Interesting essay for sure, but like the union movement itself, it contains some spectacular contradictions. IDK how the author can think he’s a worker. As a substack writer, he is a small, independent, self employed business owner. I totally agree that we need more private-sector unions, and these could play a big role reducing the growing income gap. On the other hand, public-sector unions have become a parasitic monster feeding off the hard work of taxpayers. What’s the latest – more than 1,000 employees at the Office for National Statistics (ONS) are threatening to strike after they were told to return to the office for two days a week. More private, less public please.
But private union membership percentages are dependent on State laws mandating that all closed shop workers pay Union fees. So in the US, everywhere you have “Right to work laws” you have lower Union membership because workers can’t be COMPELLED to pay dues.
Unions argue that Right-to-work Laws are “Union-Busting” and encourage “free riders” because the Union has to negotiate on behalf of everyone in the shop under federal law. But this is only true if the Union has Exclusive Bargaining Rights in the shop. If the Union signs a Members-Only contract than the Free-Rider problem is eliminated…but so is the Monopoly.
In a Members-Only Contract, the Union needs to do a really good job if it wants to keep the best employees. If not, those employees can just negotiate on their own and that erodes the Union’s bargaining power. So knowing that, they tend to prefer the Exclusive Bargaining Rights even in Right-To-Work States where workers don’t have to pay dues to get collectively represented.
So does Right-To-Work suppress “Median Wages.” Well yes, there’s no question that Private Sector Unions negotiate higher wages, especially if we don’t adjust for inflation. But we can’t ignore that the cost of living is much lower in Right-To-Work States without Labor Monopolies. These States also tend to have lower unemployment and experience less disruptive work stoppages caused by strikes for COLA increases to keep up with inflationary business environments.
These states are also inherently less regulatory and political because Labor is not helping politicians craft all the laws to the advantage of specific industries. In Big Labor States the climate is hyper-political and favoritism is everywhere due to the regulatory bureacracy.
R Wright
1 month ago
As ever from the left two things stick out. First is saying with three words what a writer could say in one. Secondly, and most importantly, is the usual elephant in the room being ignored. What good is your organising if the ‘bosses’ are savaging your wages by bringing in millions of foreigners.
Indeed, but it isn’t just immigration. It’s all globalization that has to be scrapped. It’s the free flow of capital, goods, and people that must end for the economic sovereignty of national governments elected by the people to be restored. I think we’re already heading in that direction overall. Dedollarization, the BRICS alliance, the CHIPS act, the China tariffs, populist movements in Europe and the concessions they’re already being granted by Brussels, and so on. The immigration fight is just one way that the international financial class is trying to hold the doors open as long as they can. I salute the Texas governor for turning a negative into a positive by barricading the border himself and daring Biden to stop him and bussing millions of migrants to darken the doorsteps of the liberal strongholds who love immigration as long as it’s someone else’s problem. Truly this man is playing chess while most everybody else is playing checkers, or maybe tiddlywinks if we’re being honest. Abbott is my early favorite for President in 2028.
Mike Michaels
1 month ago
I’m sure the Batley Grammar School teacher is glad he paid his union dues after their stellar support of him.
Hugh Bryant
1 month ago
I can’t imagine how a party whose largest funders are hedge fund managers devoted to open borders, defunding the police, legalising shop lifting and all the rest of it can really be called a party for the working class and their unions.
When you have George Soros’s son, Alex, noted in NY Post as having visited the WH 20+ times – this should give you a clue as to the agenda of the Biden WH and his Administration and the Dems, and it’s not protecting workers or our national sovereignty. People in the UK know the fiscal damage Soros did to your nation years ago. He and is “Open Society” are trying to destroy us.
2 plus 2 equals 4
1 month ago
People fret about how high the divorce rate has become; it’s at a 60-year low.
Before I read the rest of the article: how much of that is to do with fewer couples getting married?
What people really fret about is how low commitment to marriage is. That was the concern fifty years ago when divorce rates were rising, and its the concern now that never-married rates are rising. However, this introductory oversight is the least of Mr. deBoer’s mistakes.
