrong. That unions perform other functions and aim to protect workers in other ways beyond collective action should be a totally uncontroversial statement.
Although unions proximately came into existence for the purpose of taking collective action against oppressive employers, it's equally true, and at least as important, to understand that they came into existence in order to fill a regulatory vacuum in labor law.
This should prompt some important questions:
1. Should the job of protecting workers from employers properly belong to any entity other than the government?
2. Is filling the regulatory vacuum with regulation theoretically or empirically insufficient to protect workers?
3. Are unions the only means of collective action?
4. Are the functions that unions serve beyond coordinating collective action actually necessary in order to protect workers? Would they still be necessary even if labor law was sufficiently well regulated?
My position is this: We should dramatically expand and increase labor regulation and enforcement actions, and we should allow employees to take collective action. Then we should ask ourselves whether unions are still necessary.
California already has laws that protect employees. Google and other tech companies are abusing loop holes in these laws by calling would-be employees "contractors" to get out of paying them benefits and providing job security.
Many professions that tend to be highly individualistic and require complex mastery have historically been represented by a Guild. While Guilds these days are sometimes a specialized form of union, the distinctions are often significant. A couple examples that come to mind are the American Bar Association, the American Medical Association, the Screen Actors Guild, and the Writers Guild of America.
Well, at least in the case of SAG and the WGA, those are essentially just white-collar unions. Neither of those groups would describe themselves as pro-organizing, but opposed to unions.
Im the United States most local and state ballots have measures on them generated by petition drives. Get X number of registered voters to sign a petition and it is on the ballot.
I always signs these when the someone approaches me. I may not agree with the cause or be a proponent of the goal, but the group organizing should have the right to appear on the ballot and have citizens votes on it.
I think you may have taken my comment out of context. I was replying to the OP when they said:
"One can be pro-organizing but not pro-union."
My understanding is the OP Was looking at it through the lens of a worker.
My comparison was meant to say I support someone's initiative to have something put up for a vote, but that doesn't mean I will vote for it. I could have been plainer in the explanation.
You present this as if there were only two positions one could hold on those topics which helps you paint anyone who has a different opinion as an indecisive buffoon.
This is no different from centrists saying that every problem can be solved by splitting the difference. There's some times and things where one should expect a normal distribution, and other times and things where a binomial distribution shows up.
Phase transitions and bifurcations show up all the time in natural systems, from mathematics to cell division and population ecology; I don't know why people think social structures would be immune from this.
> This is no different from centrists saying that every problem can be solved by splitting the difference.
You're right but because it's no different from someone saying their specific solution is the only way. In reality, there are a multitude of different opinions and it seems likely to me that more than one would be effective.
> There's some times and things where one should expect a normal distribution, and other times and things where a binomial distribution shows up.
Sure things might tend to distribute into two major positions but that doesn't mean nobody holds a different opinion and it says absolutely nothing toward whether those two solutions are somehow the ideal solutions (or one of them, in the case of the OP).
I think the point is that even if your actual position is not one of the two major ones, the pragmatic effect is that you end up supporting the one you claim to be against.
I can't help noticing that you addressed my first sentence but then ignored the very next one where I laid out a different point of view, opting instead to refute an argument that I never made.
This is a non-sequitur. The (apocryphal, IMO) “centrist” that’s saying everything is “between the two extremes” is not the same thing as someone saying “no, there’s actually more than 2 positions”.
Your statistical example actually takes things the wrong direction. The person you are responding to is positing a distribution with more than two modes, not fewer, and by suggesting there are two your example actually is closer to the “centrist” straw man.
Sure...if you ignore that I also mentioned a normal distribution, which includes a variety of opinions with a rough clustering around the center. Why did you just ignore that?
I didn’t ignore it, I called it a straw man. That’s the entire point of my comment.
The argument you are calling “centrist” is not claiming there is a “truth somewhere in the middle”. It’s claiming there are plausible positions (concentrations of probability in your metaphor) in more than just two locations.
I also considered adding that the assumption of a one-dimensional parameter space is also overly reductionist and not representative of the majority of positions people take when they feel like the mainstream choices are both wrong.
You misread the comment. No one is saying that you agree with these other political positions, just that the political position you stated that you believe in makes equally little sense.
The parent brought up a valid point, that organizing can be done without traditional union bureaucracy behind it - and perhaps suggesting sometimes this is a better approach.
Then you responded with a completely different set of points attacking the parent poster on completely unrelated topics that you somehow equated to what the parent said.
If we want positive change in our world we need respectful and rational discourse. Posts likes yours actively tear down discourse and makes worse the very problems you mention.
The very country we (I’m assuming you’re American apologies if not) are sitting in was founded by a group of, admittedly rich old white men, coming together and convincing their oppositions to not just go to war against the greatest power of their time, but afterwards to come together as a single unified country through a large number of compromises.
You were quick to list the handful of dictators and “strongmen” you know off hand, but for every example you listed there is someone like Merkel, Obama, etc. on the other side.
