Unions that have an exclusive right to represent workers in an industry, or which are able to levy fees from workers in an industry regardless of the affiliation of those workers, constitutes an illegal monopoly and should be broken up.
Agree/disagree?
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Not OP but I have a question.
Why do unions exist?
OP here - presumably to represent collective bargaining power for a group of workers, as is the right of any free person to express themselves.
To give workers leverage against their employers, which ideally would protect them from abuse.
The concept is good and even today is relevant despite what ancap fags will tell you, the execution however has had mixed results.
We should institute right to work laws that require unions to legally represent and spend money on workers who opt out of the union.
...no, that makes no sense.
That's freeloading user.
I don't even understand why any ancaps speak out against them. Even Ayn Rand liked unions.
No, we should legally require workers to pay dues to a union they don't want representing them.
Nowhere does it say the union needs to exist. If you want to help then do so and who cares about whether or not it's "fair" - the problem takes care of itself.
no, that makes just as little sense as the point you are countering.
Yeah, but it's basically your only options. Either workers get benefits negotiated by a union they don't pay for, or they pay for representation they don't want. It's a horrible debate run entirely by people who strawman each other to death constantly.
Collective bargaining. It's easy for your boss to push around one guy, it's hard to push around the whole company.
They already benefit from the minimum wage and general pay rises a union achieves without needing to pay membership fees
I don't think you should be forced to pay union dues, but at the same time if you're in construction, it's hard to argue against being in the union because construction companies will often work you half to death if it weren't for unions. If there is ANY union that has a justified existence it's the AFL-CIO and its subgroups.
Like I get that union corruption exists and there's always been a myriad of problems, but I've always believed that their existence is a net positive. Posting related Simpsons clip just because
youtube.com
I largely agree. Unions serve a purpose, but shouldn't be given free power over those they benefit. Making sure that dues and membership are optional forces the union to keep its focus on serving the individual workers, rather than consolidating power at the top, like you see in so many national unions.
No, those aren't your only options. Neither of those existed at the dawn of unions, and they accomplished what they set out to do without them.
bump
100% this. Unions are party to corruption just like any large human enterprise, but people tend to see them as altruistic (or evil depending on your party affiliation) no matter what. That perception needs to change.
>Making sure that dues and membership are optional
Retard NEET spotted
Now, election of the leadership by the union members, is something I'd want to see in my own union.
>Governments serve a purpose, but shouldn't be given free power over those they benefit. Making sure that taxes and citizenship are optional forces the government to keep its focus on serving the individual citizens, rather than consolidating power at the top, like you see in so many national governments.
> National health plans serve a purpose, but shouldn't be given free power over those they benefit. Making sure that dues and membership are optional forces the plan to keep its focus on serving the individual citizens, rather than consolidating profits at the top, like you see in so many national healthcare services, unlike private ones in the US.
That logic is retarded. People are stupid and choose to freeload even when it's against their interest. Classic collective action problem.
Why is that opinion retarded?
There are differencea between a union, a company, and a government. You cannot make generalizations about how one should be treated on the basis of another. But perhaps this line of argument defeats the OP as well?
Agree.
Ideally all workers would have representation in companies above a certain size.
You have to make it mandatory or else it falls to shit due to free riding.
Union reps should always be elected.
Solidarity needs to be enforced, because most people are selfish cunts who when can't be sent to GULAG, should at least be a paying member of the union.
But that's false; early unions got started helping workers without it.
I don't see any realtion to the ongoing discussion, and am going to assume you have no clue what you're talking about, certainly not any experience with union work.
>Making sure that dues and membership are optional
That's like a rich country club with optional membership fees
Haha, what a fucking idiot. If a union can do its job without enforced solidarity, then the idea it must have enforced solidarity to function is obviously flawed to say the least. History is a lesson not to be left in the past.
It's nothing like that. For starters, nowhere is there a law saying the workers who are not in the union must benefit. Secondarily, no one would argue that just because the town the club is in gets jobs for its citizens, it must pay for the club to be there. But most of all, if we imagine what it would be like to say that all people in the area must be paying memebers of the club whether they want its benefits or not, we begin to realize how fatally flawed this analogy is.
