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Unions served their purpose. They made inroads and got laws enacted to protect workers.
They are not needed anymore. Time to put that dinosaur to bed and move on.
Unions served their purpose. They made inroads and got laws enacted to protect workers.
They are not needed anymore. Time to put that dinosaur to bed and move on.
Of course they're still needed. Corporations are pretty open about the fact that they want to screw over their employees as much as possible.
Unions served their purpose. They made inroads and got laws enacted to protect workers.
They are not needed anymore. Time to put that dinosaur to bed and move on.
It's not so much that labor unions are unnecessary, but the fact that organized labor has become a watered-down version of what it once was.
From the late nineteenth century through the early 1930s, organized labor was a worker-controlled cultural institution. The IWW and the pre-merger CIO both organized workers into industrial unions, as opposed to the trade unions we know today. In the first four years of the 1930s, there were over eight hundred sit-down strikes in The United States. These were strikes in which workers took over and, literally, occupied their workplaces. There were massive general strikes in Minneapolis, Toledo, and San Francisco.
Although advertised as a pro-labor initiative, The National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act) of 1935 served the purpose of taking much of the control out of the hands of workers. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1957 (which overhauled The Wagner Act), sapped organized labor of virtually all of its remaining militancy. This left workers with nothing more than AFL-style trade unions which, more often than not, draft collective bargaining agreements which are designed to keep things comfortable for the corporations, with limited regard to the best interest of the workers involved.
Unions are still vital as a concept, they just need to be taken back by the workers themselves.
Of course it did. Government education spending gave people the skills to get jobs and unions made sure those jobs paid a middle class wage. This worked fine until we started allowing companies to pay Chinese workers $0.50 per hour and thus undermine American prosperity.
I worked for a company that did business in the North and in the South. The North had labor unions and South did not. Workers doing the same job that I did received a lunch break in the North and a 12 hour day max. Workers in the South did not receive a lunch break and were expected to work 14 hour days. Thus I know that the unions do bring benefits to the workers. This is in recent modern times as well.
Well most union people work for the government these days so that "corporate" reason won't work anymore.
Why not? The question was if we still need unions, not how prevalent they are - and judging by how crappy employees in the private sector are doing, the answer would be yes.
Can you imagine how much wealth would have been put to better use than giving it to corrupt unions? How many companies went out of business due to union demands? How many companies were never started because these start ups could not pay union wages?
At the end of the day, the idea of forming a union and telling your employer "how it is" was always a disaster and economics has finally caught up with them.
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