The rate is the rate, no matter the number of couples involved. The issue of fewer couples is far more salient in this climate.
2 plus 2 equals 4
1 month ago
It’s hard to imagine how I could ever belong to a union in this capacity, and yet the fact remains that I work, and that corporations capture the value I create, resulting in my exploitation.
I don’t understand the mystery. In the UK he could join the NUJ as a freelancer.
I assume the equivalent union in the USA has similar membership options. But even if for some reason they don’t, its not a massive leap of imagination to look across the Atlantic at the UK.
Dillon Eliassen
1 month ago
This article misses several marks. 1. In America, private sector union membership is down but public sector union membership is up. 2. Take auto unions for example: the problem for those unions isn’t they can’t fight against auto makers capital and leadership, it’s that Democrats are prioritizing electric cars over internal combustion engine cars, and are wildly distorting the market and of course those unions will lose power as they lose market share. 3. “I don’t control the means of my production — Substack does, thanks to owning its servers — but I also have no specific employer.” Author conflates distribution with production. He owns the means of production (himself); he doesn’t own the Substack servers. 4. “(If you’d like a prominent example, last year UPS described the demands of the Teamsters Union that represents its workers as extortionate for months — then folded once an actual work stoppage drew near.)” Nothing about how one of the reasons YRC, the next largest freight carrier behind UPS and FedEx collapsed, due in large part to not being able to afford union demands (YRC had other problems too).
Jon Morrow
1 month ago
“It’s hard to imagine how I could ever belong to a union, and yet the fact remains that I work, and that corporations capture the value I create.”
Solution to this is easy – design some computer chips, mine and refine various metals and silicon, etch the required chips and build your own server. Install a global communications network and some power generation to drive it, write your pieces and charge access to the public to read it. Job done. ….or stop to think about the value you get from all the “evil” corporations that you are happy to buy from, presumably because they can provide you with goods and services you can’t remotely come close to providing for yourself and stop the infantile thinking of yourself as a victim.
Definitely the best comment here! Well said.
Provide something of real value to others, and you won’t have to unionize to be paid well. Mandatory unionization in Canada is basically a monopoly on the seller side of the labour market. The same people who support this monopoly would (rightly!) be very against it on the purchaser side.
Kirk Susong
1 month ago
What an absolutely terrible article – written with about the level of self-reflection I would expect of a teenager. The author is so deeply committed to his erroneous ideology – “Unions protect regular folks from greedy capitalists” – that he cannot see how the world has long since moved on.
It’s not that working in a home or cubicle instead of a mine makes it harder to organize… it’s that workers in homes or cubicles have less interest in organizing, precisely because the alleged harms being visited upon them are so attenuated. This isn’t in any way a problem of process, but of substance.
If, just once, a union advocate would explain to me how they can tell if the market will bear a union-organized wage hike, obtained under threat of strike, before they strike, I would be very impressed. How can they tell if there is simply “extra profit” waiting to be redistributed from ownership to worker, or if their demands will instead decrease their employer’s competitiveness?
What happens is that the unions see something they want (more money), and use the legal levers at their disposal to claim it (striking). Sometimes that contributes significantly to the destruction of their own jobs by increasing the cost of their services beyond their own productive value. The company folds, or scales back, or winds down these or those operations. But those union bosses got their paychecks, so…
PS. The best part, I’m sorry to say, is when it’s left-wing journalists trying to organize against the media corporations that employ them. If they put themselves out of business with their own inflated vision of their worth, then no complaints from me.
Alex Lekas
1 month ago
Organized labor is one of the three great anachronisms of our time in the US. Each has largely achieved its goals yet likes to pretend that we’re living in a combination of Jim Crow, the Handmaid’s Tale, and The Jungle. We’re not.
As with anything else, unions come with tradeoffs. For every protection or benefit to the group as a whole, there is a protection for the slackers and non-performers who should be cut away. The idea that unions are “always good” is nonsense; nothing is always good. In their day, unions had a role. Today, individuals have far more independence than workers of a hundred years ago.
