This skips a step. Who gave the strikers the right to choose this for the entire workforce? If my coworker says "I strike" and I stay at my desk, does that make me a "scab"? The article gives no information about who the workers are, how many of their fellow workers they represent, how long they've been doing the job. I'm not sure what would qualify them to speak for everybody, but it's got to be more than giving a quote to NPR, and surely it depends how many of them there are, relative to their coworkers.
Yes. Call it scab, strikebreaker, whatever; you are undermining your coworkers' demands and weakening the strike. Of course it's not easy to strike, but it's necessary if you support their demands. You show solidarity and support by striking with your coworkers. It's most powerful when done as a whole block.
Yes.
Are you part of a union, with the striking worker?
Yes: you are a scab
No: you are not a scab
Then you have a strike.
If a few coworkers get together and declare a strike, you are not obligated to join them. Even if the majority get together, you are not obligated, because you had no say in the matter. That is the point of the union.
You assume the striker always has the moral high ground, why?
That's a big assumption. I've lived this. When I worked in a union job, I was forced to hand over a part of my paycheck to my union who did absolutely nothing for me when management went hostile without cause. As far as I could tell, the union was a gigantic executive/manager pyramid which was supporting its lifestyle on our backs. No bathroom break, no breaks at all- literally law breaking- no protection from management abuse of any form.
This is the case in a lot of jobs. The facts on the ground as I lived them are- unions do nothing for workers. They run campaigns for Democrats. Democrats empower unions. The worker still gets screwed.
Give me a right to work state and enforcement against past jobs badmouthing former employees - which is something no one ever enforces or in any way patrols for employers doing and which is ruinous to working people's prospects- and I'll be fine.
What's the ultimate goal- to serve and support unions or make life better for the working person? Because they aren't the same thing.
Then it's clear you don't support their demands. You're siding with management and not your fellow coworkers.
That's fine, just know that your choice doesn't fully support their demands and is hurting their movement.
The question is, what are the actual norms that determine it, and are the current strikers meeting those norms, or have they simply gotten some media attention? By the way, I'm not saying their demands aren't reasonable.
The main benefits of a union tend to manifest in the collective set of workers actually being able to set up infrastructure for command, control, and communication. Things like retaining legal representation for members, emergency war chests, and collective bargaining.
>I was forced to hand over a part of my paycheck to my union who did absolutely nothing for me when management went hostile without cause.
How do you mean? Did they not get you representation? We're you not afforded any protection? Did your Union rep stone wall, or just figure you were a lost cause?
I'm genuinely curious. I've been trying to find examples of Union failure states to compare with the pre-Taft-Hartley era unions. The statistics are clear that Unions worked for the group's amongst which they gained traction. At least when the tables weren't so tilted that even an outright failure was better than not trying.
>The facts on the ground as I lived them are- unions do nothing for workers. They run campaigns for Democrats. Democrats empower unions. The worker still gets screwed.
How? Gory details please. I'm aware that there is generally some level of "the Union didn't do enough"; but again, without details it's hard to try to posit what one can do/not do in order to get the best out of a collective bargaing unit.
Also, as some historical evidence to prop up your case, back during WWII, I think it was the steelworker's union that ended up giving organized labor a black eye. I think what these folks are asking for is reasonable; and the expectation at large is going to be the firm's need to accomodate
Forced to hand over == I had no choice. Forced to.
Do nothing for me == I was "reassigned" after someone accused me, without anything even remotely resembling proof, of something people in my position were accused of every day in every workplace covered by this union. Enduring baseless accusations are a part of this job. That's why we have CCTV cameras.
This was not an unusual accusation. I was not fired; I was reassigned to a place the company keeps for the specific purpose of making people quit- it's physically unendurable by anyone, generated no revenue for the company and existed as I said to make people quit.
So the company had a reliable supply of pretenses from third parties they were free to ignore- or act on- and a location whose existence was malignantly designed to force people to quit.
Unions play this game with the employers. We will pretend we don't know what you're doing and represent to our members there's nothing we can do.
They could have, for instance brought to bear the fact that this reassignment place had zero value to the company and had never been manned, ever, and generated no -zero- revenue , but did have the redeeming quality of making anyone who was assigned there quit.
They could have referenced the fact that the company receives 100s of complaints per year all of which they dismiss for total lack of evidence and this was one exactly like those except for the fact that the CCTV evidence exactly contradicted the complainant's assertions. They could have said that.
But that would create an antagonistic relationship between them and their partner and to what ends? What good would it do them? Besides, there's more than one way to skin a cat, right?
In highly unionized workplaces, all that happens is the employer antagonizes and provokes the employee until they quit. That's clever, but sometimes it backfires if the employee digs in. Then we all read about it in the papers; we know this as "going postal".
That's right.. the postal office, that bastion of union strength has a managerial policy of continuing to turn up the heat on an otherwise un-fireable employee until they quit, which most do but now and then one of them "goes postal".
Just have decent working condition laws, a right to work, and vigorously enforce the laws against smearing past employees and you'll have a market where employees are truly free to leave and be hired elsewhere.
Since you're interested in management-labor relations you might also want to know I was working in Silicon Valley when the whole Apple-Google-HM-and-Every-Other-Company-Known-To-Man / Do-Not-Hire scandal went down. Actually, I could have become a claimant in that.
Here's the deal. Companies are going to do whatever they want. Getting caught and fined is cheaper than obeying the law and to the extent that isn't true, then we have a container ship worth of dirty tricks we're willing to play on our employees, just like they did me. They have "labor shortages" and "narratives about how Americans aren't interested in STEM and all the rest of this garbage... it never ends.
No cop of any form is going to stop them; policing them just gives false hope to employees, and creates a false trail for researchers to fumble over. Unions shops and Amazon, both, do whatever they want.
So let them- within clear safety strictures (but see Amazon's forklift scandal in Indiana a few months ago to see how THOSE laws all worked out). Then we all know what reality is and we can negotiate it. Just let employees move on unmolested- which is what the aforementioned Google et. al. scandal was trying to prevent- and the market will work.
That's good odds on average.