You must not have worked much if you think there is any class consciousness left.
Works decent enough in Denmark, then they hire Poles that are not in the union, kinda falls apart there.
Here's the thing: socialists are fooling themselves if they think the proles gained consciousness from their agitation. Class consciousness will return so long as it is a struggle each man and woman must experience. When the union fights that battle for you, and its existence continues regardless of your desire to participate, then that itself is the chief mechanism by which class consciousness erodes.
Bump
Bullshit. Class consciousness eroded in the West because:
1. Living standards for the working class improved rapidly from 1940-1970/80.
2. Communism in its Soviet well known form got BTFOd
3. The big one. Mass migration in every Western country. Also globalization. You're now desperate for a job because you know your plant could move to China or a million migrants want your service sector job too.
19th century socialists decided mass migration for undermining labor. Now the left is led by rich kulak scum who only see race and not class.
Working class people can be divided on race and religion as long as natives worry about being replaced in 2-3 generations.
Your 1 is part of my point. Your 2 is not germane to my argument. Your 3 actually was the reason for the rise of class consciousness in America and other places; it is as though you think immigration is a modern anomaly.
Yet my argument is bullshit? Your move, holmes.
For 1. Rapidly rising living standards helped people buy into "a rising tide lifts all ships" ideologies.
For 2. Socialism had long been the guiding ideology of the labor movement. Even if they feared and despised the Soviet style of government, it still showed socialist government was possible and could compete with liberal democracy. The sudden collapse of the USSR and liberalization of China left the Left without a strong leverage point, arguably until 2008.
3. Migration is on a far larger scale today. By their own nations predictions, every major Western European nation will have majority non-European decended citizens by 2100 or soon after. That is a monumental shift.
Migration was not the cause of class conciseness in America. That was industrialization, which spurred migration. There are myraid examples in primary sources of factory owners employing migrant intentionally to put ethnic groups against each other and break up class solidarity.
In any event, the high tide mark of income equality, the Black/White income gap being smaller, and union membership was the decades after WWII when migration had been severely constricted. Black/White income diverged and income inequality soared right as globalization kicked off and Congress reimposed mass migration in the late 70s.
First off, thanks for actually intelligently engaging with me, making me get off my phone and onto a keyboard to type this shit out:
1. And those rising standards and false senses of unification with the elites are part and parcel with an entrenched union's inherent ability to separate the proletariat from the struggle, thus making it more difficult to see who was really fucking them.
2. Don't conflate Communism with Socialism. Also don't go thinking anything said about either movement takes away from the fact that entrenched unions alienate their members.
3. You're making the mistake of looking at raw numbers instead of percentages. Migrations in the past could be far more disruptive than modern ones; witness the Huns, the Phoenicians, the Mongols, and most incredible of all, the European migrations to the Americas.
Industrialization in America is the story in which migrant populations were used to work the factories in the urban centers of the country. Those migrants brought with them European ideas of anarchism, socialism, and communism. Just read the wiki page on the history of labor in the USA:
"For instance, in Boston in 1790, the vast majority of the 1,300 artisans in the city described themselves as "master workman". By 1815, journeymen workers without independent means of production had displaced these "masters" as the majority. By that time journeymen also outnumbered masters in New York City and Philadelphia.[9] This shift occurred as a result of large-scale transatlantic and rural-urban migration. Migration into the coastal cities created a larger population of potential laborers, which in turn allowed controllers of capital to invest in labor-intensive enterprises on a larger scale."
The anomaly of the late 40s into the 60s prosperity in America was the result of us being the only unfucked economy in a world that was starved for industrial finished goods, able to furnish jobs for a large number of immigrants from Europe.
Because Ancaps see themselves as embarrassed millionaires. They think if an ancap paradise were created, they would be part of the upper class. They don't want any pesky unions standing the way of their hypothetical profit in a hypothetical reality.
