- Joined
- Nov 4, 2017
With this latest expensive toy, John has secured his progressive bona fides for sure!
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I will say the Optimus Prime bot is basically an advanced Robo sapien with Peter Cullen's voice, but Its pretty damn cool. If I had $700 of someone else's money to buy manchild trinkets with, I'd be in on one.
I'm really interested in how unions in america went from being seen as a useful/necessary counterpower to money hungry, useless mob-like organizations.
My lefty friends always tell me that it's because corporations spent a lot of money to make people think that but they also tell me that venezuela was ok before the CIA ruined the country.
tl;dr Is the Mob infiltrated and used natural human tendencies to get them as money laundromats while also giving capos no-show jobs to earn a little legit money.
A slightly longer version is a lot of the "real" job of the union, worker safety, is handled by OSHA. Before OSHA, a union was how employees made sure their employer was doing bare-shit minimum to keep their work places from being death traps. Once you don't need to fear death or maiming on the job, all the union offers is wage and benefits negotiations, and they are incredibly inefficient as they are cronyism top-to-bottom. Skill, experience, dedication.... none of that matters as much as how long you've been in the union.
You also have a shift away from "raw efficiency" to "sustainable employment". Once you get away from stop-watch motion study faggots and actually start focusing on employee job satisfaction, employers saw productivity rise but as importantly employee retention rise - hiring a new worker is a huge and expensive risk.
Another factor is the rise of "News 6 Investigates: Is this company owner a complete unfeeling monster who hates his workers?!"; losing a hour of productivity per worker because someone is using bathroom breaks to jerk one out is nothing compared to the PR hit you take by trying to implement shit like taking off the doors on stalls.
This boils down to employers having a less adversarial relationship with their employees. When employers aren't outright hostile to employees, the need for a union falls away.
This is the rule that proves the rule; this is why Police unions are some of the few unions growing in power and support of the members. Local governments are often very hostile to officers (even if they generally pro-police) due to a willingness to toss individual officers under the bus to get votes, and the police are very aware of this. Plus the nature of an often hazardous job, fighting for medical leaves is important; another reason Fire Department unions are also very strong.
Another thing Unions used to offer was pensions - the mobs also largely raided those, but more importantly that is handled by 401(k) and employer matching.
So a lot of the historical union's task is redundant and irrelevant. For people who complain about exploitative management, union leadership loves giving themselves raises and vacations.
Some of the interviews, the people in the warehouse were basically "Unions are a necessary evil in mining. I'm putting boxes on a shelf in A/C, I'm not in physical danger. We are already able to pressure management without regulated collective bargining and management was already listening before those yankee faggots came in screeching about unions." to straight up "Fuck unions, I got fucked so hard at the mill because all they care about is seniority and collecting dues.
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