appreciatorBus 11 hours ago

A retort being familiar does not mean it isn't true or real.

Millions upon millions of ppl at every income level have experienced working in and around unions and not all of them came away with a positive experience.

  • antonvs 10 hours ago

    You can say the same thing about democratic governments, or capitalism, etc. etc.

    By itself that's not a meaningful observation.

    • nothrabannosir 9 hours ago

      It didn’t come by itself, it came in the wake of a comment that outlined a process whereby unions have a negative effect on new applicants in the job market.

      The disagreement then was “I’ve heard that argument before.” - “ok that doesn’t make it wrong” <— that last sentence is what you’re replying to.

  • fzeroracer 7 hours ago

    Do these same criticisms also apply to corporations? I've worked for some absolutely shitty corps that have abused and taken advantage of their labor. Should we abolish corporations?

    These criticisms of unions are always pulled out but then never equally applied to corporations.

    • vanviegen an hour ago

      Corporations are providing people with jobs and clients with value (or they go out of business).

      Unions, especially failing ones, don't inherently provide any net benefit to society. They may as well be engaged in little more than self-preservation and zero-sum games.

      Therefore, I believe unions deserve a different type of scrutiny than corporations.

fsckboy 10 hours ago

>None of this is a reason to not organize to better represent the interests of labor.

unions restrict the supply of labor and this results in (price increase) better wages for the union's members. However, overall the total dollar amount transferred from employers to labor goes down (employment decrease), so the "class" of all workers (employed and unemployed) see their per capita wages go down. and if that's not enough, the industry grows more slowly so the problem only gets worse for everyone in the future (trickle down) this is the underlying reason for europe's lower year over year economic growth compared to the US

is the reason. it's not a moral or ethical or even income distribution issue, it's just how markets operate.