This ties to the larger issue of activism – there is no solution being pursued, just the perpetuation of a perceived problem. Because there is money tied to that perception. Union bosses are paid handsomely. The Dems depend on the union dues that are funneled to the party, including money from people who are not themselves Dems. Like the other causes, the union is about the union and its continued existence.
Arthur King
1 month ago
The didn’t just abandon unions. They abandoned the working classes. Massive immigrant drives down wages and increases housing costs. Who does that benefit? The bourgeois! And when the workers rebel, they get called a basket full of deplorable.
Steve Jolly
1 month ago
I think the answer to how to organize could be through the Internet. There are already groups on Reddit, 4chan, Facebook, X, etc. for fans of a specific TV show, fans of a sports team, lovers of cat videos, workers of a particular profession, and practically everything else under the sun. I can imagine an organized labor movement gaining strength in that venue IF it weren’t stopped by the big tech companies, which might well happen. If the workplace is virtual, the meeting places may as well be virtual also.
Before that happens though, the people will have to take back their governments. As long as wages are kept low through unrestricted free flow of people, goods, and money, then unions have no more chance to break the power of the international financial oligarchy than anyone else. The solution is to deglobalize the economy and restore economic sovereignty to national governments. The people in some ways already have an innate understanding of this. The people of the UK voted for Brexit only to learn their politicians never had any intention of actually following the public will and exercising the economic sovereignty the people were demanding. I think this demoralized the people of the UK and I can’t say I blame them.
Everywhere else though, we have populist movements making similar noise. Whether Trump wins or loses in 2024, his anti-globalization America first policy has already become political orthodoxy. TPP is dead, NAFTA got renegotiated, the China tariffs are staying, and nobody dares to do otherwise out of fear of political backlash. The CHIPS Act and infrastructure bills were recognized by everyone intelligent as unapologetic economic nationalism, and I expect more of the same regardless of who’s in the White House.
Once the nations of the world once again have more or less separate economies in a multipolar political world, the power of international finance will be checked by default because trying to diversify among several countries will once again entail serious risks. It’s risky for Americans to invest in China if there might be a war where China nationalizes the assets of Americans and Chinese investors face the same risk. Questions of political risk and allegiance become as important as economic calculations. If the dollar faces increased competition, exchange rates and the policies of other nations will come into play. Once the financiers have to hitch their wagons to one or another country, then the governments will again have power over them.
After that, I think unionization becomes a more realistic goal.
UnHerd Reader
1 month ago
Same with much of the far left here in Uk, and much of the new left, youth, etc, plenty of time, energy for refugee and global issues though.
UnHerd Reader
1 month ago
Can’t seem to downvote, and have a fair few to do so, given my (critical) left perspective, click on DV and nothing happens, anyone else? I am signed in, sub,
Ooop, working now
Fabio Paolo Barbieri
1 month ago
A union for independent contractors would have more the characteristics of a guild, setting up professional standards and denouncing their undermining, supporting capable members in periods of unemployment, creating a common savings bank and a savings fund, professional courses, contact networks, and actively opposing and investigating employers who do not respect minimum standards and employ incompetent labour.
Neiltoo .
1 month ago
“ and yet the fact remains that I work, and that corporations capture the value I create, resulting in my exploitation.”
Exploitation is it? My, haven’t times changed.
Paul T
1 month ago
The actors’ and screenwriters’ strikes have been a complete disaster. Many independents went bust, many actors went without work and income, power was further concentrated in the big studios and the newer players like Netflix and Amazon. They could not have designed a better strategy to keep themselves at the top of the whole machine.
Nancy Kmaxim
1 month ago
One of the factors missing from this piece is the question of who the union represents. The union which ostensibly represented me spent far more money on political issues which in no way impacted actual working conditions than on contract negotiations. Union membership is far more diverse in the current age, and union leaders seem economically and socially far removed from those who are paying their salaries.
