this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2025
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Work Reform
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A place to discuss positive changes that can make work more equitable, and to vent about current practices. We are NOT against work; we just want the fruits of our labor to be recognized better.
Our Philosophies:
- All workers must be paid a living wage for their labor.
- Income inequality is the main cause of lower living standards.
- Workers must join together and fight back for what is rightfully theirs.
- We must not be divided and conquered. Workers gain the most when they focus on unifying issues.
Our Goals
- Higher wages for underpaid workers.
- Better worker representation, including but not limited to unions.
- Better and fewer working hours.
- Stimulating a massive wave of worker organizing in the United States and beyond.
- Organizing and supporting political causes and campaigns that put workers first.
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They can't cut union rates since they have a contract. So they can, within reason, pay non union workers more but not lower the pay of union workers. One of the benefits of being in the union is that they can't just lower your wages and they may have issues firing you for bad reasons.
There's a limit to how much they can pay the ununionized workers before it becomes clear they're trying to interfere with the workers rights to free organization. In the image, it's quite likely that the extra 50¢ is union dues, or could be explained as related to costs.
Not until everyone leaves the union to get extra pay and the union loses all its bargaining power.
That doesn't make any sense. If it's about union dues, the union pay is what should be higher.
I love how people downvote my comments with absolutely zero explanation of why I'm wrong.
The workplace is deducting the union dues from union workers checks automatically.
Unions loosing membership causing them to be weaker in negotiations is entirely irrelevant to why companies don't just lower union pay outside of negotiations.
There's no faster way to get downvoted than to complain about being downvoted, particularly if you're weirdly smug about it.
OK, here's the source of the confusion.
What the fuck did I say that made anyone think I was talking about cutting union pay outside of negotiations? Literally where is anyone getting this from??
Most of the downvotes I got (so far) came before I added that part.
Because referring to changing pay rates for union workers as a policy change pretty heavily implies it's not a negotiation, and "why wouldn't the company just get the union to agree to a significant pay cut" is an even more asinine point. They obviously would have if the could have. The assumption that you didn't know unions negotiated contracts seemed more charitable than thinking you didn't know how bargaining worked.
Okay.
But that's not how bargaining works. What unions are able to negotiate is a function of how large, powerful, and organized they are. Rejecting what the company offers can mean going on strike, and if they aren't powerful enough for that to be a credible threat (because people left the union for higher pay rates), then that means they have very little power to negotiate or say no to what's offered.
So it's more like, you don't understand how bargaining works, so you jumped to the completely absurd conclusion that I didn't know unions negotiated contracts? What?
At this point I'm fairly certain you're just trolling, since you asked a dumb question, responded to answers with nonsense scenarios and indignation, and then responded to clarification as though your scenario were a given.
I did literally none of that but ok.
You also didn't take into account every person in the state being in the Union, and the company only employing union workers, and the one non-union person, the CEO, was so afraid of loosing business at his company that only makes pro-union T-shirts that he wept openly at the thought of not capitulating to the unions every demand.
Clearly a bird has eaten most of your frontal cortex and you've confused the concept of negotiations with women's freestyle swimming.
Literally not you or a single other person in all the comments responded to me has said a single word that actually explains why it wouldn't work this way. You just started randomly attacking me for no reason. Maybe it's because you can't provide an actual answer?
Replace leaving the union with going to college instead and you get why we have a 3 generation straight loss in union membership.
People told their kids to chase more money and then spent that money on cheaper foreign products and the whole house fell down within 20 years.
This was the plan by the way for capitalists.
Well, also, a lot of the union jobs simply don't exist anymore. Not very many boilermakers, steamfitters, carmens, or glazers around anymore. So obviously union membership is going to be down.
Aren't people with college educations more likely to end up in a union? One of the reasons some places don't want to hire "overqualified" people is because they're afraid of unionization.
There's a variety of reasons for the decline of unions in the US, the main ones being:
Anti-union laws and propaganda (Mike Rowe being a big one)
Offshoring of manufacturing jobs
Major unions defanging themselves by purging radicals/communists to prove they're "one of the good ones"
No most higher education jobs aren't union. Do you bother to lookup anything by yourself before you speak about things?
Literally not what I said at all. I said that you are more likely to be in a union if you have more education. Do you bother looking anything up before trying to incorrectly correct others?
At this point it's extremely obvious that you're just trolling.
I'm not going to raise time to look, Im fairly sure someone did but regardless it's widely known easily available information.
https://aflcio.org/what-unions-do
https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/your-rights/employer-union-rights-and-obligations
It's extremely obvious you are trolling or legitimately ignorant on basic civics, take your pick.
Neither of those links are remotely relevant to how higher education correlates with union membership. Trolling.
Name one industry in good faith
Ok, warehouse workers. Servers.
Pretty sure I could name any industry and the people in those industries with college degrees are more likely to be in a union than those without.
None of those require higher education or a degree. Thats unskilled/semi skilled/ and skilled labor. Which do have unions.
The claim is that a worker with a degree is more likely to take a trade position.
Teachers come to mind for unions in that regard. But that’s more a relic of the state and federal civilian union culture from 1940s through today.
When did I ever claim anything remotely like that?
