Kinja reply list

Read More
Jerry-NetherlandHamilton Nolan
6/10/15 2:13pm
This was once taught in elementary schools (right after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire) and an understood fact. Now, via NCLB and the general dismissiveness towards labor history (and of Social Studies/History/Civics in general, mainly by the powerful TX Bd of Ed textbook committee), this sort of info has been systematically deleted from the American zeitgeist.
Reply
- Read More
  PlantinMoretusJerry-Netherland
  6/10/15 2:20pm
  I know union members who are anti-union. That’s how effective the propaganda has been.
  Reply
- Read More
  GameBuff2Jerry-Netherland
  6/10/15 2:33pm
  Republicans regularly re-write history to suit their purposes. People like Ted Cruz who now insists JFK would be a Republican today. Hell, Ronald Reagan wouldn’t be considered a Republican by the party today let alone a liberal like JFK.
  Reply
Read More
festivusaziliHamilton Nolan
6/10/15 2:17pm
Unions need to get better at PR. I was genuinely surprised by the number of commenters that seemed angry at Gawker’s writers for voting to unionize. Not just disagreeing with the choice; actually angry that a group of people would decide to negotiate as a bloc.

If the batch of commies reading HamNo articles is that anti-union, I don’t imagine the poulace as a whole is further left.
Reply
- Read More
  Dolemitefestivusazili
  6/10/15 2:25pm
  I’ll never understand it myself. Americans seem content to wallow in misery, and if they see teachers or auto workers making good money, they scream in outrage and declare unions as evil and they want the teachers and autoworkers drug down to make the same peanuts the rest of us are making. Why not argue that you should be making the $60K they are making? It’s 2015. Minimum wage should probably be around $12-$15 an hour by now, and people that are making 25-35k *should* be making that 50-70k that seems like a fortune to some of us. How is it that 30k (in my area) was “good money” back in 1990, and 25 years later, 30k is still “good money”, because wages have remained flat for 25 years?
  Reply
- Read More
  Nemesis0999festivusazili
  6/10/15 2:26pm
  I think part of the issue is that many people don’t like someone else getting ahead. I’ve seen this time and time again where someone gets promoted and they are upset about that rather than congratulating them and working to get promoted themselves. I think part of this is the keeping up with the "Jones'" mentality.
  Reply
Read More
HiMyNameIsJayAgainHamilton Nolan
6/10/15 2:18pm
I’ve heard the CEO of my company say many times that they “fear unions more than our competitors.”

Meanwhile, our unionized competitors are killing the game.
Reply
- Read More
  Emerald D.V.HiMyNameIsJayAgain
  6/10/15 2:28pm
  The inflation of his paycheck at the expense of the people doing the real work fears unions more than the competitors.
  Reply
- Read More
  SlickWillieHiMyNameIsJayAgain
  6/10/15 2:29pm
  haha I support our sales organization with (among other things) proposals, and the only difference in the proposal if a client has unionized employees is one fucking paragraph that I keep in or take out if they don’t have unions (always red states, obviously).
  
  Oh, and it just says something about how we work with a bunch of unions in (insert civilized blue state here) and it won’t be an issue, blah blah.
  Reply
Read More
Meander061Hamilton Nolan
6/10/15 2:10pm
In before the American Plutocrat Apologists show up. Defending the wealthy from bloggers and comedians.
Reply
- Read More
  newcellphoneburnerMeander061
  6/10/15 2:18pm
  Without rich people, there would be no jobs. Also, there would be no children hunting parties at castles in the Swiss Alps.
  Reply
- Read More
  blameitonthecroutons goodbye tourMeander061
  6/10/15 2:22pm
  Hold on I think I can do it!
  
  BLUE COLLAR WORKERS ALWAYS DEFRAUD WORKERS COMP
  
  NOT EVERYONE DESERVES A LIVING WAGE FOR THEIR JOB
  
  THE ONLY PEOPLE WHO DESERVE WHAT THEY GET ARE SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE AND YOU’RE JUST JEALOUS
  
  MY DAD WORKED IN A UNION AND THERE WERE A FEW BAD APPLES. ALL UNIONS ARE BAD!
  
  UNIONS HAVE OUTLASTED THEIR USEFULNESS BECAUSE BOSSES ARE MORE COMPASSIONATE THAN BEFORE
  
  WORKERS SHOULD BE THANKFUL FOR HAVING A JOB
  
  NO ONE DESERVES HANDOUTS OR TO COMPLAIN ABOUT ANYTHING
  
  Did I get it?
  Reply
Read More
Pie o myHamilton Nolan
6/10/15 2:25pm
I’m a manager on the bottom of the pay scale that was promoted from an administrative position. Who do I start talking to about organizing? Are managers exempt? Am I the bad guy?