Freddie deBoer represents his position as much more poweless than it really is. He is selling his books and articles through a variety of platforms on terms that are negotiated between the parties. He is not necessarily being exploited just because the platforms he uses are owned by corporations. To claim that he does not own the means of production (Substack does) is wrong. He owns his computer. Substack is merely the method he chooses to disseminate his material. Other than that, an interesting account of trade unions in today’s USA.
And on a side point, divorce rates are low because many fewer people have been getting married. Separation rates of unmarried couples are sky high.
M To the Tea
1 month ago
One compelling argument for unions to engage more deeply in political activities, beyond their traditional role as protectors against labor exploitation, is illustrated by the historical example of Nicolas Fouquet. Despite Fouquet’s significant wealth and influence, his lack of political leverage ultimately led to his downfall. This underscores the crucial understanding that true power lies not merely in financial resources or personal connections, but in the ability to influence and shape policy and regulations within the political sphere.
Robert Pruger
1 month ago
The author hit on the biggest reason that private unions are declining In one sentence (very short term stays) and then the employee moves on. An Amazon distribution worker thinks of his job as a way stop on to something else. Very difficult to organize employees under those circumstances. Ditto for many other jobs.
Public employees have a vastly different mindset and their employee union dues go to promote cultural issues (gun restrictions, open borders, decriminalize anything but the most awful crimes, right to abortion up to end of term). Try any of those policies on unionized workers in manufacturing, mining, construction, or transportation and see the response of the rank and file.
In my last C-suite employment in the construction industry, we (management and overwhelmingly Republican) proposed a company policy banning guns and other dangerous weapons on company or customer property. The blow back from the field employees (generally bluedog Democrats) was a vehement “no”. We compromised by caving in and forbidding weapons within our office walls and in client’s buildings but they could have whatever was legal in their vehicles and on job sites.
Union organizers are woke and share views that Rob Henderson calls “luxury beliefs” (see elsewhere on Unherd for Freddy Sayers interview of Rob). Union workers and potential unionized workers know that electric vehicles means 30% less labor, an illegal will work for less and frequently under the table, and they don’t want anyone telling their son Jose that he might be a girl. I could go on, but you should get the picture. Unions are a tough sell if it giveth with one hand and taketh away with the other.
The trajectory for unions is largely public unions, comprised mostly of women, frequently unmarried and woke.
Brian Matthews
1 month ago
No, Joe Biden is the first president to stand in a picket line.
Interesting essay for sure, but like the union movement itself, it contains some spectacular contradictions. IDK how the author can think he’s a worker. As a substack writer, he is a small, independent, self employed business owner. I totally agree that we need more private-sector unions, and these could play a big role reducing the growing income gap. On the other hand, public-sector unions have become a parasitic monster feeding off the hard work of taxpayers. What’s the latest – more than 1,000 employees at the Office for National Statistics (ONS) are threatening to strike after they were told to return to the office for two days a week. More private, less public please.
But private union membership percentages are dependent on State laws mandating that all closed shop workers pay Union fees. So in the US, everywhere you have “Right to work laws” you have lower Union membership because workers can’t be COMPELLED to pay dues.
Unions argue that Right-to-work Laws are “Union-Busting” and encourage “free riders” because the Union has to negotiate on behalf of everyone in the shop under federal law. But this is only true if the Union has Exclusive Bargaining Rights in the shop. If the Union signs a Members-Only contract than the Free-Rider problem is eliminated…but so is the Monopoly.
In a Members-Only Contract, the Union needs to do a really good job if it wants to keep the best employees. If not, those employees can just negotiate on their own and that erodes the Union’s bargaining power. So knowing that, they tend to prefer the Exclusive Bargaining Rights even in Right-To-Work States where workers don’t have to pay dues to get collectively represented.
So does Right-To-Work suppress “Median Wages.” Well yes, there’s no question that Private Sector Unions negotiate higher wages, especially if we don’t adjust for inflation. But we can’t ignore that the cost of living is much lower in Right-To-Work States without Labor Monopolies. These States also tend to have lower unemployment and experience less disruptive work stoppages caused by strikes for COLA increases to keep up with inflationary business environments.
