NEW ORLEANS—Multibillionaire Elon Musk won and workers lost as a three-judge panel of the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the National Labor Relations Board’s structure is unconstitutional.
I don’t mean to minimize this because it’s obviously not good but its impact on the labor movement or existing practices in labor law is pretty insignificant and very much in line with the historical trajectory we’ve been on since Taft-Hartley. Trump already demonstrated he could remove board members and the GC with impunity and ALJs play a relatively minor role in the whole process.
The bigger issue is that the unions have let this shit slide for he last seventy years without offering even the most meager resistance to it. It’s almost as if they want to be stamped out of existence.
The bigger issue is that unions have let this shit slide for he last seventy years without offering even the most meager resistance to it.
To be fair, unions were targeted by COINTELPRO and its offshoots. You had literal feds infiltrating unions to do ghoul shit. And the unions not targeted by the FBI were targeted by the mafia and Pinkertons.
Anyone who had the backbone to show solidarity was either killed or imprisoned. Employers used both legal and illegal methods of destroying unions with impunity.
The bigger issue is that the unions have let this shit slide for he last seventy years without offering even the most meager resistance to it. It’s almost as if they want to be stamped out of existence.
Hard agree. I was one of the main organizers for my union struggle and the local we chose was worse than useless and kinda made me antiunion. At least in the way where I want wildcats and general strikes and actual direct action from the workers
The most fundamental challenge in unionization in the USA is choosing a union to affiliate with vs. trying to be independent. Changing later is very challenging, amounting to a decert and reunionization, so choosing “correctly” the first time is important.
While most unions you can affiliate with are lackluster to say the least, the main challenge to being independent is you will lack strike funds, logistical support, and legal support that some affiliate-able unions would provide. Management tends to realize this and subsequently bullies the new union.
This really is the main actual question in US trade unionism: how to bridge that challenge. To improve existing unions to suck less? To make independent unions more viable? To make something in-between? All of these are actually very difficult and at the end of the whole ordeal you can still end up with a union with petty bourgeois interests that won’t work with your socialist org on a labor campaign.
With few exceptions you don’t even really get to choose who you affiliate with though. You either end up with the Teamsters or an AFL-CIO affiliate that was granted your employer as “turf” twenty plus years ago. If neither of them consider you a worthwhile investment then good fucking luck getting any help.
And then if you do affiliate they’ll tell you first contracts are always shitty and ram one through so they can get a security agreement in and start collecting dues.
That’s another good point I forgot to mention: often no unions will even take you. A shop will be ready to go, an easy win, but none of the relevant unions do anything because the shop is “too small”. The next least bad version is what you refered to: only one union will take you and they kind of suck. Though in my experience Teamsters can be pretty militant despite the union’s overall right wing tendencies.
Oh yeah same. We got ghosted twice by the UFCW local we worked with before we gave up on them where I work. It took quite a while for me to work through that emotionally and made me realize a lot of the union orthodoxy is bullshit and so are those that preach it.
UFCW seems to be one of the worst unfortunately. My first job was a brief stint at a grocery store represented by them. This is when self checkouts were first introduced. Over half of the cashiers were laid off, and a couple had to relocate to stores that would’ve doubled their commute. Before that a cashier told me that when he started his job, there were only like 8 steps to journeyman pay, but during later negotiations it got doubled to 16 or something crazy like that.
I feel for you when it comes to the emotionality of it all. Myself and some of my comrades put our EVERYTHING into that struggle for close to 3 years, just for the department to dissolve just a couple months after the contract was ratified. I’m still kinda fucked up from how terrible and demoralizing it all was and I havent been at that job for nearly a year
The union rep I had lost the fucking COCA-COLA contract here; it probably would’ve been the biggest bargaining unit with the most dues paid for the whole local. Those workers decertified and were super bitter towards unions after. Why would they let that happen if they would get so much notoriety/money out of a unit?
UFCW structures itself with the bureaucratic old guard at the top who care more about loyalty than competence (they do still make a show of it internally but really and truly do not give a fuck) and does extraordinarily cynical math about cost:benefit ratios. A big new unit can actually threaten the power structure as new members expect representation, but it can be hard to tease out incompetence from cynical power hoarding from afar.
