Strong unions make strong businesses.
Now let's pass some union reform laws and get rid of "right to work" on the federal level.
this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2023
723 points (98.7% liked)
News
23644 readers
4125 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Unions are getting paid because corporations have gigantic piles of cash lying around right now (because of record profits), and they were hoping to just keep it for themselves somehow
They thought the words “economic headwinds” would really just make the workers go “ah ok, sure. Keep hoarding away”
they owe a big chunk of it to the Trump Tax Cuts.. every penny of that went into the boardroom..
It’s not enough. Not until everyone is paid what they’re actually worth will it ever be enough.
Now imagine if we had some way to send people that could represent our needs to the government. If only we could house such a group of people near the seat of government so that they could petition our needs in the form of ... I don't know let's call it a bill of writ and law.
If only we could have something like that, too.
Not nearly enough. We need a lot more participation. That's gonna help with the money in politics problem too. This is the solution used the last time inequality and its socioeconomic effects were at this level, and it worked for a while.
This thread talks about the new young Democrat mayor of Terre Haute, Indiana where I live. I do not like him at all for other reasons, which I go over in the thread, but I think unions are definitely a big part of why he got elected. Despite Terre Haute being a big union town, it went to Trump both times and the mayor was a Republican for years.
I think a lot of union members are just fed up with Republicans and their anti-labor stances and we'll see more of that in 2024.
Indiana is deep red, so that mayorship win really is a big deal. I sure do hope you're right about 2024.
Maybe I'm becoming too cynical, but the raises these unions have been settling on don't really cover inflation over the periods where they received no increase.
These articles just feel like the media wings of these megacorps are trying to stroke our egos. "Yes, so much bargaining power!"
I can't find the article I'm thinking of where someone used a bunch of privately sourced data to peg the average annual inflation at 7%, but this article shows how economists don't even agree on what metrics to measure for calculating inflation.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/07/consumerpriceindex.asp
I can’t find the article I’m thinking of where someone used a bunch of privately sourced data to peg the average annual inflation at 7%
This is definitely not accurate. 7% compounding inflation every year is significantly more purchasing power lost than anything we've seen.
Only takes 12 years for cost to double like that, right?
By the "rule of 72" it's doubling a little over every 10 years.
That's what I'm thinking of, ty
Adding to this with a post I found on wallstreetbets.
https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/15uo06v/inflation_data_has_always_been_a_lie/
Not exactly a reputable source, but the OP does go through several key indicators and shows their math (with screenshots of a calculator, lol)
So you're probably wondering how it's possible that the dollar supply has been expanding at over 7% for the past 52 years, but inflation has only been 3% on average. The answer is that CPI data is designed to underreport inflation.
Yeah there's so much wrong here that it's difficult to know where to start. I guess maybe let's start with, inflation isn't determined by how many raw dollars are printed, and population rises aren't being taken into effect, both of which will heavily change his end result.
Mfs still subscribe to inflation theory from 200 years ago smh…
Money is printed in accordance to inflation, among other things, but it’s not the cause. Ffs. The US printed trillions during and after the 2008 crash and there was barely any inflation then.
Glad to see this here. The way some leftists are repeating libertarian talking points about inflation these days is disturbing.
It's intuitive because it follows from personal experiences with money. Having read and seen information on this, perhaps what gave me the clearest intuition was Randall Wray's intro to MMT lectures. Perhaps throwing one of the simplest ones at leftists spouting this stuff would work for them too.
Seriously someone thinks that inflation is equal to increase in money supply? 🤦♂️🤦🤦♀️
I mean it's /r/wallstreetbets lol
Wages have kept up with inflation though, often exceeding it.
Here a link for the minimum wage.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1065466/real-nominal-value-minimum-wage-us/
The real problem is that wages have not tracked productivity growth. But unions will not be able to solve that, since a lot of workers haven't actually gotten more productive.
Most productivity improvements are capital intensive investments in technology. You won't be able to capture much of those gains through labour bargaining.
To really improve the economic standing of workers, we must distribute non-housing capital more equally among the whole population.
Start taxing large capitals and put things like IRA's and 401K's on steroids to grow the capital of normal people.
Actually, the graph you linked to shows a negative relationship between inflation and wages every single year since 1970. The minimum wage has effectively gone down due to inflation.
It does not.
2000 and 2010 directly contradict your statement.
From the caption of that graph.
Love it. Unions got us to where we are, and we are thankful for them.
Strikes work.
It’s nice to celebrate the wins this year, but I think there were just as many warning bells.
UAW, WGA, and SAG got thrown their bones, sure, but we also watched those huge multinational companies gleefully ignore them for huge spans of time. These massive companies can just fall back on their international components, knowing the company can go on indefinitely without them, and wait for the union to run out of money. Then when the union members are desperate, the company finally comes to the table with a fraction of what the union wanted at the start.
This years events showed pretty clearly that strikes are not (always) the existential threat to the business that made organized labor so powerful in the past. I hope the movement is hearing that warning bell.
I guess I should expect headlines in the next year that blame more inflation on union workers for getting big raises...
...cept teachers. 🤬
Teachers should make at least 90K
The most important metric, membership, doesnt seem to be doing so hot.
An organized workforce is a workforce that will fight fascism.
Remember that the raises are almost always barely playing catch-up with contemporaries. I've not seen a case where a union member of staff is making even the average pay for a given job function.
I put an info request into the Teamsters website.
No response. 😏
Millions got $10-$99 raises? Whoopty doo, but what does it all mean Basil?