These states are also inherently less regulatory and political because Labor is not helping politicians craft all the laws to the advantage of specific industries. In Big Labor States the climate is hyper-political and favoritism is everywhere due to the regulatory bureacracy.
As ever from the left two things stick out. First is saying with three words what a writer could say in one. Secondly, and most importantly, is the usual elephant in the room being ignored. What good is your organising if the ‘bosses’ are savaging your wages by bringing in millions of foreigners.
The American left has a bigger problem: it has abandoned common sense.
Indeed, but it isn’t just immigration. It’s all globalization that has to be scrapped. It’s the free flow of capital, goods, and people that must end for the economic sovereignty of national governments elected by the people to be restored. I think we’re already heading in that direction overall. Dedollarization, the BRICS alliance, the CHIPS act, the China tariffs, populist movements in Europe and the concessions they’re already being granted by Brussels, and so on. The immigration fight is just one way that the international financial class is trying to hold the doors open as long as they can. I salute the Texas governor for turning a negative into a positive by barricading the border himself and daring Biden to stop him and bussing millions of migrants to darken the doorsteps of the liberal strongholds who love immigration as long as it’s someone else’s problem. Truly this man is playing chess while most everybody else is playing checkers, or maybe tiddlywinks if we’re being honest. Abbott is my early favorite for President in 2028.
I’m sure the Batley Grammar School teacher is glad he paid his union dues after their stellar support of him.
I can’t imagine how a party whose largest funders are hedge fund managers devoted to open borders, defunding the police, legalising shop lifting and all the rest of it can really be called a party for the working class and their unions.
When you have George Soros’s son, Alex, noted in NY Post as having visited the WH 20+ times – this should give you a clue as to the agenda of the Biden WH and his Administration and the Dems, and it’s not protecting workers or our national sovereignty. People in the UK know the fiscal damage Soros did to your nation years ago. He and is “Open Society” are trying to destroy us.
Before I read the rest of the article: how much of that is to do with fewer couples getting married?
What people really fret about is how low commitment to marriage is. That was the concern fifty years ago when divorce rates were rising, and its the concern now that never-married rates are rising. However, this introductory oversight is the least of Mr. deBoer’s mistakes.
The rate is the rate, no matter the number of couples involved. The issue of fewer couples is far more salient in this climate.
I don’t understand the mystery. In the UK he could join the NUJ as a freelancer.
I assume the equivalent union in the USA has similar membership options. But even if for some reason they don’t, its not a massive leap of imagination to look across the Atlantic at the UK.
This article misses several marks. 1. In America, private sector union membership is down but public sector union membership is up. 2. Take auto unions for example: the problem for those unions isn’t they can’t fight against auto makers capital and leadership, it’s that Democrats are prioritizing electric cars over internal combustion engine cars, and are wildly distorting the market and of course those unions will lose power as they lose market share. 3. “I don’t control the means of my production — Substack does, thanks to owning its servers — but I also have no specific employer.” Author conflates distribution with production. He owns the means of production (himself); he doesn’t own the Substack servers. 4. “(If you’d like a prominent example, last year UPS described the demands of the Teamsters Union that represents its workers as extortionate for months — then folded once an actual work stoppage drew near.)” Nothing about how one of the reasons YRC, the next largest freight carrier behind UPS and FedEx collapsed, due in large part to not being able to afford union demands (YRC had other problems too).
“It’s hard to imagine how I could ever belong to a union, and yet the fact remains that I work, and that corporations capture the value I create.”
Solution to this is easy – design some computer chips, mine and refine various metals and silicon, etch the required chips and build your own server. Install a global communications network and some power generation to drive it, write your pieces and charge access to the public to read it. Job done. ….or stop to think about the value you get from all the “evil” corporations that you are happy to buy from, presumably because they can provide you with goods and services you can’t remotely come close to providing for yourself and stop the infantile thinking of yourself as a victim.
Definitely the best comment here! Well said.
