kenberg, on 2017-January-03, 14:12, said:
In the 1950s, GMC wanted cars built, the UAW wanted decent wages and working conditions. Even this simple model went awry first when the Volkswagens hit and then much more so later on. But it was a fairly straightforward arrangement of adversaries. Winston mentioned police unions and firefighters. This is already more complicated but at least we can assume that nearly everyone wants fire protection and police protection. With the schools it is tougher yet. Perhaps most people agree that educating our children is important, but for many people this is an abstract obligation. They don't have kids, or their kids are grown, or they have kids but are planning on sending them to a private school, etc. Through their vote, they influence what happens. Also, there is far from universal agreement about what's important in education. When I was in high school,
Paul Rosenbloom gave free Saturday lectures in mathematics to those of us who were interested. This was my first encounter with that level of brilliance and it was very useful to me. Of course this did not do much for the kid thinking of dropping out of school.
Give us five dollars an hour, a forty hour workweek, time and a half on Saturdays and the we will put the pistons correctly into the cylinders and get the valves attached to (or rather correctly placed for) the camshaft. That sort of negotiation was straightforward. With education it is much less so.
You use an interesting reference. Afaik, unions have a management role in VW, including the right to have seats on the Board of Directors. This is common in large companies. Altho technically, workers have two ways of being involved: unions and workers councils, which co-exist.
One of the main problems with unions in the US, Canada, and the UK, in terms of the private sector, is the us v them attitude. Now, that isn't just because of the unions: it takes both sides to create an adversarial relationship. That's why co-opting the workforce into ownership/management seems like such a powerful approach.
This approach would not seem to translate well into public sector unions.
Police, firefighters, paramedics are special cases, imo, in that they routinely get involved in highly stressful situations. They deserve special consideration, especially since it would seem ill-advised to allow them to go on strike!
Teachers are another special case, imo, since they are or should be regarded as an investment in the future of society. My impression is that teachers are grossly undervalued in the US. The salary scale in most places is miserly, and this cannot help but be a disincentive to many who might otherwise make excellent teachers. The reasons for this are surely many. The role of religion in American life seems to be a major factor, since it is generally known that a reality-based education tends to lessen religious conviction....remember Santorum's proud claim that he went to college and remained a fundamentalist despite doing so?
Btw, anyone who thinks unions are a bad idea is either a person utterly lacking in empathy or someone ignorant of relatively recent history....say the late 1800's into the mid 1930's. Are unions ideal? I don't think so, but imagine any industrial or post-industrial society in which the wealthy can dictate working conditions and pay without regard to collective action by the workers.
Even in sectors or subsets where unions do not exist, the fact that unions exist elsewhere influences compensation, benefits, and working conditions.
In my firm, for example, we have no union. However, the Provincial Government is a major employer of clerical workers. The government is unionized, with a strong union. I guarantee you that firms such as ours would likely be paying less to our staff were the union rates over at the government not what they are. The same is true in the construction industry, where the rates negotiated with the large, unionized, employers trickle down to the non-union shops, who need to be competitive (at least when times are good) or risk losing their good workers.
As for the closed shop: it has its downsides, but I agree with Richard that the alternatives are designed to destroy unions, not to preserve individual rights. Unions depend on being able to mobilize the workforce to pressure the employer. This includes such things as having funding to pay a modest amount in strike pay in some cases, to prevent the employer's usual economic clout from prevailing. This is difficult to do if employees perceive that they can get a free ride by staying out of the union.
The idea that forcing someone to be part of a union against their wishes is wrong falls flat once we realize that in any civilized society citizens are required to comply with many majority decisions despite finding them to be antithetical to their values. Indeed, a lot of Americans are going to be finding out over the next four years, in a very real way, that they are compelled to abide by decisions made by a minority of voters.
'one of the great markers of the advance of human kindness is the howls you will hear from the Men of God' Johann Hari
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) is another thing entirely and the answer probably depends on the political biases of the respondent. It is perfectly possible to think that neither has any great concern for protecting US interests. I could naturally ask the same question back - who do you think is most concerned about protecting US interests, Britney Spears or Justin Bieber?