Reposting my comment from another thread
I don’t mean to minimize this because it’s obviously not good but its impact on the labor movement or existing practices in labor law is pretty insignificant and very much in line with the historical trajectory we’ve been on since Taft-Hartley. Trump already demonstrated he could remove board members and the GC with impunity and ALJs play a relatively minor role in the whole process.
The bigger issue is that the unions have let this shit slide for he last seventy years without offering even the most meager resistance to it. It’s almost as if they want to be stamped out of existence.
To be fair, unions were targeted by COINTELPRO and its offshoots. You had literal feds infiltrating unions to do ghoul shit. And the unions not targeted by the FBI were targeted by the mafia and Pinkertons.
Anyone who had the backbone to show solidarity was either killed or imprisoned. Employers used both legal and illegal methods of destroying unions with impunity.
Hard agree. I was one of the main organizers for my union struggle and the local we chose was worse than useless and kinda made me antiunion. At least in the way where I want wildcats and general strikes and actual direct action from the workers
The most fundamental challenge in unionization in the USA is choosing a union to affiliate with vs. trying to be independent. Changing later is very challenging, amounting to a decert and reunionization, so choosing “correctly” the first time is important.
While most unions you can affiliate with are lackluster to say the least, the main challenge to being independent is you will lack strike funds, logistical support, and legal support that some affiliate-able unions would provide. Management tends to realize this and subsequently bullies the new union.
This really is the main actual question in US trade unionism: how to bridge that challenge. To improve existing unions to suck less? To make independent unions more viable? To make something in-between? All of these are actually very difficult and at the end of the whole ordeal you can still end up with a union with petty bourgeois interests that won’t work with your socialist org on a labor campaign.
With few exceptions you don’t even really get to choose who you affiliate with though. You either end up with the Teamsters or an AFL-CIO affiliate that was granted your employer as “turf” twenty plus years ago. If neither of them consider you a worthwhile investment then good fucking luck getting any help.
And then if you do affiliate they’ll tell you first contracts are always shitty and ram one through so they can get a security agreement in and start collecting dues.
That’s another good point I forgot to mention: often no unions will even take you. A shop will be ready to go, an easy win, but none of the relevant unions do anything because the shop is “too small”. The next least bad version is what you refered to: only one union will take you and they kind of suck. Though in my experience Teamsters can be pretty militant despite the union’s overall right wing tendencies.
Oh yeah same. We got ghosted twice by the UFCW local we worked with before we gave up on them where I work. It took quite a while for me to work through that emotionally and made me realize a lot of the union orthodoxy is bullshit and so are those that preach it.
UFCW seems to be one of the worst unfortunately. My first job was a brief stint at a grocery store represented by them. This is when self checkouts were first introduced. Over half of the cashiers were laid off, and a couple had to relocate to stores that would’ve doubled their commute. Before that a cashier told me that when he started his job, there were only like 8 steps to journeyman pay, but during later negotiations it got doubled to 16 or something crazy like that.
I feel for you when it comes to the emotionality of it all. Myself and some of my comrades put our EVERYTHING into that struggle for close to 3 years, just for the department to dissolve just a couple months after the contract was ratified. I’m still kinda fucked up from how terrible and demoralizing it all was and I havent been at that job for nearly a year
I’ve seen UFCW hang a unit of thousands out to dry and get decertified because they decided it just “wasn’t strategic”.
The union rep I had lost the fucking COCA-COLA contract here; it probably would’ve been the biggest bargaining unit with the most dues paid for the whole local. Those workers decertified and were super bitter towards unions after. Why would they let that happen if they would get so much notoriety/money out of a unit?
UFCW structures itself with the bureaucratic old guard at the top who care more about loyalty than competence (they do still make a show of it internally but really and truly do not give a fuck) and does extraordinarily cynical math about cost:benefit ratios. A big new unit can actually threaten the power structure as new members expect representation, but it can be hard to tease out incompetence from cynical power hoarding from afar.
UFCW is up there for worst big union around.