I love unions in American fictional media. The Wire seasons two is centered around the dockworkers who take bribes and are arguing about how corrupt they should be (I’m biased since it’s the most boring season by far). Ozark features a union on the periphery which is introduced by a man carjacking a truck and kneecaping the driver with a shotgun. Can’t wait to see what’s up next.
> I’m biased since it’s the most boring season by far
That season has really grown on me over time and rewatches. It has a lot of great character work on Omar, Avon, Stringer, McNulty, Prezbo, Freeman, etc.; Ziggy, Nick, Sobotka is peak tragedy with a lot of fun along the way.
You may be right that it's not as exciting as other seasons, but I personally would call it boring and it sets up and deepens _so_ much of what comes after.
Every season in The Wire is a mix of new and old groups of characters (except the first of course). Is s2 really notably extra focused on s1 characters? If it is I didn't notice, though I can't say I've counted either.
Season 2 helps explain how the drugs come into the city. It shows how the cops get reassigned to hammer on which ever nail is currently sticking its head up once they've hammered the current one back down. It shows how nails can work their way free and pop their heads back up requiring the attention of the hammer again. If only the cops could figure out how to use screws instead.
Don't forget the classic film On the Waterfront. Considered one of the greatest movies ever made and adapted from "Crime on the Waterfront," a 24-article series by the New York Sun's Malcolm Johnson that received the second prize ever awarded for Local Reporting, in 1949.
> In a vocation where loss of limb (and even life) was not uncommon, prospective workers — in a field disproportionately comprised of working-class African-Americans and whites of Italian and Irish descent who did not benefit from the upward mobility of the G.I. Bill — were forced to offer kickbacks to syndicate representatives at the daily "shape-up," in which prospective workers were forced to compete against each other to secure work irrespective of union membership. At any time, workers could be virtually blacklisted from subsequent employment for arbitrary purposes in the union's "blue books," their jobs often requisitioned by members of the syndicate who were completing prison sentences.
Yeah, just ask the DOJ!?!?!? Is this supposed to be a joke? Unions in the US have been corrupt ever since the Taft Hartley act kneecapped them, but it's absurd to take the DOJ's word for any of this.
I love that season. The most boring season to me is the 5th season where they jumped the shark and the stupid journo. I really like the "Greek" and his crew, especially Vandos. His line about "why can't they just kick the ball with their feet" cracks me up with his confusion over basketball.
But why do you seem to have this thing that union members are above committing crimes like those depicted you've called out? We know that unions are heavily influenced by organized crime. Why do you think that even if the union isn't controlled by OC, why would you think individual members wouldn't be susceptible to working side hustles?
and why might that be? because your normal day to day person that pays their dues, goes to work, gets paid is a boring story. there's no news there. there's no there there. union member gets caught committing a crime while using their position in the union or with the protection of the union is news and plenty of people find that interesting. nobody cares about some start up, but tell the story of how the startup became a rocketship to the moon because their founder created a bro culture that rewarded shady practices of using the information they collect on their users to try to make those reporting on the shady practices look bad, then you have a much more interesting story. There's never been a biopic made about the founders of Lyft, like for Uber. Never was a biopic made about Tom and MySpace like there was about the Zuck.
Okay fine. I was naive about the influence of organized crime on unions in America. And if you’re gonna make a union a central thing in a crime series (The Wire) then it doesn’t make sense for it to be “legit”.
hmm its not a "class" in the old social order sense.. aligned interests? what is allowed? maybe.. another angle is that govt is also shown as corrupt plenty of times in other places.. also lawyers .. also doctors.. just about all the professions.. Hollywood has to hook the viewer on the story, so yes they deal in stereotypes. Assigning "class" as a motivator is slightly dim, in the modern times IMHO
Background: I completed my union IBEW apprenticeship in Texas.
Comment on article: I read books more than I work (often!), and this article was wayyyyyyy tooooooo longgggggggggg. The point of effective communication is to be just concise enough to still retain your readership (I stopped reading a little less than half way).
Comment on unions: I am currently supporting UAW's current push to unionize Chattanooga's Volkswagon Plant; my posit to neighbors is "if unions actually rewarded blue collar employees worse, why would the corporate executives be rallying so hard with propaganda against organized labor?!"
