‘Your Turn’: United Auto Workers Launches Campaign to Unionize Tesla::After the UAW won contracts with the Big Three, it’s seeking to unionize 150,000 workers across a dozen companies including Tesla.
‘Your Turn’: United Auto Workers Launches Campaign to Unionize Tesla::After the UAW won contracts with the Big Three, it’s seeking to unionize 150,000 workers across a dozen companies including Tesla.
This is a very exciting time. I’ve been a union guy for 25 years and I will go to my grave not understanding the fierce resistance to unions by my X gen and the boomers. When they would say unions were bad, I’d say let’s make ours amazing and… they just refused.
I never thought I would see the resurgence of American labor unions. This is an absolute joy to see.
Depending on where you lived you were plied with anti-union rhetoric. I remember back in the '80s and working at a department store and they had us watch “training” videos about how we were a big family and how unions broke up that family and made us adversaries. I thought it was a bunch of bull, but I’m sure there were plenty of folks that bought into it.
They don’t understand or see themselves as workers because of things like this, they see themselves as individuals who will succeed if they just try their best and be their most “authentic” selves or whatever BS they use. Most important message they try to send is your position in the economic system is about you as an individual and not because of your class or relation to capital.
I’ve been in one union and it was a corrupt joke. That said, it was still the best unskilled job I’ve had by a large margin.
McCarthyism and the decades of fear mongering and misinformation about communism and red scare tricked generations of Americans into thinking that the most patriotic thing you could do is die in your work boots for minimum wage.
Certain specific professions like IT, and its mercenary culture, don’t fit well with the collective bargaining model. For many other professions/careers, a union can be a great tool for workers.
I’ve never been in a union, but there was an era where individuality and meritocratic means seemed like the pathway to unlimited success but this doesn’t really map over to blue collar work. Unions were not likely to help because they batch outstanding workers at the same level as the lowest performers on the team.
But unions work a bit like an alternative to minimum wage. All the boats rise with the tide, so if the UAW scores big with some mfgrs, other auto workers are going to want a piece of that too or they’ll switch.
This can backfire though because a lot of jobs can still be automated if they aren’t economically feasible.
In my union good workers get paid above scale or they get promoted or they move to a different company that will pay them above scale. Also, people have reputations and if you’re a complete fuckup of an employee, you will either be fired or laid off and eventually you’ll find yourself on the “available for work” list down at the hall, but never getting hired because nobody wants to put up with your bullshit. You will say that it’s a kind of informal blacklisting, which is true, but I’m in the union too and they can’t make me hire people I know I don’t want.