Because unions inevitably become criminalized shitholes ridden with fat Italian guys with shitty fashion tastes and a penchant for gabagool.
Allowing Italians in America was a mistake.
Took the words right out of my mouth.
Solidarity forever!
His points were all roundly answered friendo
Because they're dumb
Unions are chill and also integral to an actually morally sound landscape of businesses. Only real problems are the labor laws forcing unreasonable/unneeded standards.
Is that a thing that exists? Closest I've seen to that is employers insisting that they'll only deal with a union and apply any agreements to the workforce generally
Oh yes, both are common. For instance, my wife must pay dues to the local teacher's union whether or not she is a member, and other unions are not allowed.
Bump
>3. You're making the mistake of looking at raw numbers instead of percentages. Migrations in the past could be far more disruptive than modern ones; witness the Huns, the Phoenicians, the Mongols, and most incredible of all, the European migrations to the Americas.
I don't get what you're getting at here. Those were destructive migrations that destroyed the native civilizations.
As for percentages, the current foreign born and second generation immigrant population is right at the cusp of eclipsing the previous highs set in the late 19th centure and early 20th.
However, neither party wants to reform legal immigration. At current trend levels, 1 in 8 Americans will be foreign born (1 in 15 are now) and about a third will have at least one foreign parent or be an immigrant.
Bear in mind, according to Pew, if migration had stayed at the same levels as from the 1930s-1970, still high by most standards, our population would be around 270 million instead of 320.
...I wonder why housing is so scarce and the labor supply has been so plentiful that employers don't need to offer raises....
>The anomaly of the late 40s into the 60s prosperity in America was the result of us being the only unfucked economy in a world that was starved for industrial finished goods, able to furnish jobs for a large number of immigrants from Europe.
Only partly true. America had started to pull ahead long before then. Partly by avoiding much of WWI.
There is a stat in The Third Reich in Power that Hitler wanted to beat France for the continental power with the most automobiles per person. That goal was 1 for every 15.The UK was doing better, more than 1 auto for every 10 people.
The US, close to 1 in 3.
People don't realize because the UK navy was so big, and the occupy a lot of the map, but the US became the biggest economy in the world by at least 1890, when it's population was not hugely larger than other great powers.
The US adopted the industrial revolution better than any other nation.
It's possible I'm missing the point of your argument... but my point was those migrations were proportionally much greater in terms of percent population change. Considering especially the ratio change in the Americas from Natives to Europeans over the course of just a few hundred years or less in some locations, there's literally no way any modern migration can compete - we're talking nigh 100% replacement.
I don't know what country you're living in, but in the USA housing is scarce because buidlers forgot how to build houses people can actually afford... I have seen tons of new developments going up where every single house was a mcmansion, but I couldn't tell you the last time I saw a group of condos or ranch houses going up. Everyone wants shit to be like it was and doesn't get that it ain't gonna be like the 50s, 60s, or hell even the 90s ever again. Those moments in history have passed and it's not even really our fault.
As for the labor supply, the USA has for a long time now been moving out of labor-intensive industries and simultaneously heavily investing in automation capital. When people look only at immigrants as job takers and not job creators, they're being either ignorant or malicious, because as you can see in this literal nation of immigrants, we have done just fine creating a shitton of jobs and wealth for ourselves. Immigrants consume wealth AND generate it. Who the fuck else you gonna get to buy a new car, new house, and that shitty cellphone plan anyone with half an education knows is trash?
>gabagool
makes me laff.
I dunno, it seems like you are forgetting this giant thing called the Great Depression.
As for the time when we first attained power, it's irrelevant to my point. We reaped the fruits of our success decades late because the first half of the 20th century was basically one big FUCK YOU to prosperity. For all that, though, it was just a speedbump. We had used african slaves, chinese railroad workers, irish, itialian, and hungarian factory workers, german farmers, and many more to increase our population hugely ever since our inception. It paid off, just like how India and China's populations are paying off for them now; they're late to the game, but there's no overcoming a market 1.3 billion strong no matter how automated your 350mil nation is.