"if unions actually rewarded blue collar employees worse, why would the corporate executives be rallying so hard with propaganda against organized labor?!"
Because the world isn't a war between workers and employers. It's not a zero-sum game. Businesses create value by turning less-valuable inputs from society (fundamentally, labor) into more-valuable outputs to society (cars, haircuts, etc). It's a positive-sum game. Unions add a lot of friction to this process, causing everybody to be worse off overall. Business leaders care about creating more outputs to society. Unions work against that goal.
Some of the best, highest-paying companies aren't unionized, even within a specific industry, unless legally required. Unions succeed by suppressing change, which works well enough in government and stodgy old industries which often amount to arms of the government anyway: education, healthcare, automotive, transportation, etc.
Businesses fight against unions because they don't want the light to go out.
>Because the world isn't a war between workers and employers. It's not a zero-sum game.
>Business leaders care about creating more outputs to society.
How do you square these ideas with record profits and record executive compensation, juxtaposed with decades of wage stagnation and the dramatically expanding wealth gap? That gap now has 1% of the population owning over 30.6% of the wealth.
In the context of this discussion, it doesn't matter if the game is positive-sum, if the overwhelming rewards from the created value accrue to a tiny percentage.
Wasn’t that always the case? There may have been a small post world war 2 blip where the distribution was slightly flatter in the United States. But in the past that may have been worse (as in a few kings and nobles owning most of the wealth).
Executive compensation is an issue. And it is regularly brought up when unions are mentioned. But I doubt cutting executive compensation even by 75% would result in the amount of money to satisfy union demands on healthcare, job security and retirement.
Your problem is the stock market punishes companies that don’t have cash flow. Union demands ebb that cash flow and no amount of executive compensation reduction will make up for it. Keep in mind I’m specifically talking executives, not founders. Founders own shares in their companies and that cannot be considered compensation.
CEO-to-worker comp was 20-to-1 in 1965. In 2021 it was 399-to-1. [0]
CEO comp rose 1,460% from 1978 to 2021. Worker comp rose 18.1% over that period. [0]
>Your problem is the stock market punishes companies that don’t have cash flow
The idea that the company's sole responsibility is to "maximize shareholder value" has become a bit of a meme in its elevation to the status of some codified fiduciary duty. In fact, it's derived from the musings of a single economist (albeit a pretty influential one). No surprise that was uttered in 1970, just prior to the sharp increases in compensation disparity. It could be credibly argued that this canard has been used as the "moral" pretext for measuring and rewarding CEOs and shareholders to the detriment of workers. "Yes, we're redirecting trillions from workers to executives and shareholders, but you see, that's our moral obligation as a company with a single overriding missive".
So, used here as ostensible justification for suppressing worker wages (i.e. to avoid being "punished" by the stock market), it's a bit circular.
But, ironically, your positing it as credible rationale for resisting unions underscores its pernicious effectiveness.
I’m saying it’s probably the major driver of why unions are resisted. Shareholder value = value for hedge funds = value for 401k accounts. The perverse relationship is that union resistance and offshoring is a necessity for better security in retirement for those who can afford it. It’s not a healthy measure. We do need something better than that.
Cutting ceo pay isn’t going to do much. Irrespective of how much that is reduced you’re not going to be able to cover cost increases of all that unions demand - unless you decide to reduce shareholder value. Now, this means funds may no longer invest in your company which in turn causes a whole downward spiral in stock.
We need to cut the link between retirement funds and the stock market. If you see ironically the 401k of union employees are most likely invested in companies that bust unions.
>I’m saying it’s probably the major driver of why unions are resisted.
Yes, I understood your meaning. I was countering that, while the concerns about shareholder value and stock prices are often used as justification for suppressing wages or resisting unions, it's really just a circular argument. They essentially do it, reward themselves as shareholders and leadership, then justify it by claiming they had to do it because they demanded they do it.
But, there is no moral or legal obligation to put shareholder value above equitable treatment of workers, as they claim. In fact, I'd argue it's the other way around.
>Shareholder value = value for hedge funds = value for 401k accounts.
