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by Justin Foley_Archive
total\_douche wrote:LOLOLOLOL. SEIU and people-powered aspects of the union world in the same paragraph. SEIU was, by far, the worst, most useless, least giving-a-shit union I ever paid dues to. As in, if you wanted representation in a meeting with a manager, they'd just tell you you are the union! You can represent yourself! Need to file a grievance? Don't expect help from the steward or anyone else in your local. But locals can be bad without the rest of the union being bad, right? So you've decided to do all that grievance work yourself, eh? Good luck getting anyone in St. Paul to process it, and enjoy spending months hounding them on the phone until they decide to get back to you. If they manage to accomplish anything, it's purely by accident. Fuck them. The world will be a better place when they finally crash and burn and are replaced by a real union.You can blame the right wing all you want, but the unions ain't got (almost) nobody to blame but themselves. Nobody in a union shop would buy the right wing talking points if the unions hadn't gotten so shitty. Is right to work a facetious load of shit designed to strangle unions, instead of the argument that it incentivizes them to provide actual value to their members? Absolutely. Are the talking points used to justify it true? By and large... yeah. They are. And the problems ain't just local. The boomers fell asleep at the wheel and now labourers everywhere are paying for it as they get caught between shitty companies and indifferent union representation. The good news is that the boomers will be retired soon, and millennials are union-friendly enough, and things have gotten shitty enough, that we just might be able to put this derailed train somewhere close to the tracks. Maybe even on the tracks themselves. That would be nice.So yeah... as a concept? Unions are absolutely NOT CRAP. As a reality, they used to be equally NOT CRAP. But your 21st century union is often a steaming pile of indifferent CRAP that will happily screw you to keep their friends in the company happy.I don't know what happened to you or what Local you were a member of, but your complaint against all of SEIU is way too broad. And the stuff about how unions deserve the shit that they get is just wrong. There's room for debate and plenty of change inside the US labor movement. But the concentration of power against unions has, in many ways, significantly reduced the power that even a high-functioning union can gather in the US. You had a bad experience and it sounds like you really think you got fucked. You didn't see fighting back within the union as an option. You're pissed. I won't argue any of that. The talking points that the right wing uses to defang, cripple, shrink and attack unions are not right and largely massive whoppers of hypocrisy. The think tanks that rage as absolutely as hard as they can to prevent union elections will immediately turn around after an election win and scream that the union isn't doing anything. If you got screwed, don't bitch and moan that the whole labor movement sucks because it doesn't.Andrew - I've got nothing to say about the latest Andrew Stern stuff because I've stopped paying attention to the weird shit that guy's up to. I also have limited mental space to re-litigate internecine left-labor fights of ten or more years ago. But Stern made a lot of enemies to the left and right inside the labor movement; I think a lot of the choices he made that pissed people off were smart ones, especially his commitment to funding and prioritizing organizing. cynical piece of garbage is myopic. = Justin