@jadagul You mention a dislike of unions in another post, but have you ever worked in a unionized workplace?
I’ve worked in both, and I can say that unions do occasionally stop companies from making incredibly boneheaded decisions, also that the most poorly run non-unionized companies I’ve worked for would have been forced to adapt or fail if a union had been in place (changing people’s benefits on the fly without telling them and that would have been a good thing). Which isn’t too say unions are a uniform good, but it’s not at all clear they are a uniform bad.
I’m in a workplace that’s trying to unionize right now, and I’m really uncomfortable with this on a lot of levels and feel like the union is really underhanded, and this has me on a bit of a hair-trigger about this right now.
I’m genuinely having a stab of panic every time I walk past the announcement of the union election in the halls.
(The visceral dislike is that I don’t like the idea that they’re going to claim to speak for me without my consent).
IIRC you’re in academia, which is slightly different, but w/r/t unions in private for-profit companies:
In a better organized world, private enterprise would not consist of organizations that are, internally speaking, feudal command economies. It’s not a very efficient or reliable way of doing business, and many countries with more productive workplace cultures (like Japan and Germany) incorporate some kind of institutionalized mechanisms of worker feedback that don’t necessarily depend on the existence of a union, but the United States doesn’t do that for peculiar historical reasons. To the same degree that one ought to vote and be politically conscious, one ought to be a member of a union. Like the individual citizen, the individual employee has very little bargaining power with the decisionmakers at the top, so protecting individual interests requires collective action. Defecting, for whatever reason, harms both the individual and one’s colleagues.
As with public elections, the solution to the problem of “these people are going to claim to speak for me even if I don’t participate in the collective decision-making processes” is to take part in the collective decision-making processes, not to throw rocks at them. For various reasons, like romanticizing an unrealistically individualistic view of how we move through society, or personally eschewing participation in big collective organizations, or disliking politics, or having an unrealistic view of our own agency in the face of large employers, we might find ourselves instinctually and aesthetically repulsed by unions, but those don’t translate into substantive arguments against their existence. The arguments for the existence of unions are roughly isomorphic to the arguments for the existence of democracy, and if we feel that there is a distinction between the moral imperative to democratic decisionmaking in the sphere of “public” enterprise and democratic decisionmaking in the sphere of “private” enterprise, well, I’d like the suggest that this is a historical distinction and not a natural or a moral one.
I mean, I democracy is a technical fix to technical problems, and it should be used as little as reasonably manageable, because it involves people speaking for other people.
I don’t know of a better solution to the exercise of political power, which can’t really not-happen and wielding it not-democratically is even worse than wielding it democratically.
But I don’t like it and one of my major social/political goals is to minimize the extent to which decisions have to be made politically and democratically, and the extent to which people have to be aware of and engaged in politics. Any time any person has to engage in political activity, that’s a fundamental social failure.
And workplace negotiations don’t have to work that way. I don’t want other people to speak for me. It’s not that I don’t want them to speak for me without me participating in the decision-making process. I don’t want them to speak for me at all. The union is only representing me if it is doing nothing at all and letting me negotiate my own contract independently of everyone else.
Basically, “romanticizing an unrealistically individualistic view of how we move through society, or personally eschewing participation in big collective organizations, or disliking politics” all sound basically correct to me. The goal is to build that society. And unions, like common political participation and deep rooted social ties, are in opposition to that.
I don’t belong to things. I’m not a part of things. I am an individual and I want to transact with other individuals. And if I don’t like the contract I’m being offered I’ll go get a different fucking job.
However, I can totally agree with this: “To the same degree that one ought to vote and be politically conscious, one ought to be a member of a union.” Because I want to set all those things to zero.
“Any time any person has to engage in political activity, that’s a fundamental social failure.“
I feel like this is isomorphic to “any time any person has to engage in market transactions that’s a fundamental social failure”?
“I don’t belong to things. I’m not a part of things. I am an individual and I want to transact with other individuals.”
I mean in most cases it’s not individuals are are going to transact with you though, the vast majority of us conduct the vast majority of our transactions with abstract corporate entities, and the ratio of transactions is deeply imbalanced in the sense that you may be one worker among thousands at a single workplace and one customer among millions at a single store, if you graphed the network of transactions “between individuals” it would reveal obvious structure which you’re deliberately choosing not to see.
I feel like this is isomorphic to “any time any person has to engage in market transactions that’s a fundamental social failure”?
I mean…yeah. In that neither is a useful observation under most circumstances, but both are entirely accurate.
(In a better society, we would all be aristocrats with all of our needs being met by armies of unliving servants, and our interactions with each other would be predicated on personal interest and will. It’s worth remembering which things are actually good-in-a-closer-to-terminal-sense and which things represent compromises with necessity.)