- cross-posted to:
- news@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- news@beehaw.org
Nearly 900,000 Americans sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner this week will have unions – and the double-digit pay increases they won – to thank.
That’s how many unionized workers have won immediate pay hikes of 10% or more in just the last year, according to an analysis by CNN.
And the pace of increases of that size have been picking up. More than 700,000 of those workers won pay hikes over the course of the last six months, and of that group, nearly 300,000 saw deals reached in just the last six weeks.
“I would say this is the best run of wage increases won by labor since the period right after the end of World War II,” said Art Wheaton, director of labor studies at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations in Buffalo.
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Strong unions make strong businesses.
Now let’s pass some union reform laws and get rid of “right to work” on the federal level.
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.
Love it. Unions got us to where we are, and we are thankful for them.
Strikes work.
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.
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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
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?
When I worked at Amazon, i learned that unions are bad for workers.
I remember that if we get/keep unions out of the way then more of the money we make can go to us instead of the union.
Are you telling us this as an example of the kind of things they will tell you at Amazon, or is this something you believe too?
Say sike right now
Unfortunately, it very much doesn’t work like that.
The goal of any company, Amazon included, is to pay you as little as possible while extracting as much work from you as possible.
Without a union, they will pay you absolute minimum they can to have you stay at that job, regardless of other expenses - in fact, corporations keep renewing records in profits without workers getting anything from it.
With a union, strikes and legal actions increase your power over the company and allow you to get a bigger slice of the pie (and poor poor Bezos will have to give out a little of his for that).
I want to believe you, but Amazon gave us lunch during their class on unions and lunch is one of my favorites. Besides youre coming off like a know-it-all and aren’t buying me lunch
