Why don't workers join unions anymore?

They reduce your already shitty pay and are a scourge

This is merely an assumption but it might be so that when the state's economy has matured into a knowledge-based economy where small(ish) companies with a relatively flat hierarchy focus on the output of innovation, the idea of a union seems less of a necessity due to flexibility and choice of employment and better treatment of workers due to their high value. I am not familiar with any (web)design/engineering/consulting unions.

>This is merely an assumption but it might be so that when the state's economy has matured into a knowledge-based economy where small(ish) companies with a relatively flat hierarchy focus on the output of innovation, the idea of a union seems less of a necessity due to flexibility and choice of employment and better treatment of workers due to their high value

Basically this. Unions thrive in areas where there are a large amount of relatively unskilled workers in the same place, at least private ones anyway. As people have gained more skills and as more small businesses have popped up, the opportunities and benefits of joining a union has fallen.

>I am not familiar with any (web)design/engineering/consulting unions.

It's because skilled professionals have 'associations' that serve the same function as a union. By regulating the amount of skill needed to join, you command the price you can charge for your service. For example, in Australia, if you want to be an accountant, you have to join the CPA. If you want to be a doctor, the AMA. An engineer, EA. These institutions serve the functions of a union (some of them anyway) without being called a union.

That sounds more like a guild than a union to me.

They are similar. I can only talk a little bit about Australia but the main unions we have are all trade unions. A trade union is when you can join if you have are in a trade. This contrasts with a workers union (kind of like a syndicate) or an industrial union (workers in the same industry are in a union). The big two unions in Australia are are the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) and the Australian Workers Union (AWU) and are both trade unions. (ACTU is a trade federation but get off my dick)

I really wish I knew more about unions and the labour movement in general. Are most unions today trade unions? Why? Why don't people start syndicates? What form does the labour movement take today?

>(web)design/engineering/consulting unions
They would unionized but Unions have already been defanged with outsourcing and immigration

Pic related is as an excellent representation of the rise and fall of unions. The growth of the idea of coops are probably the next stage of labour

It's not illegal unless you can prove that they fired you because you joined an union (and they won't EVER say it, instead they'll just lie and make a reason up.

A mixture of changing economic conditions reducing the traditional union jobs, employers becoming better at subverting unions, unions becoming corrupted and losing any flexibility, unions failing to find a place in the white collar industries, and finally rising standards of living made unions seem less necessary.

You live in NYC, you're a cuck no matter what

Union is anti-capitalism. REEEE

I enjoy you $7/h door man in Arkansas. UNION is EVIL.

>Unions are anti-free market

Idiot

>rising standards of living made unions seem less necessary.
Tbh the dying working class (white collar too) shows the need for unions is all the more important

Because there is less and less need for actual humans to be involved in manufacturing or extraction. Capital has once again triumphed over labor, except now even decision making can be done by robots with better accuracy than a human could ever hope to achieve. No job is safe.

Not inherently, but most unions are in favour of minimum wage rises and mandatory minimum standards for working conditions.

Unions would be an essential part of a completely free market assuming you could organize one big enough to not be solved with a layoff. Depending on the industry, some unions in America are either toothless or corrupt which turns people off of them.

That is a much more recent phenamenah. The things in talking about started 60 years ago. Also, I wasn't saying unions are bad just explaining why I think they declined.

Only white people join unions these days.

How the fuck are unions anti-capitalistic.

Well unions were mostly destroyed in the U.S though. America has always had this traditional 'classlessness' as a part of it's culture; everyone was an American, no matter how much money you had.

And I'm guessing the unions were destroyed by Pinkertons because they put emphasis on the fact that capitalists and workers have differing interests, instead of keeping the American Dream alive.

Juxtapose this with my own country where unions essentially control everything and have for 40 years.(Because they have government backing).

What skills do you have that stop them from replacing you with a robot?

Syndicates > Guilds >>>>>>>> Unions

because all the proper manufacturing jobs have been shipped off to china where unions are illegal

Sweden?

Norway.

Job loss due to automation far outnumbers job losses due to outsourcing. Blue collar workers dont want to look like Luddites because thats a losing battle so they choose a foreign spook.

Because in the United States unions have garnered a reputation of being less about workers rights and more about the rights of the people at the head of the union.

Because I own my own business

Both of them are true though. Unions can help workers, but at the same time fatten themselves. They aren't mutually exclusive.

>Both of them are true though. Unions can help workers, but at the same time fatten themselves. They aren't mutually exclusive.

Absolutely false. Once the head of the organization no longer feels the pain of the people he is heading, his opinions and ideas will rapidly become divorced from all sense of reality. Note for instance the Head of the Banks before 2008. Assured of their yearly big checks and generous severance packages, they took risky and dangerous moves in the name of the company knowing full well that they wouldn't end up paying a single cent of the eventual downside and reap all the rewards of the upside. Had the common man working in a cubicle, whose job is tethered to the survival of the bank, been in charge he would have acted differently. And again in the incident with Hostess, the Union leaders refused to allow Hostess to reduce wages in order to make the company solvent and remain afloat. I am sure the many factory workers who lost their jobs on ideological purity, were very happy about that particular decision. You cannot have someone negotiating on your behalf, if that person does not share the same losses as you if they fail.