It comes down to both our ideologies being wrong. No you can’t talk your way through everything and no you can’t fight your way through everything either. You have to wade through the muck in the middle, and because that muck isn’t sexy very few people are actually willing to do it.
This seems like a self-defeating argument - why didn't the American revolutionaries just hug it out with King George? You take the fact of their going to war as a given, like the weather, then turn around and pour scorn on grandparent posters' firm opposition to autocracy and level of knowledge ('the handful of dictators and “strongmen” you know off hand').
You seem to be characterizing ideologies as fight everything out vs talk everything out, and then saying that centrism is the 'muck in the middle' where compromises are brokered. Why, then would you invalidate the whole concept of opposition and dismiss them as ignorant?
> If we want positive change in our world we need respectful and rational discourse. Posts likes yours actively tear down discourse and makes worse the very problems you mention.
This is a very ahistorical take. Tone policing and "moderation in discourse" has a strong connection to the will to maintain status quo. Radical discourse, direct action and even an unpleasant tone have however a rich history of change, both positive and negative.
It all depends on how an individual feels about the status quo.
A. You can be moderate because you believe moderate actions will bring about radical change, or
B. You can be a moderate because you believe things are good to some degree as they are, and any actions should result in moderate changes.
I'm inclined to believe the calls to moderate discourse come from the latter group. "Rational discourse" stands in opposition to "irrational discourse", with implied irrational demands.
In other words, if you can't see why group X would want something, you won't see anything group X does to get that as rational.
I agree and would point out that my comment does not contradict yours. Respectful and rational discourse doesn’t mean to sit idle while your talked over, rather it means you respect your enemies strengths and rationalize their weaknesses in order to take a position which best supports your cause.
> Ah yes, the toothless cry of the moderate liberal.
Why should every position need teeth? Isn't it possible that we are largely doing things correctly enough, and we should focus on the exceptions to that?
> "...I just don't support ... my parents meeting my daughter and her black boyfriend" [your caricature of a moderate liberal]
What do you accomplish, if your parents really are so racist, by tactlessly exposing to something they will simply reject? You have better options, even if your goal is for them to change. What about his parents, are they good? Maybe if they knew your daughter's boyfriend's parents were responsible, the truth would be easier to accept. I don't get why empathy is no longer a common resource for solving problems in the left coast culture.
People who are wrong about something are still people, and you won't notice when you're wrong like them, so why can't you empathize sometimes?
There's the "racist" that leads the Ku Klux Klan, and the "racist" that has black coworkers they get along with great but just doesn't want their daughter dating a black man, it's just not how we do things, you know.
The Klansman, at least in the present day, knows that he's on the margins of society's beliefs. Like any other tiny political position, holding those beliefs is uncomfortable. Even among the second category of racists, the KKK is too far. The Klansman doesn't have friends. His subconscious has been hoping for a way to rationalize leaving; it's more than happy to listen to Daryl Davis. His conscious, of course, is embarrassed to have been wrong, but with time that will fade.
The second category of racists don't believe that they're racist. They believe (possibly correctly) that they're in the mainstream, that the label "racist" has been turned into a cudgel by a minority. If their own child is dating a black man, well, it's the child that's been brainwashed, the common ground is to convince their daughter to remember how the family works. (Why did no KKK member attempt to convince Daryl Davis to cease his crusade?) They're the ones who have friends and social groups who will support them. They're the ones who can easily find neighborhoods and churches and grocery stores free of black people - not that black people would be unwelcome, but clearly, it's unnatural for whites and blacks to interact. They have no subconscious desire to rationalize changing their minds; if anything, they have a subconscious desire to keep their feelings. (What will their friends say? What will their extend family say? What will their church say? Well, they won't say anything, but we all know what they'll think, right?)
The first group sees themselves as ascendant with the most powerful man in the world as their ally. It is foolish to dismiss the real problems of organized and politically powerful racism. It is one of the country's most early and ingrown sins that shapes our discourse and policy (e.g. policing and the concentration camps at the border) to this day.
Daryl Davis is a great guy, but you need to reflect on the fact that many KKK people took the initiative and reached out to him. It's not the job of people who are being victimized to make their attackers into better people, and framing it as an issue of effort v laziness is putting the onus firmly on the victims.
It's great when this happens, but it's also extremely labor-intensive and it requires the person who has been in the grip of a hateful ideology to be looking for a way out of it in the first place. If they're not, then things can go terribly wrong. Back in 2017, three bystanders tried to intercede with a guy who was screaming racial abuse at two women on public transport, and he stabbed all three intercessors, killing two of them.
> It's not the job of people who are being victimized to make their attackers into better people, and framing it as an issue of effort v laziness is putting the onus firmly on the victims.
Unfortunately it is the job of those sympathetic to a cause to support it, whether they are victimized or not.
It's not "fair" or "right", it's just a reality that causes are advanced by those who care about them. Life is tragic that way.
> Back in 2017, three bystanders tried to intercede with a guy who was screaming racial abuse at two women on public transport, and he stabbed all three intercessors, killing two of them.