Provide something of real value to others, and you won’t have to unionize to be paid well. Mandatory unionization in Canada is basically a monopoly on the seller side of the labour market. The same people who support this monopoly would (rightly!) be very against it on the purchaser side.
What an absolutely terrible article – written with about the level of self-reflection I would expect of a teenager. The author is so deeply committed to his erroneous ideology – “Unions protect regular folks from greedy capitalists” – that he cannot see how the world has long since moved on.
It’s not that working in a home or cubicle instead of a mine makes it harder to organize… it’s that workers in homes or cubicles have less interest in organizing, precisely because the alleged harms being visited upon them are so attenuated. This isn’t in any way a problem of process, but of substance.
If, just once, a union advocate would explain to me how they can tell if the market will bear a union-organized wage hike, obtained under threat of strike, before they strike, I would be very impressed. How can they tell if there is simply “extra profit” waiting to be redistributed from ownership to worker, or if their demands will instead decrease their employer’s competitiveness?
What happens is that the unions see something they want (more money), and use the legal levers at their disposal to claim it (striking). Sometimes that contributes significantly to the destruction of their own jobs by increasing the cost of their services beyond their own productive value. The company folds, or scales back, or winds down these or those operations. But those union bosses got their paychecks, so…
PS. The best part, I’m sorry to say, is when it’s left-wing journalists trying to organize against the media corporations that employ them. If they put themselves out of business with their own inflated vision of their worth, then no complaints from me.
Organized labor is one of the three great anachronisms of our time in the US. Each has largely achieved its goals yet likes to pretend that we’re living in a combination of Jim Crow, the Handmaid’s Tale, and The Jungle. We’re not.
As with anything else, unions come with tradeoffs. For every protection or benefit to the group as a whole, there is a protection for the slackers and non-performers who should be cut away. The idea that unions are “always good” is nonsense; nothing is always good. In their day, unions had a role. Today, individuals have far more independence than workers of a hundred years ago.
This ties to the larger issue of activism – there is no solution being pursued, just the perpetuation of a perceived problem. Because there is money tied to that perception. Union bosses are paid handsomely. The Dems depend on the union dues that are funneled to the party, including money from people who are not themselves Dems. Like the other causes, the union is about the union and its continued existence.
The didn’t just abandon unions. They abandoned the working classes. Massive immigrant drives down wages and increases housing costs. Who does that benefit? The bourgeois! And when the workers rebel, they get called a basket full of deplorable.
I think the answer to how to organize could be through the Internet. There are already groups on Reddit, 4chan, Facebook, X, etc. for fans of a specific TV show, fans of a sports team, lovers of cat videos, workers of a particular profession, and practically everything else under the sun. I can imagine an organized labor movement gaining strength in that venue IF it weren’t stopped by the big tech companies, which might well happen. If the workplace is virtual, the meeting places may as well be virtual also.
Before that happens though, the people will have to take back their governments. As long as wages are kept low through unrestricted free flow of people, goods, and money, then unions have no more chance to break the power of the international financial oligarchy than anyone else. The solution is to deglobalize the economy and restore economic sovereignty to national governments. The people in some ways already have an innate understanding of this. The people of the UK voted for Brexit only to learn their politicians never had any intention of actually following the public will and exercising the economic sovereignty the people were demanding. I think this demoralized the people of the UK and I can’t say I blame them.
Everywhere else though, we have populist movements making similar noise. Whether Trump wins or loses in 2024, his anti-globalization America first policy has already become political orthodoxy. TPP is dead, NAFTA got renegotiated, the China tariffs are staying, and nobody dares to do otherwise out of fear of political backlash. The CHIPS Act and infrastructure bills were recognized by everyone intelligent as unapologetic economic nationalism, and I expect more of the same regardless of who’s in the White House.
Once the nations of the world once again have more or less separate economies in a multipolar political world, the power of international finance will be checked by default because trying to diversify among several countries will once again entail serious risks. It’s risky for Americans to invest in China if there might be a war where China nationalizes the assets of Americans and Chinese investors face the same risk. Questions of political risk and allegiance become as important as economic calculations. If the dollar faces increased competition, exchange rates and the policies of other nations will come into play. Once the financiers have to hitch their wagons to one or another country, then the governments will again have power over them.
