• ZosoRocks @lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Is this an American thing? Why would anyone be anti union (apart from the given example of getting a job)? Even the decimated unions of the UK are still thought to be fairly positive seeking for better rights. Genuinely asking.

    • schnokobaer@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      Ironically I know a lot of German employees who range from sceptical to outright anti-union. They are mostly East-Germans, and my attempt of an explanation is that for them, unions used to belong to the founding and ruling East German Socialist Party SED and thus they connect it with oppression and patronisation from the elite ruling class. They don’t have any arguments either, when you ask them what they have against it and whether they know that we have weekends and maximum working hours and paid sick leave due to unions they go yea of course of course, but… idk man… I don’t see how I would profit from it… and all the strikes man, it only hurts the economy man… It’s a bit like yeah but apart from sanitisation, wine, the aqueducts, schools, democracy, what have the Romans done for us?!

      And then of course some are thoroughly brainwashed an-caps who think people must be stinking rich or stinking of the excrements in the street they live in, no in-between, and hate unions for fighting just that.

    • kmkz_ninja@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I doubt it’s a uniquely American thing, but yeah, there’s a lot of anti-union sentiment in America for good but mostly bad reasons.

      Some modern unions have overstepped their reach (IMO) at the expense of the people their members are supposed to serve.

      Mostly, it’s propoganda. Or whatever you call the process that makes people accept tax cuts on billion dollar companies (already at the lowest rate America has ever seen) or a predatory healthcare system.

      • ChihuahuaOfDoom@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Police unions need to go, pretty much all other unions are good though many could use some reform. There is a guy at my work who is rarely on time, calls out sick constantly, has verbally threatened co-workers and supervisors and totalled a $100,000 truck and the union keeps going to bat for him and there seems to be one of those guys at every union shop I’ve been a member of. I am pro union but I just wish they would do better at picking their battles and ditched toxic motherfuckers who make the rest of us miserable.

        • Anamnesis@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Police unions need to be abolished for the same reason that ordinary unions need to be preserved: unions protect workers. And the police already have fucking guns and can arrest you on flimsy pretexts. They do not need to be protected.

        • Roboticide@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Exactly this. Police unions should go. The UAW is pretty rotten too. The DoJ cleaned them up a little bit in the last few years with those corruption charges, but working with UAW in the plant is a crapshoot. Some are fine, some are shitheads just exploiting the fact that they can do basically anything and not be fired. And the workplace environment in non-union automotive plants is so much better than union plants and the pay comparable enough, it makes you wonder what benefit the UAW currently really provides.

          But teachers, teamsters, actors, Starbucks even… Those unions are doing some good work.

      • ZosoRocks @lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Care to venture a split on the good/bad? UK is the same to an extent with gov. decrying strikes in the last year but most professionals at least are still in a union.