I see this contrast every day. About 30% of my department is unionized and makes over double what I make base only, and the rest of the department in a different trade that isn’t unionized and makes beans. The union group does 7 year apprenticeship and comes with all their certifications they need. The non union workers couldn’t give two shits about getting certifications even though we pay for the training and testing. Can’t say I blame them a lot of the time.

I’d love to go back to administrative work but they are outsourcing that at my company to call centers (in the USA for now).
Reply
- Read More
  Hamilton NolanPie o my
  6/10/15 2:47pm
  I don’t know how your company is organized but talk to a union organizer and ask. If you can’t join one union, try joining another.
  Reply
- Read More
  Rev Les CrowleyPie o my
  6/10/15 4:28pm
  If your question is “why aren’t there white-collar unions (apart from government/academia)“ I’d like to know the answer too.
  Reply
Read More
OneViewHere3Hamilton Nolan
6/10/15 2:34pm
I think you need to make a distinction between public unions and civil service unions. There are a LOT of overpaid coddled civil service union employee’s out there that treat taxpayer money as an endless trough from which to feed....
Reply
- Read More
  Meander061OneViewHere3
  6/10/15 2:55pm
  Not really, no. That’s another anti-union lie. Public unions include first responders, like police and firemen.
  Reply
- Read More
  cahawbanOneViewHere3
  6/10/15 3:04pm
  OMG my dad is apparently on Gawker now
  Reply
Read More
Don'tPokeTheWhereHamilton Nolan
6/10/15 2:13pm
Except when the unions demand exemption from minimum wage laws right?
Reply
- Read More
  MisterPigginsDon'tPokeTheWhere
  6/10/15 10:12pm
  Because unions would demand...minimum wage? What? I think they usually try to get more than that.
  Reply
Read More
Sean BrodyHamilton Nolan
6/10/15 2:23pm
If it weren’t for unions, my buddy wouldn’t own a boat. And I’d be sitting in a bar this Sunday drinking a beer instead of out in the harbor doing that.

I think we can agree that unions are a good thing, for me.
Reply
- Read More
  VectoriousSean Brody
  6/10/15 2:45pm
  Is your buddy looking for more friends? I'd like to put in an application.
  Reply
Read More
TRUMP DELENDUS EST (fka Chatham Harrison)Hamilton Nolan
6/10/15 2:36pm
Every problem America has with unions can be traced back to business. If business had chosen to work with unions, unions wouldn’t be so adversarial. They wouldn’t be so defensive, and they wouldn’t so opaque and secretive in their leadership. With a post-industrial economy, business can always argue that the common citizen has more to lose from a business’s closure than they do from workers getting shafted, and unions have had a hard time avoiding the villain role.

Making unions more community-oriented is one of the two keys to making communities more union-oriented. The other is electing officials who support unions. Unions won’t stop being adversarial until we stop electing their adversaries.
Reply
- Read More
  FriendofWoodenCanoeTRUMP DELENDUS EST (fka Chatham Harrison)
  6/10/15 2:55pm
  That’s not historically accurate. Radical unionism IWW and OBU were antagonist to capitalists/capitalism as an ideological imperative. They sought the overthrow of capital and the worker utopia of true communism. Obviously they did this because capitalists were busy exploiting the hell out of them and often times, like at ludlow, murdering them. What we see today, as part of the pax-americana is the postwar subduing of radical unionism and the pacification of even moderate unions.
  Reply
- Read More
  TRUMP DELENDUS EST (fka Chatham Harrison)FriendofWoodenCanoe
  6/10/15 3:11pm
  Yeah, I’m going back before the IWW/OBU era to the Knights of Labor. They were moderate, they worked in conjunction with business, and they were effective for the era. When they got dicked over by industry, that’s when labor became more popularly radicalized.
  Reply
Read More
EtruscanRaiderHamilton Nolan
6/10/15 2:47pm
Its a harsh reality of human psychology. Being in a Union and negotiating collectively limits your ability to negotiate by yourself. The trouble is you only can negotiate more than the basic wage if you’re noticeably so superior that the employer is willing to pay more, and that scenario applies to virtually nobody. However, people always like to think that they are above average at what they do. The math in their head goes something like this, “I’m better than most people in my profession, if only I negotiate on my own I can get paid more.” The flaw is that they either are perfectly average at their job or the profession that they’re in doesn’t care if that person is a little bit better. Its massive denial.

I’m sure you’ve all heard about the meme where a teacher tries to demonstrate to the class about socialism by giving everyone the average of everyone else’s grades. The students in that meme aren’t really organized because if they were, they’d realize they could just refuse to take the tests in the first place or share all the answers. After all how embarassing would it be for that professor if his tenure committee found out that he’d had to give an entire class incompletes because he wanted to prove some dumbass political point. That’s what organization means. It turns the tables.
Reply