Yeah, and the same happened in England under Thatcher.

But that doesn't mean bad working arrangements are acceptable.

I am in principle a capitalist, but that doesn't mean that I think people shouldn't be able to unionize, nor does it mean that workers shouldn't be able to use what little power they have to get a better wage for their unforgiving work.

Did you read my post? Or did you imagine something else and respond to it. I was simply describing how once you have a system where the head no longer suffers the same risk as the general populace of the organization, then unpopular and stupid decisions which go against what's best for the whole are often made with terrible results. Which is the exactly what happened to most manufacturing unions in the U.S.

>I was simply describing how once you have a system where the head no longer suffers the same risk as the general populace of the organization, then unpopular and stupid decisions which go against what's best for the whole are often made with terrible results.

So what? This is true for anything in contemporary culture.

I can literally make the same argument against the presidency, but that doesn't mean the presidency shouldn't exist.

>decent paying jobs
>being able to work in a not rat infested shit hole

Yeah, fucking communists, amirite?

Did I say that?

You kinda implied it

so are those disgusting government entities called corporations

nah

which is why you filed papers with the government first of course

The fact that rich shitheads like the feeling of another person kissing their ass.

He fucks up though he gone

Because American workers have been convinced that not only do they not need them, but that they're a detriment to their prospective career. Also, companies have bought out unions just to kill a unions existence, making the employees vulnerable to anything the company wants to do with them.

Hasn't anyone else noticed the trend of falling union membership and the drop in quality jobs for regular workers? They replaced the everymans job that supported a family with the fucking college meme of spending all your money to the state/privatized interests before you even have a job that now requires an education to live a life that doesn't require government assistance or just rotting away in a garbage pit.

This was intentional by the American government and big business, it's obvious since at least the 1980s where the love of the rich man became a thing, where people that weren't well off became convinced of workplace and political ideology that works directly against their interests.

Tldr, it's because America is a piece of shit that isn't even a real country, just a conglomerate of businesses.

Contract wages are also a big problem with unions. Companies giving contracts to workers instead of hiring them full time is a tactic being used by mid-sized companies so they don't have to give them benefits or equity of the company. Thus, trade unions are impossible to form because in order for you to be in a trade union, you need to adhere to a local union - if you move around constantly because nobody wants to tack on a permanent hire-on, you can't be a member of a union.

Forgot to mention that it was also in the late 70s-early 80s that student loans largely stopped being a government loan, because the government simply "handed off" those responsibilities to private lenders...can anyone guess that perhaps those interests were in the hands of individual politicians?

That killed the relative cheapness of college...so is it just a coincidence that as time went on that the majority of jobs are requiring more and more pedantic education for jobs that can teach you those skills in two weeks of on the job training, and rising costs of that education that's outpaced the rate of inflation?

um sorry sweetie they are, what are price controls

Why are companies allowed to do this?

Should I have said fair pay and fair work conditions?

I tried to say it in the most uncoloured way possible really.

In that case, there's absolutely nothing wrong with fair pay and fair conditions. So your point of noting some ties with being anti free market don't make any sense.

Well anything that adds costs to the price of a good or service without any benefits to the customer distorts the true price of a good.

Yeah, but to people on the left side of politics fair pay and fair conditions is synonymous and only a result of minimum wage rises and mandatory minimum standards for working conditions.

So either I say it from a neutral perspective and I get accused of calling unionists "commies" or I say it from a leftist perspective and don't get my point across.

Why are unions legal, but price fixing illegal?

Because people signing on consent to it. Thing is, it's almost always the millennials that get these kinds of work because the job market is very slim for that generation. I've worked with employment agencies before, and they've told me most of the contract work nowadays is exclusively millennials because they're the ones who would do anything, for virtually next to nothing.

In my country we have syndicates and they only exist to leech the worker, while the leaders get bribes from the corporations/government to avoid strikes. Then a new guy decides he's had enough and creates a new syndicate/gets elected. Rinse and repeat. They don't protect the workers. Just pretend to.

There are no human skills that will not eventually be automated, but thanks for playing with us today.

>he thinks setting a wage is the same as setting the price of a product artificially

Hint: one is a standard, the other stagnates the economy because it games the supply-and-demand system.

A wage is the price of a product (labor).

Meh. Any schmuck without an education can do his job. He's expendable now.

That has nothing to do with the free market. The member of the union provide a service and if you don't want it you're free to stop employing workers.

Your mom won't stop sucking dick just because she enjoys fondling my balls while doing it.

>That has nothing to do with the free market
Not when the law changes due to union lobbying.

