Can you please try to keep up? At least try to maintain some reading comprehension. I'm not being mean or facetious, I seriously mean it - please try. Because you literally just forgot the train of thought even though it was just a few posts long.
You asked about union tyrants so I gave you a specific example. That's because you asked.
And with regards to the situation in question, I pointed out that unionizing wasn't necessary for the worker to get the correct result. There are already management processes and channels for resolving these types of situations, and the worker was treated well despite one manager abusing power.
If you have an argument for why this worker would've needed to unionize for something, I'd love to hear it. I'd also like to hear about specific examples of large unions that don't take advantage of people by wielding tremendous stagnating power and seizing people's pay for union dues. There's a reason why people leave unions when they're no longer forced to be in them, brother.
Oookay.
As soon as someone suggested unionizing you immediately went off about "union tyrants." That sounds a lot more like a general statement about unions than a comment about the specific situation of that lady.
I'm glad the upper management decided to overturn the manager's lack of judgement. Good on them.
If you think large unions just take advantage of workers, that's fine. I've heard that sort of argument a million times from people who tow the employer line and I've yet to meet someone using that kind of language being genuinely interested in discussing unions instead of just name-calling.
People have fought for decades and decades for the right to unionize. And sometimes those fights were fucking vicious and violent. In the end, it all comes down to power relationships. A guy stocking the shelves in a grocery, for example, has zero negotiating power. But a grocery needs people stocking the shelves. And so the guys stocking the shelves decide to band together and negotiate together to be able to get better conditions. That's the core of unions. And the initial response from employers and governments was extreme. It took a long time for unions to be able to even do anything.
And in the end, by negotiating together, they have the power to get much better work conditions than they would get by themselves.
But in the US, it's obviously different. The laws in the US are so unfavorable to unions that they very much lack the leverage to negotiate good CBAs for their members. Not only are such as mall percentage of US workers unionized, but also the use of scabs is pretty much unregulated. In other countries, lock outs and strikes are almost equivalent powers, but when it's so easy to use scabs then the unions lose a huge amount of leverage.
Maybe that's why so many Americans think badly of unions. They operate in such a hostile legal environment, and they get demonized nonstop.
I think a lot of Americans think badly of unions because they see what massive and powerful unions do. Again,I point to the Chicago Teachers Union as an example. And if you have examples of good large and powerful unions and what they can do for the average worker, I'd like to see them.
I'm not referring to what unions did long ago, either. I know all that. I'm referring to recent years. ---