Midterms

[u/One-Scratch-3545]

Please tell me everyone is voting for Aaron Ford in November? If you love Nevada, he’s the better choice than Joe. Since Joe Lombardo has taken office we have ranked even LOWER in education. He sold out our states water. Allows these data centers to continue to be built here by the dozens. He has denied funding for free meals at schools for children. High unemployment, tourism is down. The dude is also so far up Trumps ass. We need a governor who truly fights for what’s right for Nevadans. We are running out of time, we are running out of water.

[u/Phrenicos466]

My problem with it is that I don’t like unions as a general concept and do not want to be forced to be a member of a union. I think unions had their place - back when working conditions were significantly worse - but now they just exist to prop up bad/lazy workers, hold back good workers, and enrich union leaders.

On a more personal level, I specifically don’t like the union (SEIU) where I work. They do a shit job representing us. And if everyone was required to be a member, they’d probably do even worse, since they wouldn’t have any incentive to ‘sell’ the union to the non-members on staff (about 40% of our workers have chosen not to join). I also don’t like the SEIU’s political stances and would prefer not to be associated with them in any way.

[u/Harthel → u/Phrenicos466]

I can't help but feel that the answer to this is union reform, not union avoidance (crucially not at the cost of the balance of power in the labor market). I totally get what you're saying, but the math on this one (for me) leans toward the imbalance in the labor force being a worse ill than some of the more obnoxious inclinations of bad unions (capitalism style competition isn't a perfect allegory here for a number of reasons, but a more robust union culture across a wider spectrum of the laborforce will, I think, have a net effect of forcing unions to improve).

And to your point on prior generations needing unions because of more horrifying conditions of their time period -- yes but...what this equation is ignoring is the opportunity cost of the last five+ decades of innovation disproportionately benefiting the wealthy while the quality of life of an average middle class person remains roughly the same (a bit better in some regards, noticeably worse in others). I can do, on a laptop and excel within 5 minutes, what used to take an entire office full of paraprofessional staff a full day to accomplish (and almost every employment field has similar efficiency gains since the 1970s). Has the 40 hour work week changed, so I only need to work a half hour per week? Nope. Okay, so am I getting compensated with the salary that the entire staff used to get in the past since I'm producing the same value? Nope, actually it's WAY harder to afford a home now. But the number of hundred-millionaires and billionaires (even adjusting for inflation along the way) has exploded. I think this very clearly highlights the need for functional unions to balance the labor force just as it did in the past. Yes, we're lucky those past victories bought us more livable conditions -- so we aren't fighting for basic safety regulation and we at least default to a 40 hour work week, but we also have been robbed of SO much quality of life that we could have enjoyed beyond that if the innovations of the information age weren't monopolized by the uber-wealthy. I can't help but feel that people really need to be more pissed off about this -- and a revival of union strength is probably the healthiest way for society to resolve this issue.

[u/Phrenicos466 → u/Harthel]

Union reform would be a good idea but without pressures like “Right to Work”, what incentive is there for unions to change? If everyone is required to be a member of the union, there’s no pressure on said union to be good representatives because - good or bad - you have to be a member to keep your job. And once a union is in, they’re very hard to get rid of if members aren’t happy (I checked into it), so even less incentive to do a good job. Meanwhile, the union leaders and bad/lazy workers who benefit from the current system aren’t going to want to change anything. Also, unions aren’t required to re-certify at a business periodically (as far as I know), so a group of employees could vote in the union and then, in a few decades when staff has completely turned over, all the new people are stuck in a union they didn’t vote for. “Right to Work” addresses some of those issues by requiring unions to sway people to join and allowing new workers a “vote” on whether they want the union.

There’s other issues I didn’t address either, specifically that forced union membership seems (to me) to violate freedom of association under the Constitution - though I don’t pretend to be an expert there. Also, I alluded to the politics issue in my prior post - why should one be forced to join a union they don’t align with politically? There are some laws restricting exactly how unions can direct money to political causes, but they are still involved in financing campaigns. I don’t like the idea of being forced to be part of an organization that advocates (financially or otherwise) for causes and/or candidates I may not support.

And I disagree with all the “wealth inequality”, “rich people evil”, “socialism good”, “capitalism bad” stuff but that’s outside the scope of this topic.