Some things, like jobs that require person to person contact can't or at least shouldn't be replaced.

>meh
>ill mitigate my own argument when its used against me!

You really moved those goal posts right out of the stadium, huh? Within this century, it's incredibly likely that everyone will be "expendable" by that logic. A person and their work is worth whatever someone is willing to pay for him, because that's literally how value is established. Take your pseudo-intellectual bullshit that didn't make sense 50 years ago somewhere else, please.

Buying groceries used to require person to person contact, now it doesn't, and I'd say the whole experience has been greatly improved by this.

Joining is mandated by law here.
Unsurprisingly, unions are useless and only serve to jumpstart political careers and steal cash.

I'm not arguing that in the long run were imperfect meat bags. But what real skills does a bellhop or doorman have? He cant do corporate mergers or program and update software or navigate and ensure compliance with regulatory laws, functions that are difficult to replace with AI as of now. Hes a glorified help booth. He has no intrinsic function besides ass kissing.

>but that doesn't mean the presidency shouldn't exist.
You are imagining things which I never said. I simply gave a reason as to why Unions were in decline in the United States. People see that in their current state, they do not serve their best interests at heart. So they don't join them.

Yeah, and I'm trying to explain that the same reason is probably why many people don't vote in elections.

A bellhop or doorman is far more useful than a corporate merger.

Because people are willing to sign the contracts to work? And their is a glut of labor allowing companies to actually get away with it? Contract "employees" come with a certain caveat in that their "employee" holds less than 0 loyalty towards the company they "work" for, thus they can only contract out positions they know their is a surfit of quick and available labor to resupply and can withstand being unoccupied for a short period of time.

One is a local process and another is a global effect. A union asks for too much money and the company might suffer a downturn. Set a price too high or too low, and you might crash the whole economy.

>a glut of labor
People know this, yet they keep adding to it by having more and more children. Why? Why do they despise their offspring so much that they are willing to throw them into the grinder like this?

Unions in the USA are no longer a value to the workers.

Globalist "free" trade makes it impossible to squeeze the capitalists for more compensation.

all that stands between you and a robot is that you remain cheaper than retooling for robots. the dairy industry is going to be mostly robotic soon. as you can't even get illegal mexicans to do dangerous and dirty dairy work at over $20 a hour. while dairy robotics keeps getting cheaper and is proven to be cleaner and safer for the cows.

If robots can do all the work, why should people still need to work in order to survive?

>Using anecdotal evidence to justify nothing in particular
Thanks for playing

Coz fuck baby boomers

Because people dont want to share their wealth with others. If an African family came to your house and demanded that they live there rent free, would you comply? (Swedes need not respond.)

This. We could have robotic fueled communism with high standard of living across the board, but we don't on principal.

That's not the same as us all getting money for technological advances. That argument is retarded.

that would require fixing the population or reducing it in size.

you can't have too many idle young men in a population. even if they are secure and comfortable economically.

They've been gutted. Mine doesn't do shit, except make sure you don't get fired. No wage raises, safety precautions, nothing. Only making sure lazy fucks don't get fired.

I live in a right to work state, so I can join voluntarily, so I imagine they have less power but more reason to join. There's some states where you HAVE to join a union.

If I had the knowledge that they'd be helping out with bills, won't do anything illegal, and that my neighbors are doing the same, then yes.

"Fuck you, got mine" doesn't seem to be a moral standard we as a people should aim for.

>Because people dont want to share their wealth with others

They do though. People share their wealth with others all the time.

What they don't want however, is to reduce their living standards at the expense of others, which wouldn't be a problem if robots made everything.

>their wealth with others
What wealth? If robots can literally do everything, then it is the robots creating the wealth, not anybody else

Why? So they can't pursue their interests free from material constraints?

Do you think things like birth control would be more available in those conditions though.

Do you consider intellectual property to be property?

it is hard wired into the male mind to want to be productive and feel like they accomplished something.

if they can't fill that biological drive. then someone with ill intent will offer them a way to.

look at saudi arabia. a huge welfare state where men work, but barely. all the malcontents are stirred up by religious whackos and sent out to fight wars. if they stayed in the kingdom they would be causing trouble for the monarchy.

yes

Are you claiming that the profits and benefits of a workforce that's majorly automated should be to the benefit of the creator only?

Seems like the type of reasoning that got us to where we are today.

Then let them work if they will, but do not tie it to an income.

globalization means corporations can just move somewhere else if the native workforce refuses to suck their dicks hard enough

I dunno man, if I had all that time, I'd use it to develop myself: learn languages, exercise, travel, learn to play an instrument, spend more time with friends and family. I wouldn't live as much in an artificial mental depression that centers on working to justify my existence and worrying about bills that mean absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of life.

Holy shit all the more in FALC, they can literally do whatever they want to feel that they can accomplish something. If your biggest argument against FALC is people might doing shit you don't like, then fix your sensibilities

pic related

labor should buy the company they work for and reform it into a co-op.