After that, I think unionization becomes a more realistic goal.
Same with much of the far left here in Uk, and much of the new left, youth, etc, plenty of time, energy for refugee and global issues though.
Can’t seem to downvote, and have a fair few to do so, given my (critical) left perspective, click on DV and nothing happens, anyone else? I am signed in, sub,
Ooop, working now
A union for independent contractors would have more the characteristics of a guild, setting up professional standards and denouncing their undermining, supporting capable members in periods of unemployment, creating a common savings bank and a savings fund, professional courses, contact networks, and actively opposing and investigating employers who do not respect minimum standards and employ incompetent labour.
“ and yet the fact remains that I work, and that corporations capture the value I create, resulting in my exploitation.”
Exploitation is it? My, haven’t times changed.
The actors’ and screenwriters’ strikes have been a complete disaster. Many independents went bust, many actors went without work and income, power was further concentrated in the big studios and the newer players like Netflix and Amazon. They could not have designed a better strategy to keep themselves at the top of the whole machine.
One of the factors missing from this piece is the question of who the union represents. The union which ostensibly represented me spent far more money on political issues which in no way impacted actual working conditions than on contract negotiations. Union membership is far more diverse in the current age, and union leaders seem economically and socially far removed from those who are paying their salaries.
US union membership has plummeted. But young workers are organising, pushing companies to rise to the occasion and meet their demands for better conditions on the job. https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20230831-the-gen-zers-leading-a-new-pro-union-push
Freddie deBoer represents his position as much more poweless than it really is. He is selling his books and articles through a variety of platforms on terms that are negotiated between the parties. He is not necessarily being exploited just because the platforms he uses are owned by corporations. To claim that he does not own the means of production (Substack does) is wrong. He owns his computer. Substack is merely the method he chooses to disseminate his material. Other than that, an interesting account of trade unions in today’s USA.
And on a side point, divorce rates are low because many fewer people have been getting married. Separation rates of unmarried couples are sky high.
One compelling argument for unions to engage more deeply in political activities, beyond their traditional role as protectors against labor exploitation, is illustrated by the historical example of Nicolas Fouquet. Despite Fouquet’s significant wealth and influence, his lack of political leverage ultimately led to his downfall. This underscores the crucial understanding that true power lies not merely in financial resources or personal connections, but in the ability to influence and shape policy and regulations within the political sphere.
The author hit on the biggest reason that private unions are declining In one sentence (very short term stays) and then the employee moves on. An Amazon distribution worker thinks of his job as a way stop on to something else. Very difficult to organize employees under those circumstances. Ditto for many other jobs.
Public employees have a vastly different mindset and their employee union dues go to promote cultural issues (gun restrictions, open borders, decriminalize anything but the most awful crimes, right to abortion up to end of term). Try any of those policies on unionized workers in manufacturing, mining, construction, or transportation and see the response of the rank and file.
In my last C-suite employment in the construction industry, we (management and overwhelmingly Republican) proposed a company policy banning guns and other dangerous weapons on company or customer property. The blow back from the field employees (generally bluedog Democrats) was a vehement “no”. We compromised by caving in and forbidding weapons within our office walls and in client’s buildings but they could have whatever was legal in their vehicles and on job sites.
Union organizers are woke and share views that Rob Henderson calls “luxury beliefs” (see elsewhere on Unherd for Freddy Sayers interview of Rob). Union workers and potential unionized workers know that electric vehicles means 30% less labor, an illegal will work for less and frequently under the table, and they don’t want anyone telling their son Jose that he might be a girl. I could go on, but you should get the picture. Unions are a tough sell if it giveth with one hand and taketh away with the other.
The trajectory for unions is largely public unions, comprised mostly of women, frequently unmarried and woke.
No, Joe Biden is the first president to stand in a picket line.
That makes up for all that other stuff.