Anyway, I don’t really even know how to argue the point that unions or worker collectives are good for working people. It’s sort of the ultimate no-brainer
Let’s talk unions this week…..let me try to understand how the very mention of the word union seems to leave a foul taste in most people’s mouths these days. Let me see…unions have given us the 40-hour, five-day work week, decent and living wages for the workers who belong to them, all sorts of health and safety legislation and the list sort of goes one and on…pretty well every advance made by working people in the last century was accomplished because workers organized, banded together and forced employers to treat them fairly and with some modicum of respect….Even today, where I live, workers like police, nurses, teachers, fire fighters (all public sector) earn extremely decent money and have great benefits and many other rewards earned for them by their worker collectives. There are very, very few unionized private sector jobs because our unions today are badly broken and are not doing their job. Workers who are unionized in the private sector, like some auto workers, are also doing well, but they are a tiny fraction of the total workforce….
Why? In today’s economic climate, the working poor – and there are a whole lot of them in our society – are struggling to try to get the rich folks to bestow on them $15 per hour….you can’t live on $15 per hour in today’s world….you will be living in abject poverty for sure. Most of our working poor have no benefits, no pensions, no anything….they are just the working poor and, as the current pandemic has so graphically illustrated, they are holding all of society on their shoulders. I can’t, for the life of me, see why folks in the upper echelons of our society can’t seem to understand this. And, actually, I’m pretty sure they do understand it but somehow enjoy putting a knee to the throat of the working poor everywhere.
I am, of course, profoundly disappointed in each and every one of our current unions. They are garbage and useless as tits on a goose, as the saying goes. They have been fighting a steady, retreating action against big business and big government for most of the last 30 years. They are losing this war/battle as is indicated by the already low and shrinking numbers of union members across North American society. They should have been on the offensive all along, protecting workers’ rights, and waging a real war on corporate greed and government ambivalence. They should have been busy signing up members by the tens of thousands in places like big box stores and fast food restaurants and pretty well every sector of our society. Instead, they have been sitting on their hands, soaking up what benefits they still can and waiting for a few more worker collectives to be gutted and destroyed by the wealthy autocrats that control our economy.
You never know if what you’re reading on the internet is true or not, but nearly everyone does their own “research” these days. Of course, most people wouldn’t understand real research if it hit them on the head, as proven by the fact that most ordinary people these days seem to feel they know way more about stuff than actual experts in the field. But, I checked this out as well as I could…..McDonald’s employees in Denmark make over $20 per hour, have benefits, a pension plan, lots of holidays and there are lots of fulltime workers in the system….In the U.S., McDonald’s employees make an average of about $9 an hour, usually have zero benefits and no pension….a Big Mac costs about 45 cents more in Denmark. When I was mentioning this to a guy who has a degree in economics, he said it all boils down to the level of greed in North America. Clearly, something is way out of whack. Some folks are making far too much money -and they’re mostly making it on the backs of the working poor….
Anyway, I don’t really even know how to argue the point that unions or worker collectives are good for working people. It’s sort of the ultimate no-brainer. Corporations of all stripes, private and public, are all working to balance budgets or make profits for shareholders and they’re doing it by raping and pillaging working people. It takes a sort of unholy triumvirate to keep society economically healthy. It takes big business and big government and big labour all sort of fighting for their share of the proverbial pie….big labour’s gone missing for sure….