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Comment by 0xcde4c3db | Hacker News Reader

That's totally unsurprising to hear. Wal-Mart apparently defaults to portraying unions as pure evil. I don't know what the current procedure is like, but they used to make new hires watch laughably biased "educational" videos about unions. I don't remember the contents in detail, just that they roughly reminded me of '80s anti-drug PSAs/specials, with union organizers essentially taking the place of the "drug pusher" who wants to profit by ruining your life. Wal-Mart management, of course, takes the place of the wise parent/guardian who has your best interests at heart.

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It works, too. In the popular media, unions have been so thoroughly demonized for several decades.

Lots of middle-aged folks now will have grown up with their only idea of the union as being the lazy teamster who does nothing all day except file grievances, or the fabled electrician who won't plug in your power cord at a trade show because it's someone else's job.

And the kinds of people who're going in for these jobs at Walmart probably aren't the most educated to begin with, so watching a video that confirms the biases they've picked up from popular media, well, that's probably a pretty effective tactic on Walmart's part.

This is all not to say that unions in the US are blameless. They could surely learn a lot from the way unions operate throughout Europe.

There's been corruption, greed, and mismanagement in the big unions, just like every big organization (especially big American organizations; something in our cultural DNA seems to make us prone to graft), but us workers still absolutely need them or something like them to keep up the good fight.

I'm in my late 30s. My image of unions is an amalgam of my uncle who got paid well for his union job and the guy I knew a decade ago who bragged about intentionally disrupting a UAW production line.

(and of course other stuff, but I've seen both ends of it. I also don't give the UAW a lot of credit for tiering their recent agreements: http://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/general-moto... It's almost literally "got mine".)

In fact WalMart's European arm, ASDA, is heavily unionised and management have a love / hate relationship with it but on the whole put up with it. At one point ASDA management tried to induce workers to waive their right to collective bargaining in return for a pay rise; a court found that unlawful and fined the company and made them compensate the affected workers £2,500.

So they have largely buried the hatchet but it is the only place in the world that WalMart tolerates unions.

"Lots of middle-aged folks now will have grown up with their only idea of the union as being the lazy teamster who does nothing all day except file grievances, or the fabled electrician who won't plug in your power cord at a trade show because it's someone else's job."

Or have had the actual experience of not being allowed to plug in your own electrical cord at a trade show and blaming in on the union - which is probably right. I'm not saying unions are all bad but in the US ones don't have a good track record.

When the AFL-CIO asks for an exemption to the $15 minimum wage it doesn't help their image. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/12/los-angeles-...

Yeah, I dunno. I've done a ton of trade shows and never had that experience. There's the power strip, go nuts, that's how it's always been for me.

But I've heard about that rigid union electrician since I was a teenager (and wandered, starry-eyed, around my first trade show). 20+ years later, the story never matched up with reality for me.

But yeah, American unions often have a lousy track record. Better than nothing, though. I wish they'd make a comeback.

> Or have had the actual experience of not being allowed to plug in your own electrical cord at a trade show and blaming in on the union - which is probably right. I'm not saying unions are all bad but in the US ones don't have a good track record.

While in grad school, the heater in our lab was out during a cold-ass New York winter. We put in work requests for weeks, and no repairs were ever made. A fellow grad student finally got fed up, looked up the plans to the heater online, and figured out how to fix it on his own. Months later (it is spring time now) someone from facilities shows up, goes into a fit that someone non-union fixed the heater, and the fellow grad student got into some shit from the department and the deans office. Yes, this is anecdotal, but negative interactions with unions are a real thing.

Edit: Also, the most vocal opponent of the smoking ban on campus was from one of the service worker unions.

There are very real safety/regulatory/liability issues with having random grad students performing electric repairs. My guess is that this is the actual problem from the facility manager's perspective, and you (or someone in your chain of communication) are misattributing it to a union problem.

Of course, it's inexcusable for repair work to take so long.

The Port of Portland (Oregon) lost container service due in no small part to this exact type of fracas between unions. There was a work slowdown over who is allowed to plug and unplug refrigerated units. This slowdown eventually led to large container ships no longer calling the port. The economic impact that this has had on the local economy is huge. Now small businesses and farms need to truck or train their goods to Seattle/Tacoma, which is a large cost for low margin goods (such as hay).

http://www.oregonlive.com/business/index.ssf/2015/02/what_th...

These are real people hurting due to the so-called fabled union demonizations.

That article tells us that the plug/unplug stuff was a consequence of a bunch of other stuff (like mismanagement, working without a union contract, etc).

According to that article, the problems didn't begin with the who's-allowed-to-plug/unplug. They were structural and systemic, and had to do with the port being mismanaged as much as the unions agitating for their workers.

So, I'm not entirely sure why you're saying it's about plugging and unplugging refrigeration units.

But, also interestingly, they lost Hanjin, and a mere year later, Hanjin's bankrupt. There was a lot of press a few months ago about container ships being stranded, etc.

Right, Hanjin was the company whose exit prompted this article, but the Port has since also lost Hapag-Lloyd and a small company as well. Now there are zero container ships calling Portland.

Yes, it was an amalgamation of things. Management was not blameless but neither were the unions. And now, thousands of businesses are hurt. The work slowdown was a major contributing factor, and whether or not the slowdown was morally justified is outside the scope of this argument. The slowdown had a causal relationship with losing container service to Portland.

More recent article: http://www.wsj.com/articles/port-of-portland-loses-last-cont...

I think the parent comment was pointing out that the foxbusiness article was pretty blatant plagiarism -- in fact, if you go through the two articles side-by-side, you can see that the foxbusiness article is pretty much taken verbatim, albeit some slight restructuring (that IMO harms the overall flow of the piece).

One point, though, although I'm not sure how to interpret this, is that the original author (Nassauer) is linked at the bottom of the foxbusiness piece.

The WSJ is owned by News Corp, the same company that owns Fox News. So this is probably not plagarizing, just a company printing an article in their various holdings.

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