The only question is, does the employee collective you belong to have any collective bargaining ability or not?
For example, the dev group could be treated differently than ops than sales than content than mechanical. And you can have different groups even within devs for example. So being able to choose as an employee before joining or through career is important to me.
I have never looked at a union’s value proposition for me and chose to join. Either through not joining a firm, or through not joining an optional union. But I’m a programmer-type and likely others will feel differently based on their conditions and principles.
I think I wouldn’t feel too bad if I was in a position and co-workers joined a union, but I didn’t. But I would feel kind of scabish if I joined a majority union org and didn’t join the union.
Kind of like if you live in a house and your neighbors form an HOA and you choose not to join. I wouldn’t feel bad at all, as I bought the house with the expectation of no HOA.
But what if I don't like the union's goals or the way it tries to achieve those goals? Not joining them isn't 'scabbing' it's standing up for my own principles.
People talk about unions as if they're some kind of benign force for unquestioned good. In your mind they're simply 'fighting for better standards' without any qualification of what they think those better standards are, how they're fighting to get them, what their end-state is, what other political campaigns unrelated to the job they support, and so on.
The the UK most unions aggressively support one of our main political parties. If you don't want to support that political party then don't join any union because your money will be going to them!
It's not 'scabbing' to stand up to not join a union.
Literally the definition of a scab.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/scab definition 3b.
Of course there certainly are people in unions who do not support Labour, but the historical connection is there because the Labour parties were largely formed as an extension of the work started in and around the unions.
All arguments seem to circle back to a vague idea of 'but they represent you', for both unions and Labour. I'm sure that's what they think they're doing, but the Conservatives and the Greens also offer to 'represent' me. It's not convincing.
They do, or they just don't join a union at all.
Wasn't this conversation about why people might not be to keen to join unions?
If the unions don't care about membership numbers then there's no issue. If they want to increase their membership numbers then aligning themselves to, and worse than that actively funding, one party, that many people don't support, will be an issue that makes that harder.
It's not just the Greens - people who could be interested in joining a union but wouldn't want to fund Labour might include Socialists, Communists, Liberal Democrats, yes Conservatives as well (Conservative Workers & Trade Unionists for example), UKIP, and so on.
In the US union membership is a big issue. In the UK not so much. The unions do certainly care about membership, but they also care about actually having influence over the issues that matters to their members, as that's what they're for. At some point you need to choose if it's more important to represent everyone, or represent those who do join you well.
As it stands there's very little indication it'd be worth it for most UK unions to lose the influence they have in Labour. Consider that trade union support for Corbyn was greater than in Labours regular membership, for example - in other words, most of the unions have tended to lean to the left of Labour, not towards any of the other UK parties. Labour leaning UKIP members have largely returned to the fold, after the Brexit vote (and many places contributed to Labours result in the 2017 election). The far left have either embraced Labour again under Corbyn or at least accept it as an acceptable choice. Even TUSC and CPGB recommended people vote Labour most places.
This is a "problem" that mostly seem to be a problem to people who are usually not themselves unionised or interested in being unionised but who dislike the additional support it brings to Labour.
Put another way: If a substantial number of unionised people in the UK wanted unions affiliated with other parties, they can form them, or someone would form them and people would join. The Tories have tried at least twice (with CWTU that you mentioned being the latest incarnation) - it hasn't worked.
Instead what's happened after Corbyn is that unions that severed links with Labour during Blair has re-affiliated (most notably the Fire Brigades Union). RMT has not reaffiliated, but instead supports TUSC, to the left of Labour, but endorsed Corbyn in the Labour leadership elections. There are still other unaffiliated union options as well, as well as options to reserve yourself against affiliation in most unions affiliated to Labour (which means your money doesn't go to Labour and you don't get a vote in Labour leadership elections), so this is an artificial concern.
But if anything, UK unions have consistently been to the left of mainstream UK politics, even when some of their members end up voting for parties actively opposed to the same interests they've voted for when electing their union membership.
The proportion of members that reserve themselves against affiliation with Labour has typically also been low.
> Conservative Workers & Trade Unionists
... is a group set up by the Tory party as an attempt at trying to win over union support from Labour, that has totally failed at getting any traction, because it was started from the top with basically no bottom-up support. It was presented in 2015 as a major thing, and then quietly shoved under the carpet when they didn't manage to get anywhere.
One thing is conspicuously absent from their gallery page [1] for instance: More than a handful actual workers and regular members, as opposed to Tory party staffers, MPs, MSPs, MEPs and Lords. If they can't muster a room full of actual workers to front a "union", that say it all.
If they succeed at organising workers that feel unrepresented by Labour-affiliated unions in sufficient numbers to actually influence Tory policy, then great. But so far it has been a PR stunt from the Tory party.
To put it in other terms: The largest Tory led "union" was Conservative Trade Unionists (now "Conservatives at Work"), which at it's peak had at most a few tens of thousands of members, at a time when there were more than 10m unionised workers in the UK. It's been in steady decline since.
I'm thinking more about non-traditional potential unions. Like if people seriously tried to set up a computer scientist union and tried to unionise a large proportion of workers at white-collar places like Google in the UK, I would imagine that some of the push-back they would get would be, for example Liberal Democrat voters not wanting to pay for Labour election campaigns.
Maybe a computer scientist union could simply choose not to be associated with Labour, then.
1) Does your union represent you as talent or just by your seniority?
2) How much more (or less if you're talented) do you make now because you're unionized?
3) How much are you forced to PAY to the union for the privilege of having your job?
The right way to think of a union is as a force with similar (but radically reduced) power over your work conditions, but one with different incentives and for which you have some (depending on how healthy the union is) representation.
Unions can obviously be a bad thing! But the idea that they're intrinsically coercive is a little overwrought. All of employment is coercive; the median union simply peels off some of the coercive forces that apply to your job and hands them to the employees as a collective to manage.
I have and my experience was that you will never get paid what you’re worth - if you’re talented.
So if you want to argue that people with less talent can make more money with unions, I would agree... in the short run.
Eventually talent will seek other means and leave the unionized industries. The brain drain will have two negative results, reduced overall productivity and a union demanding more and more for its members who produce less and less.
Ultimately, the company produces worse product and recieves less revenue. Less money to pay the hungry union members who demand even more.
Finally the company says fuck this and moves its production to another country where people will work harder for less.
The whole thing will be blamed on corporate greed and will be used as a rallying call to socialism. ‘Cause that’ll fix it.
I have and my experience was that you will never get paid what you're worth --- unless you're ruthless and prioritize gaming review systems over working with your team.
So if you want to argue that people who work exclusively to maximize their short-term outcomes without developing skills or, for that matter, any actual software can make more money without unions, I would agree... in the short run.
Am I fairly characterizing corporate jobs? About as fairly as you're characterizing collective bargaining, is what I think.
I’ve only ever had one union job (at a young age) and that told me everything I need to know about unions.
Ultimately if you’re not getting paid what you’re worth, that’s on you. Or you’re wrong about what you’re worth.
I guess our difference is that I’d rather myself to blame for poor negotiating than some union boss, making twice what I make, telling me what I’ll be getting with no ability to negotiate.
So mock my limited, yet actual, experience while you arm chair philosophize about how many people unions have helped in your imagination.