Bringing 401Ks into the equation is another bit of obfuscation which implies that their actions are lifting all boats and workers also benefit. But, in reality, it's just another form of compensation that is wildly inequtiable.
>unless you decide to reduce shareholder value...this means funds may no longer invest in your company
This is the crux of it. I don't think it's a foregone conclusion that it would lead to divestiture, but that shouldn't be avoided at the expense of workers.
Why should the leadership get such outsized executive comp and massively disproportionate upside on the stock? Worse, why should they actually be incentivized to be hostile to their workers (e,g. suppress wages and implement layoffs to boost quarterly profits)?
In short, why do we accept that workers should come last? Part of the issue here is that we've accepted corporate personhood as a real thing, wherein we are somehow morally obligated to protect corporations at the expense of actual people.
>We need to cut the link between retirement funds and the stock market.
Globalization is a contributor and so is technology.
But, at the end of the day, it's down to how companies choose to distrubute the gains created from lower costs and higher productivity. One easy way to see the inequity here is to eliminate workers from the equation and look at the meteoric rise in CEO comp alone. That metric is 1,460% from 1978 to 2021. [0]
Bringing workers back into it (for context), their increase over the same period was just 18.1%. [0]
Another offset to the globalization argument is that unemployment has hit lower levels than during periods of much more equitable compensation priorities, yet wages still remained stagnant. You might say, "well, yeah, but the jobs that were replaced were higher paying", which would be true for some sectors like manufacturing. But, again, these are company decisions, and many other sectors that remained healthy have still seen nothing near the rise in executive comp. Keep in mind that increases in worker skill have also contributed greatly to productivity.
And, this doesn't even get into stock buybacks and other "financial engineering" that redistribute what might've otherwise been used to more fairly compensate workers to investors and other stakeholders instead.
Organized labor was a proven way to ensure gains were distributed more equitably to workers. It's no coincidence that decades of breaking unions coincided with the detachment of their wages from productivity.
You've got a couple of statements here that belie assumptions that aren't very accurate.
> Business leaders care about creating more outputs to society.
This is untrue. The reason markets work at all is arguably that it's untrue. Business leaders care about generating rewards for themselves. Markets are a mechanism that ensure that it is profitable to create more outputs to society.
This is a really important concept. Amazon doesn't exist because Jeff Bezos is a selfless individual who cares deeply about making sure every American has free next-day shipping. It exists because Jeff Bezos wants to make money, and the market demonstrates that selling products with free next-day shipping is a desire that other people have, and therefore it will be profitable for him to fulfil that need. Markets are about assigning value to desires, and using that value to ensure that goods and services are traded efficiently and flexibly across the whole market without someone needing to coordinate things from the top.
This is (mostly) a good thing - efficient distribution of services across a market is why we like markets and tend to use them a lot across our economy. But we need to be honest about how and why they with, and it's not because business leaders are trying to be selfless to society.
On the other hand,
> Unions work against that goal.
This is also untrue. From a market perspective, unions are a collective bargaining tool used by workers selling their work. In the same way that it's easier for a handful of truck drivers to collect together and form a business, rather than each independently set their own price for their labour, so is it often easier and more efficient for a group of workers to collect together to form a union.
But like with any market, while people can haggle over the best price, the item must be sold at some point in order for all parties to get their rewards. If you've got a melon that you want to sell for $100, but no-one will buy it at that price, then all you'll have at the end of the day is a mouldy melon. Similarly, workers in a union want to sell their labour, because if they don't and the business collapses, they're all out of a job.
In that regard, a union is a tool used by people selling their labour in the market in order to achieve the best price for them (in this regard, they are just like the business owners from before, where the market uses their personal desires to generate value across the whole market).
In fairness, this is a very simple model, and so it doesn't tell the whole story. Markets have failure modes such as monopolies where the simple analysis of market efficiency tends to break down. On the other hand, if a worker cannot sell their labour, then they cannot eat and cannot access housing, which in practice puts a lot more power in the hands of the person buying labour then the person selling it. It's important to remember that the market model is just one tool that we have for managing resources, and in practice most successful countries use a mix of markets and government intervention to provide efficient access to goods and services across the economy while also preventing common failure modes. Rules to protect workers and unions are part of that mix.
