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Doug Wilson on organised labour


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dougwils.com/s22-money-love-desire/without-the-boats-and-eye-patches.html

I read this and wtf.

If you join a union you're the same as a Somali pirate, essentially:

Organized labor is organized to take control of an asset away from its rightful owners without paying for it. Organized labor is organization of property by those who don’t own it. Organized labor, by driving up the costs of production through coercive means, destroys industries. Organized labor is piracy without the boats and eye patches. Why would anybody want to celebrate organized labor?

Me, because I'm part of it and my union works to make sure everyone's fairly recompensed for the work they do. That's not piracy, it's not stealing, it's making sure everyone gets a fair day's pay for a fair day's work. Trying to short-change workers is piracy, not workers organising to make sure they're treated OK.

I'm a lay union official (that means I'm not working full-time for the union - what I do is above and beyond my work duties). I represent members who have all kinds of politics. I don't enquire who they voted for or anything else, I represent them full stop because they are members. I would like it if my union had a policy of seizing control of the means of production, but it hasn't :lol:

However you describe it, organized labor wants to force all workers at a particular point of production to join the union, whether they want to join or not. They want to make membership in the union a condition of employment. They want to extract dues by force of law, making those dues a kind of tax. They want the right to walk off a job they did not create, and simultaneously keep that job off limits for others by harassing any “scab†who desires to replace the absent workers. In short, organized labor is organized to do unrighteousness.

This could only be written by someone who's never been a union member.

I have never tried to force anyone to join the union and neither would I vote to make union membership a condition of employment. Forced membership is worse than non-membership because forced members will scab and act against the union. I want everyone to WANT to join the union, not to be made to do so.

Scabs are a disgrace and the reason for that is that they are actually stealing. They want the benefits of good pay and conditions negotiated for them by the union, but they don't want to do anything for that, like strike if they are asked to. They want the bennies with none of the effort. They want a cushy ride through life and they will complain to management if anyone asks them not to scab. "'S my free will, innit? I can do what I like? It's not fair that the union asked me to go out on strike or whatever. I know they were polite but I felt deeply hurt, like, in my insides. By the way, are we still getting that pay increase the union negotiated?"

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Why would anybody want to celebrate organized labor?

1) Health care. Graduate student workers who overlapped with me during my master's program remembered a time prior to when the union won health insurance for grad students employed as teaching and research assistants.

2) Weekends. We wouldn't have weekends without organized labor.

3) The 8-hour day, though that's sadly going the way of the dodo.

4) Not having small children working in coal mines is pretty awesome.

5) In some cases, workers get holidays off, again because of organized labor. Is Doug Wilson fighting a War on Christmas? And if so, has Glenn Beck been informed?

6) In cases where management and laborers aren't in agreement about what to do, the presence of organized labor means that it's easier to negotiate peacefully. (I assume Wilson would prefer a bargaining session to being visiting in the middle of the night by people with pickaxes and nothing to lose. YMMV on how you feel about this. :) )

7) The property Wilson wants to protect from organized labor wouldn't exist without the presence of laborers. If by property he means "stuff that other people have made," his premise is nonsensical.

8) Benefits are yet more awesome when they're tied to the needs and priorities of the people who will actually be using them.

9) When I had trouble in an entirely different (un-unionized) workplace-- short version: boss doctored time sheets and claimed it was okay because it was a non-profit-- my old union gave me advice on how to handle the situation, let me use their phone to talk long distance to the department of labor, and offered a solidarity picket if it came to that. I cannot adequately explain how lovely it felt to have their support. :group-hug:

10) The history of the labor movement in my country is the history of some really amazing people. Some of their stories have been recorded (the trial transcripts of Mother Jones are totally riveting reading). Most of their names I will never know, but they wore their boots (and sometimes their lives) out in an attempt to make life better not just for themselves but for people they'd never meet.

I could go on, but it's getting late.

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I am not a union member, and really, very few people I know are--mostly because of career choices and region where I live.

However, I did research years ago on coal mining in my state (which had some pretty serious and bloody battles when they did unionize) and not only were miners paid in chits, which could only be used to rent a house on company land and buy things in the company store, but the pay rate could vary every day, with the definition of what was valuable that day told to the miner when they came up with their daily haul... one day, anything that didn't go through a certain size screen --just the biggest pieces-- might be all that was weighed and counted for pay, the next it might be just the small pieces and the big ones wouldn't count. It is not a surprise that unions came from working conditions such as these.

I've worked for years in a family business--I know if all bosses had been like one of the brothers, unions would not have to exist. If all bosses were like the other brother, everyone would have to be in a union-- if People have heartburn with unions, then start treating employees well without being forced...

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Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. ~ Abraham Lincoln

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When I taught in public school as a full time employee, the choice to join the union was up to me. However, whatever benefits the union obtained on behalf of the members, was also extended to the non union teachers. Substitute teachers were not allowed to join the union and there fore got screwed out of any benefits.

My 1st stepfather was in management for TWA (now gone thanks to AA) and he didn't have much love for the unions. He thought (this was the 60's) that they had entirely too much power. After he died, he didn't have to see how AA stepped on the existing unions, screwed with seniority and basically dismantled pensions for the employees who worked long and hard for the now non extant airline. The same thing happened when the Northwest mechanics went out on strike just prior to the Delta takeover.

My 2nd stepdad was full union. He worked for MGM and through his work with IATSE , made conditions tolerable and still do for their members. The TV and movie business can be brutal without union oversight and there are lots of stories about the abuse of non union shops at studios. My stepbrother works for Warner Brothers and the union has helped him when he got hurt carrying 100lb rolls of cables.

