Strong unions make strong businesses.
Now let's pass some union reform laws and get rid of "right to work" on the federal level.
this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2023
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Unions are getting paid because corporations have gigantic piles of cash lying around right now (because of record profits), and they were hoping to just keep it for themselves somehow
It’s not enough. Not until everyone is paid what they’re actually worth will it ever be enough.
Now imagine if we had some way to send people that could represent our needs to the government. If only we could house such a group of people near the seat of government so that they could petition our needs in the form of ... I don't know let's call it a bill of writ and law.
If only we could have something like that, too.
Not nearly enough. We need a lot more participation. That's gonna help with the money in politics problem too. This is the solution used the last time inequality was at this level and it worked for a while.
I guess I should expect headlines in the next year that blame more inflation on union workers for getting big raises...
Love it. Unions got us to where we are, and we are thankful for them.
Strikes work.
Maybe I'm becoming too cynical, but the raises these unions have been settling on don't really cover inflation over the periods where they received no increase.
These articles just feel like the media wings of these megacorps are trying to stroke our egos. "Yes, so much bargaining power!"
I can't find the article I'm thinking of where someone used a bunch of privately sourced data to peg the average annual inflation at 7%, but this article shows how economists don't even agree on what metrics to measure for calculating inflation.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/07/consumerpriceindex.asp
Wages have kept up with inflation though, often exceeding it.
Here a link for the minimum wage.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1065466/real-nominal-value-minimum-wage-us/
The real problem is that wages have not tracked productivity growth. But unions will not be able to solve that, since a lot of workers haven't actually gotten more productive.
Most productivity improvements are capital intensive investments in technology. You won't be able to capture much of those gains through labour bargaining.
To really improve the economic standing of workers, we must distribute non-housing capital more equally among the whole population.
Start taxing large capitals and put things like IRA's and 401K's on steroids to grow the capital of normal people.
Actually, the graph you linked to shows a negative relationship between inflation and wages every single year since 1970. The minimum wage has effectively gone down due to inflation.
It does not.
2000 and 2010 directly contradict your statement.
From the caption of that graph.
Adding to this with a post I found on wallstreetbets.
https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/15uo06v/inflation_data_has_always_been_a_lie/
Not exactly a reputable source, but the OP does go through several key indicators and shows their math (with screenshots of a calculator, lol)
...cept teachers. 🤬
Teachers should make at least 90K
An organized workforce is a workforce that will fight fascism.
The most important metric, membership, doesnt seem to be doing so hot.
It’s nice to celebrate the wins this year, but I think there were just as many warning bells.
UAW, WGA, and SAG got thrown their bones, sure, but we also watched those huge multinational companies gleefully ignore them for huge spans of time. These massive companies can just fall back on their international components, knowing the company can go on indefinitely without them, and wait for the union to run out of money. Then when the union members are desperate, the company finally comes to the table with a fraction of what the union wanted at the start.
This years events showed pretty clearly that strikes are not (always) the existential threat to the business that made organized labor so powerful in the past. I hope the movement is hearing that warning bell.
Remember that the raises are almost always barely playing catch-up with contemporaries. I've not seen a case where a union member of staff is making even the average pay for a given job function.
Millions got $10-$99 raises? Whoopty doo, but what does it all mean Basil?