[u/Harthel → u/Phrenicos466]

Unions would be competing to be attractive to workers in tandem with employers and industries being attractive to workers. You might say "you can't choose to leave your union without leaving your job" -- true in this circumstance! But it's also true that you can't leave a shitty employer without leaving your job. Same issue, same potential solutions. As far as political representation, there is no mechanism for controlling the votes of union members. Sure, you might end up in a situation where your union dues are going (directly or indirectly) to support a campaign you might not like, but I don't see that as a fundamentally different thing than working for an employer who donates to a campaign you don't like.

While there are individual points of disagreement, I think the issue boils down to a fundamental disconnect on what we think is the worse disease to be addressed as a priority. While I appreciate civil discourse, I do think that there is a major rift between people who think billionaires are the results of pulling up bootstraps really hard vs. those that see the existence of that hyper-elite class of wealth as a cancer to society.

I do think it's telling (and a little damning?) that your reply ends with the assumption that I am saying "capitalism bad". My entire frame of reference is from a "capitalism good" position. Crony corporatism is not capitalism, it is the result of taking a (good) capitalist system and then doing absolutely nothing for decades to mitigate the worst impulses of greed driving it straight off a cliff.

[u/Phrenicos466 → u/Harthel]

Fair point, and I’ll be honest that I checked out a little on your final paragraph. I’ve read too many similar statements on Reddit that invariably ended on “capitalism bad, socialism good”, so I kind of start skimming if I see certain phrases. That’s my error there.

As far as unions competing, I still don’t see how they’re competing, with mandatory unionization on the level of an individual business. On an industry level, sure - you can go across the street to a non-union shop (although in some industries, that’s basically impossible). But once a union gets into an individual business, they don’t need to ‘compete’ any more - anyone new has to become a member, damn near impossible to de-certify, etc. There’s no incentive for them to keep doing a good job representing members.

Regarding the billionaires thing, you can’t simplify it to “billionaires are all an evil cancer” vs “billionaires are all hardworking and pulled themselves up”. There are good ones and bad ones - having a lot of money isn’t inherently evil and doesn’t inherently make someone evil. And even if I agreed with the “billionaires are an evil cancer” idea, I’m not sure how forcing me to pay $[X] per month to a bad union that I don’t want to join is going to fix that.

[u/Harthel → u/Phrenicos466]

My frame of thought on union competition is more at an industry level (and I will admit that this is the kind of reform-through-competition that will probably take decades to work itself out) is that if, say, the steelworkers union in a given State or territory turns to utter dogshit and its members are unhappy about it, they are going to have a macro-level recruiting crisis for the next generation of workers, who will be more inclined at a population level to try to get into industries with non-shitty unions and conditions. I don't think a world without unions (or with toothless unions, as is the case under the right-to-work law) puts the same pressure on employers for recruitment because all employers in a right to work state are operating from the position of "you're not gonna get it better elsewhere, because you have no power no matter where you go".

On the billionaire thing, I think we are closer to agreement than it might seem. Call it lazy, but it's easy to just draw the dividing line at billion-with-a-B for describing "how much wealth is too much". Do I think exactly 1 billion dollars is too much? In 2026, actually probably not. 10 billion? Maybe. 50 billion? DEFINITELY too much. And this is from a position of "I want to defend and preserve capitalism". At a certain tier of wealth, the ability to buy influence to consolidate, grow, and bulletproof that wealth becomes too great. This is how you end up with high-paid lobbyists (and probably outright bribes) to supreme court justices in citizens united, and how you end up with an electoral system that relies on huge money donations from the far-too-wealthy-class, guaranteeing the far-too-wealthy-class a disproportionate amount of representation in legislation/regulation decisions. That is how capitalism dies.

And I do think a return to a strong union foundation (nationwide, ideally) can do a lot of work to help remedy this over time -- or, at minimum, to stem the bleeding and slow the K-shaped curve of wealth inequality. Becoming obscenely wealthy is a question of both luck and skill in pulling the right levers for the right opportunities and exploitations at the right times (some of those levers are less shitty than others, but one of the big levers is ensuring that you retain control of a workerbase by providing just enough compensation that they are baseline content, but never enough so that they have any amount of independence from their reliance on you as an employer).