I don't think the unions will ever have the power they had 40 years ago, but there are definite places where the unions and their emphasis on health and safety have made great strides for the American worker.

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Management usually doesn't like labor.

I will never, ever call National Airport near Washington, DC "Reagan" National. That asshole, Ronnie Raygun, destroyed the air traffic controllers union -PATCO- when they went out on strike in 1981. Over 11,000 air traffic controllers were fired. That's a whole boatload of air traffic controllers! It took 10 years to fully replace the fired workers. The union was decertified later that year.

I had the pleasure of having Thanksgiving dinner at a union household.

There is power in the union!

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Management usually doesn't like labor.

I will never, ever call National Airport near Washington, DC "Reagan" National. That asshole, Ronnie Raygun, destroyed the air traffic controllers union -PATCO- when they went out on strike in 1981. Over 11,000 air traffic controllers were fired. That's a whole boatload of air traffic controllers! It took 10 years to fully replace the fired workers. The union was decertified later that year.

I had the pleasure of having Thanksgiving dinner at a union household.

There is power in the union!

Me, too! Same reason. Never, ever. It's National Airport. I hear that's what the controllers call it too.

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I will admit, the only experiences with organized labor that I've had have been negative. When I was doing an internship in college, I was working in the finance department of a manufacturing plant. The plant workers were in a union, the finance, marketing, and purchasing departments were not. The finance department was housed in a group of offices on top of the plant. While I was working there, the union decided to strike, because they felt their insurance premiums were too high. At the time, the union workers were paying $20 a paycheck for insurance, non-union workers were paying at least double that. The plant went in to shut down, but finance and the other departments still were working (we had other plants out of state that were not part of the strike, and it was pretty much business as usual). I was in college, I needed to work for my internship. Every day, for a month, walking by the striking workers, we'd get spit on, have things thrown at us, and generally get harassed. The strike itself died out after a month when the shop manager got arrested with pounds of cocaine in his car. Then, it turned out he had emptied the union coffers as well as participating in a variety of fraudulent and criminal acts. After that, the union members wound up paying the same for insurance as everyone else who worked for the company. It really soured me on unions as a whole. I was a young adult, just trying to do my job and graduate college.

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Totally OT, but when I quickly scanned the headline, I thought it said "Doug Wilson on orgasms." :pink-shock: :pink-shock: :lol:

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Management usually doesn't like labor.

I will never, ever call National Airport near Washington, DC "Reagan" National. That asshole, Ronnie Raygun, destroyed the air traffic controllers union -PATCO- when they went out on strike in 1981. Over 11,000 air traffic controllers were fired. That's a whole boatload of air traffic controllers! It took 10 years to fully replace the fired workers. The union was decertified later that year.

I had the pleasure of having Thanksgiving dinner at a union household.

There is power in the union!

I call it National too, and I often arrange travel, especially on the east coast, as part of my job. I know someone whose father lost his job and career due to that strike busting. He was never the same.

Just one more reason St Ronnie the Ray Gun was one of the most despicable men to ever live in the WH.

Unions are the only way that workers have any power or say. And you cannot have capital without labor. Labor deserves an equal footing in a true capitalistic system.

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I will admit, the only experiences with organized labor that I've had have been negative. When I was doing an internship in college, I was working in the finance department of a manufacturing plant. The plant workers were in a union, the finance, marketing, and purchasing departments were not. The finance department was housed in a group of offices on top of the plant. While I was working there, the union decided to strike, because they felt their insurance premiums were too high. At the time, the union workers were paying $20 a paycheck for insurance, non-union workers were paying at least double that. The plant went in to shut down, but finance and the other departments still were working (we had other plants out of state that were not part of the strike, and it was pretty much business as usual). I was in college, I needed to work for my internship. Every day, for a month, walking by the striking workers, we'd get spit on, have things thrown at us, and generally get harassed. The strike itself died out after a month when the shop manager got arrested with pounds of cocaine in his car. Then, it turned out he had emptied the union coffers as well as participating in a variety of fraudulent and criminal acts. After that, the union members wound up paying the same for insurance as everyone else who worked for the company. It really soured me on unions as a whole. I was a young adult, just trying to do my job and graduate college.

Unions like businesses are populated by humans who will corrupt any system. That doesn't mean that unions should abolished. Businesses are corrupt too but no one suggests they shouldn't exist. They both need regulating in order to minimize the possibility of wrongdoing.

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keen23, that is sad that your experience of unions was so bad. I can honestly say that mine is unlikely to be engulfed in a cocaine scandal any time soon (we're not that exciting) so I can't really speak to that. Picket line confrontation, though...

Usually, what we do in cases like yours is we would have tried to sign you up on the line, rather than spit at you. There are two groups of workers who are scabbing - those in the union who cross the line, and those who take extra pay for doing the jobs of striking workers - and you were not in the union and continued doing your job. This makes you recruitment material ;)

My workplace is multi-union so sometimes people will say "I'm Unite [or whatever] we haven't been called out" To which we generally say "Fair play, next time you vote vote for someone who'll defend workers' rights" but we definitely don't spit on them or throw anything at them. That is unlikely to achieve the objective we want.

(I've turned people back before because they'll come up to you and say "Er, I support the strike but I'm not a member..." and I say "Aha! You CAN be, just sign here and you're in the union." You're not allowed to try to poach members from other unions though. )

However people crossing the line can be extremely rude and abusive. It's generally because they know what they're doing is wrong and they're ashamed. I have had one guy (who I knew to be a member) stand stock-still and scream abuse at us - it was actually a bit scary because it was a total meltdown but as he did it he looked away into the distance and wouldn't catch our eyes. Not the first time that sort of thing has happened. I've also been called a fucking bitch and all sorts.

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