But, despite its simplicity, the market model still helps explain the interactions between businesses and workers better than the naive approach that says that unions are bad and want businesses to die, and business owners are good and want to freely distribute value to the economy. I hope this comment demonstrates that a bit.
The Texas Monthly is not known for short concise prose. The pint of some effective communication is to be concise, some is to provide as much detail as possible. More and more I see comments like this that assume that everyone wants a bullet point list as the entire article like they can only handle tweet length content. Some people enjoy the longer prose providing the hows/whens/wheres/whys of how the points were arrived upon.
And before he was California's governor (and later POTUS), he was head of SAG-AFTRA (the actors' union) and even led them on strike in 1960 to protest how movie actors weren't getting any money when old movies were shown on TV (similar to how in the recent strike the issue was about actors not getting money from streaming). His views on unions were pretty hypocritical to say the least.
He was head of SAG it hadn't yet merged with AFTRA. As leader of SAG he helped break the CSU strike and served as a friendly witness for the House Committee on Unamerican Activities.
"Hank Milam was a businessman with $20,000 in equipment and a firm faith in the rules of the game. He took on the union that had ruled the Houston docks for fifty years and beat it on its own turf."
I'm definitely in favor of breaking up the dockworkers/longshormans unions. I don't see why we should let a small group of people hold the whole economy hostage just to enrich themselves.
Don't forget the Jones Act (1920), which was originally designed to protect domestic shipping, which it immediately killed, and which now serves to protect domestic trucking.
So if you want to transport something from Northern California to Southern, you MUST truck it, even if you could afford to wait a few weeks. It's incredibly bad for the environment, and much less efficient.
The American merchant marine was bigger than it ever was in the decades following the passage of that act. 1940s was the era of the liberty ships!
The Jones act was passed in 1920 because the merchant marine had been withering away in the decades leading up to WWI. WWI was an "oh shit" moment for the US when it realized that if it had been more directly involved in the shooting war it wouldn't have any ships to fight in it.
Arguably it worked as intended because the American flag fleet was large and modern by 1942 when the US found itself in a shooting war across two oceans.
This isn't due to the dockworkers. This is due to everything after the cargo is offloaded. LA and Longbeach are a disaster because the rail network is incredibly mismanaged.
Union Pacific has decided that they will only run unit trains out of the inland empire to a few destinations north and east.
In order to get cargo from LA and Longbeach to those inland terminals thousands of truck movements have to occur across LA's congested freeway network every day. And if the container's not going to one of the preselected locations (Chicago, St Louis, DFW, a few others) it has to go the whole way by truck.
Recall the "solution" to the blockage during the pandemic was to stack containers even higher. This is because the problem wasn't with offloading the containers, it was the trucking (drayage) getting them out of the port and to either the railheads ("intermodal ports") in the inland empire, or to their destination.
If we don't want a small group of people to hold the economy hostage to enrich themselves, then we should be looking at corporations and the ultra-wealthy.
I am always shocked by the mental model that despises labor power but is okay with the bug in our socioeconomic system where ultra wealthy people and corporations are allowed to wield such unelected power. Humans are strange.
It's perhaps not as shocking if one reflects upon the negative experiences individuals have with each.
I have personally experienced multiple negative experiences in my personal and professional lives directly related to labor unions, but Jeff Bezos has had nearly zero identifiable impact on my life. Possible exception: a Jeff Bezos donation is paying for a nearby shelter for homeless families.
I'm not necessarily opposed to collective bargaining, but I can give you a litany of crap I've had to deal with over the years because of unions, itemized with i's dotted and t's crossed, and I simply cannot do the same for the supposedly awful wealth inequality I live with every day.
Temporarily embarrassed aristocrats, in this case.
"Temporarily embarrassed millionaire" refers to working-class people who oppose progressive liberal policies because they think they might have some future windfall that puts them in the capitalist class.
> I'm definitely in favor of breaking up the *capitalists*. I don't see why we should let a small group of people hold the whole economy hostage just to enrich themselves.
See what I did there?
The hostility to unions on this forum comes near exclusively from American posters, who coincidentally, have very poor workers rights compared to anywhere in the UK/EU/EEA.
Unions provide a balance of power to employers. The made our work places safer, gave us holidays and fair pay.