When did I ever claim anything remotely like that?
Not an industry boss, it's arguably an industry job but not an industry.
Genius rebuttal though, you could have just googled it.
They're going to say Taco Bell.
Taco Bell isn't an industry and afaik doesn't have a union, but if they did, then yes, it would follow the same trend as every other industry.
It's a clearly a joke because of their name though the fact you didn't get that either is fuckin priceless.
You couldn't have possibly looked over all of the aflcios educational information. You're trolling and you're extremely bad at it.
I'm not interested in your random unrelated links. The question is whether people with college educations are more likely to join unions, and the answer to that is yes, and also, I can easily tell from reading the links themselves that they aren't relevant to that question, troll.
Unrelated? It's literally the biggest union and the labor relations board, there isn't a more relevant source to be had.
Their size has zero relevance to the question of demographics unless they actually provide demographic information on the page you linked.
They do but don't let reality stop you when your on a roll. You might be rolling to a landfill but you do you boo boo.
:::spoiler Here's screenshots of the page you linked to prove you're just blatantly lying, again.
No demographic information
No demographic information
No demographic information
No demographic information
No demographic information
No demographic information
Use the drop-down bar ya bafoon.
This is what I mean by your expectations that someone else provide you a one on one personal education. I gave you links to the most informative websites on unionization and you can't be bothered to look past the first page you're provided.
Dumb.
https://aflcio.org/sites/default/files/2017-07/Res20.pdf
You claimed it was on the page you linked. You lied. Or more likely, you didn't know because you didn't read it either, because you just grabbed a random link so that you could claim to have "provided sources" for the purpose of trolling.
Please provide any source, from them, or anywhere else, supporting your absurd claim that college education discourages union membership.
It's on the aflcio website as well as the NLRB, I'm sorry if I provided you more information than you wanted at the expense of having to actually read something. Sorry, next time I'll see if there's a "for dummies" version or perhaps a sing along.
I didn't say anything discouraged anything, I said higher education jobs tend to not be union jobs. You know, read or something every once in awhile.
That's not the claim that's in dispute. The claim was that higher education people are more likely to be in unions.
No, people with higher education tend to end up in career paths that aren't commonly unionized, regulated yes. Unionized no.
You should read what you say or say less crazy shit.
Compared to people without higher educations, yes, they are more likely to end up in a union. Most career paths, whether they require a degree or not, are not unionized.
Why don't you call Nina Turner, she'll tell you I'm right and you're full of shit. Might be more polite about it.
What's not what you asked.
Aren't people with college educations more likely to end up in a union? One of the reasons some places don't want to hire "overqualified" people is because they're afraid of unionization.
The answer is no. You're now adding context and nuance that did not appear in your original question.
I have no reason to be tolerant of the intolerant or willfully ignorant like yourself, cry somewhere else or at least be quieter about it.
Then provide literally any single source that actually says that.
I'm not your teacher, you have three immense resources, use them. Show us that you can inform yourself instead of taking positions based on ignorance only to obstinately defend them with more ignorance.
I'll take your inability to provide the information (which you claim is trivially easy to find) as further confirmation of my position.
It's hilarious for you to accuse me of "obstinate" or "ignorance." You've provided zero evidence of anything you've claimed and randomly choose to start fighting and insulting me for literally no reason except that I have an .ml in my username.
I've provided it several times at this point which you've actually admitted multiple times at this point, stop with the crybaby affectation.
No you haven't. What you've done is provide random links that don't provide the relevant information and lied claiming that they do, repeatedly.
No, I definitely haven't. I've been abundantly clear, extremely consistently, that you're lying and that the links don't contain the relevant evidence.
At no point have I exhibited a "crybaby affectation." What I've done is correctly called you out for being a liar and a troll, while you lob a bunch of random, baseless accusations out of completely unnecessary hostility provoked entirely by the fact that you have a grudge against my instance.
They are not random.
Aflcio -largest union in the Americas iirc
Nlrb - national labor relations board who overseer whom? Unions!
Board of labor and statistics by no surprise is a massive database of statistics in relation to labor.
Please of these are irrelevant what could at all possibly be a more relevant source since you're apparently know of some.
You're doing it right now, you simply call anyone who disagrees with you a troll and every one of your sources is quite literally "nuh uh" which is behavior I've only seen in idiots and children who simply don't know better.
There's no grudge against your instance but you're from a socialist/communist instance and you're making us look like fucking morons as is usual with your instance.
They are random because they don't contain any of the relevant information you've claimed they do. They are tangentially related to what we're discussing.
Here's the IWW website: https://www.iww.org/
See how linking that had fuck all to do with anything we were discussing and was just randomly dropped - even though it's the website of a large union?
I don't know why I keep responding in good faith when you've demonstrated you're a shameless liar and troll countless times. Also, I believe you're the only person I've called a troll here, and that's with extremely good reason.
They contain literally all of it you just can't be bothered to do the math. Instead you want the answer to be spoonfed to you like you're a wittle baby.
Nice try but you didn't even bother reading that did you? https://www.iww.org/pamphlets/
You could try responding in good faith once and go from there, how about that instead of lamenting something you haven't tried.