If he was ready to stab this woman, it is what it is. The lunatic who did the stabbing didn't get his way for free either. May they rest in peace.
Lunatics are brave and motivated, and heroes must be brave as well. It'd be nice if heroes could be effective and strong as well, but we don't get to choose when life calls upon us.
If that seminal Klansman were a lunatic, Daryl could have died that night. Daryl's a brave man, and that is unfortunately what is called for.
But the daughter who wants to marry her boyfriend has no interest in the cause of getting her parents to change their minds - she has an interest in the cause of marrying her boyfriend. It is her job to find the most effective way to do that, which might mean cutting her racist parents out of her life. It is not her job to find the kindest way to do that and put off her marriage possibly indefinitely.
It's not fair or right either. Life is tragic that way. Sometimes your kids find no need to empathize with you.
The original point was about a parent deciding not to show his parents his daughter's boyfriend; but I can't help but agree here on what you're saying. I have no right to stand on any soapbox about going out of one's way to empathize with one's parents, and even if I could, I wouldn't.
My point (in the original context, but it still stands) was more that if you are serious about it being a good thing for your parents to be at peace with your daughter's race mixing, then you have to be serious about accomplishing that goal. The best way is probably not lashing out or lecturing the elderly about your perceived disappointment with them.
I suspect that people who do not consider their methods, are often not acting out of a sense of duty or charity, but instead engaging in an elaborate virtue signal, with the people they should care for standing as props.
This is nonsense. You're arguing that being a punching bag is the only valid moral course.
In the case I mentioned the perpetrator was arrested by police, but you're waving aside the deaths as 'life is tragic, rest in peace.'
Police were called out the evening previous to the attack when the same guy was verbally abusing a black woman, Demetria Hester, on the same transit line, but they didn't arrest him and seemed to suggest to the woman that she had brought it on herself because she had fought back against his aggression and kicked him in the balls. It's subsequently emerged that Christian had threatened police, and despite all this they didn't do anything until after he had killed (reasonably comprehensive details below).
Your whole position seems to be predicated on a kind of passive resistance, and if that gets people killed well that's just too bad. It seems like you're saying that anyone who actively resists or retaliates against aggression thereby loses all moral standing. That seems like a pro=aggressor position to me, since aggressors don't really care what other people think.
> This is nonsense. You're arguing that being a punching bag is the only valid moral course.
The points you're arguing against are ones I never made, so I will not go to any effort to defend or disavow them. I get the impression you're making no effort to find sense in what I'm saying, and looking for an excuse to call it "nonsense". I don't appreciate that and I won't keep it going.
Unfortunately it is the job of those sympathetic to a cause to support it, whether they are victimized or not.
It's not "fair" or "right", it's just a reality that causes are advanced by those who care about them. Life is tragic that way.
[..]
If he was ready to stab this woman, it is what it is. The lunatic who did the stabbing didn't get his way for free either. May they rest in peace.
All I did was summarize your comments above for the sake of brevity. I do think it's nonsense, and callous nonsense at that. What sort of sense am I supposed to have found that I missed?
Because when push comes to shove those without teeth will be bitten. Those who are able to leverage force (whether economic, political, or physical) frequently do so.
People who are wrong about something are still people, and you won't notice when you're wrong like them, so why can't you empathize sometimes?
Oh dear no. Sure, they're still people, but if they've chosen to be mean about their views eventually they're going to be treated with reciprocity. It is not valid to say that 'you won't notice when you're wrong' as many people actively engage in self-reflection and other approaches so as to improve their decision-making.
When those asking for empathy habitually deny it to others, it's reasonable to question whether their request is made in good faith or is a mere gambit. The more a person's behavior resembles the latter, the more reasonable it is to cut them off.
One should be both, with a careful eye towards aggressive governance and transparency of your union. No different than if you have equity ownership in a startup, the only difference is that you’re selling your time collectively instead of a product.
Unions are just corporations for labor sales. If you don’t like your management, replace them with your vote.
> My point is that unions only suck if you let them suck. The devil is in the implementation details, and the effort put forth by members.
But that's the problem. The employee faces the same asymmetry when dealing with the union as dealing with the employer -- a single individual has difficulty driving a change in organizational behavior.
It's harder for an individual to fix a bad union than to leave the company for one without that union, so that's what many people will do. Which makes it even harder for anyone to do it your way, because many of the people who agree that there is a problem will have left.
Maybe? But it's like saying that it's harder to fix a bad country than to leave for another country, so its accuracy is possibly less important than its rationality.
It's a lot easier to switch employers than switch countries. Most people in fact do switch employers multiple times throughout their lives, whereas most people don't ever move to a different country from where they were born.
That's especially true when there are other jobs in the same industry and the same city but at a different company.
That depends on which country you are born into. There are several million South American immigrants living undocumented in the US who would beg to differ with that statement. Likewise, there are many expats who've chosen staying with a company over staying in their country. Finding an employer that treats you well may be harder than finding a country that treats you well in many instances.
