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Real Nice Economy You Got Here. Be A Shame If Someone Broke It
This clip of Harold Daggett is popping up all over twitter. The immediate aesthetics are comical; the accent, the glasses, the jewelry. If it looks like a mobster and sounds like a mobster....
There's enough discussion on the Presidential Race in the VP debate threads. The CW angle here is how the image of the "American Union Man" has always been 99% hagiography. They have been lionized in Bruce Springsteen songs and other pop culture kitsch since the 1990s at least, but the hard economics stopped working in the 1970s. Unions are a tax on everything downstream of them. Functionally, it's racketeering and extortion. They owe their bewildering continued existence to the fact that they function as a bedrock reliable voting bloc with lockstep leadership control .... until now?
We had the teamsters refuse to back any candidate earlier. Your modal longshoreman is almost certainly a Trump voter. But Trump despises Unions. So ... what's happening?
I’d say they owe their continued existence to the fact that they are rationally, game-theoretically correct. Your employer does not need you. It needs people like you. Why shouldn’t you bargain as a group?
Yes, they levy a tax, and we could do things cheaper without them. “Cheapness” isn’t the only goal worth pursuing. Something resembling “fairness” has its own place in the American mythology, and unions were lionized because they flattered that goal. The further they get from that motte, the less support they’ll see from left and right.
I'm seeing a lot of kinda lukewarm pro-union takes here there don't really capture the current situation.
This isn't a normal union.
It's a mostly hereditary union that is segregated along racial lines. The members get paid gobs of money, with a median wage north of $150k per year. Foremen can pull down up to $500k a year. The union boss makes $1 million a year (plus whatever illegal takes he draws), drives a Bentley and recently sold his 77 foot yacht. He is closely connected to the Genovese mob family and a witness was killed to protect him from RICO charges in 2005.
This one really isn't big business vs. hardworking blue collar types. It's more like feudal lords vs. petty barons. The oppressed peasantry are not represented on either side of the table. There is no fairness here.
A hereditary union (not officially) segregated along racial lines. Sounds right up the alley of some of the folks here, interestingly.
In what ways could these unions be considered EHC? I mean they've clearly managed to get one over on all of us. That takes skill.
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