Anyone suggesting there is no role for unions in America today might first consider a fact of history: more than a century ago, when oligarchs and the companies they owned had treated workers as if they were livestock, reduced to living in squalid pens with rationed food and water, it was unions that organized these workers to resist. It was unions who gave these workers back their humanity, and negotiated collective bargaining agreements and laws that eliminated child labor, enforced workplace safety, established an 8-hour work day, paid overtime, health benefits, and retirement pensions.
Unions today operate in a very different America. But how Big Labor has adapted calls into question their commitment to helping all American workers have a chance at a middle class lifestyle. In critical areas affecting everyone trying to thrive in 21st century America, unions have betrayed the American worker. In particular, their failure to challenge the globalist agenda of open borders and environmentalist extremism has inverted their priorities, putting them into alignment with the corporations and oligarchs they once so nobly opposed. This betrayal is most exemplified in the agenda of unions that didn’t exist a century ago, America’s powerful unions of government employees.
mostlyfriendly 2 points 1.7 years ago
I once asked a union boy why he felt the unions were so important. He smiled and launched into a speech about how corporations are only motivated by profit and so it was critical to have a union to protect the interests of the labor. I said "great, but what about public sector unions where there is no profit motive?" ... blank look in his eyes ... stammered something about "the workers" and wondered off.
Asking about public sector unions is a really nice litmus test for someone's intellectual honesty.
Public school unions are the worst. They neuter the principals and superintendent, making them powerless to act in meaningful ways. Leaving the two power structures being the union (who is pro $$ over all else) and the board (who is made of lay people.) No one in that power structure is educated on education. Leaving public schools being run by those who either don't understand or don't care about education.