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Not an effortpost, just a casual summary of a court case in which people may be interested:
Audrey Stone was a Southwest flight attendant, and also the president of the flight attendants' union. In her capacity as union president, she attended an pro-abortion protest and at that rally implicitly represented all the flight attendants at Southwest. Specifically, she carried signs with the Southwest logo on them, and the expenses of union members who attended the protest were paid for using union funds.
Charlene Carter was another Southwest flight attendant, who had left the union several years prior and was in active opposition to the union (including leading a recall campaign against Stone). She was opposed to abortion, and therefore was angered by Stone's implicit representation that all of Southwest's flight attendants were in favor of abortion. On Facebook, she sent to Stone various anti-abortion messages, including graphic videos of aborted fetuses.
Stone complained to Southwest, which fired Carter for "representing our company in a manner that is disparaging to Southwest Flight Attendants". An arbitrator confirmed that the firing was supported by "just cause" under the applicable collective-bargaining agreement.
Carter (1) sued the union for failing to properly represent her in the complaint process, (2) sued both the union and Southwest for retaliating against her due to her protected speech (both union-related and religion-related), and (3) sued both the union and Southwest for discriminating against her due to her religious beliefs. A jury agreed that all of these charges were valid, and awarded to her millions of dollars in damages. Due to federal law, the judge capped the damages at 600 k$ in compensatory and punitive damages, 150 k$ in backpay, and 60 k$ in pre-judgment interest.
On the basis of the jury verdict, Carter also asked for an injunction (1) reinstating her to her former position, (2) forbidding Southwest from violating its flight attendants' rights to religious speech and union-related speech in the future, and (3) requiring Southwest to inform all its flight attendants of item 2, including an explicit mention of Title VII (which protects religious speech). The judge granted the request. Southwest apparently asked for some parts of the ruling to be stayed pending appeal, but it did not ask for part 3 to be stayed.
Southwest then openly defied part 3 of the judge's ruling, and instead sent to all its flight attendants a message (1) stating that Southwest would continue to enforce its policies and (2) failing to mention Title VII. Accordingly, Carter moved that Southwest be held in contempt of court.
The judge investigated, and found that the memo circulated to the flight attendants was drafted by one of Southwest's in-house lawyers (Kevin Minchey), who obviously should know better than to willfully defy the judge in this manner.
Therefore the judge: (1) told Southwest to distribute a specific message verbatim, without edits, in order to comply with part 3 of the ruling; and (2), as sanction for this willful disobedience of the court's order, required three of Southwest's in-house lawyers (including Minchey), as representatives of Southwest itself, to undergo at least eight hours of religious-liberty training conducted by a representative of the Alliance Defending Freedom, since the lawyers obviously don't understand religious-liberty law properly.
Relevant court documents:
232 (denial of summary judgment)
374 (confirmation of jury verdict)
467 (grant of sanctions)
483 (denial of stay of sanctions)
The Washington Post complains that "Southwest had a constitutional right to issue a memo expressing its disagreement with the jury verdict". The judge's response to this argument is: Speech can be compelled by the government as long as it is narrowly tailored to serve a compelling government interest. Making sure that Southwest's flight attendants are aware of their rights under Title VII is a compelling government interest, and the message that the judge is forcing Southwest to send is as narrowly tailored to that interest as possible. Also, the message ordered by the judge is significantly less objectionable than the longer notice (including an apology) that Carter originally asked the judge to force Southwest to send.
The Washington Post complains that "subjecting lawyers to training by an ideological advocacy group such as ADF", rather than "by accredited law schools", is "ludicrous". But the judge points out that ADF has won multiple Supreme Court cases on the topic of religious liberty in recent years, so it obviously is well-qualified to conduct a training session on that topic.
Interesting case. Now I disagree with unions (in most cases) and I believe you should be allowed to fire someone because they are a Christian and vice versa or because they have a skin color you don’t like.
But since there is a union involved I definitely think special protections should be involved. The flight attendant can’t bargain for herself and work in her chosen profession. It’s not a free market. It’s already at its core a coercive relationship where she’s forced to join the union.
Stones her union rep by government force. So she certainly should have to deal with the complaints of her constituency. Without knowing all the legalese here it feels like this was decided correctly.
But a core part of this to me comes from unions only existing because of government violence. Otherwise they wouldn’t exists.
There are a small amount of unions that would freely appear without government. Construction is one potential area as project may be short-lived and both sides of the transaction would prefer to work with an organization verifying worker quality.
The solution in a free market (works best when it’s a constant costs business like airlines and not firms with moats who can discriminate) would be for the wrong thinkers or wrong skin pigment bidding their labor cheaper than the right thinkers and the firm hiring the wrong thinkers makes more money.
Sure, they can give up a vast majority of a union's powers and survive without government backing. Let's compare what a theoretical non-government-backed collection of employees could do relative to a union (under my local laws).
On inception, a collection of employees that got buy-in from 51% of the employees would consist of 51% of the employees. A union would consist of 100%. (Technically you have the ability to refuse membership, but you are forced to pay membership dues regardless.)
If the company doesn't like working with the employees (for whatever reason), it can fire them. If it doesn't like working with a union, it's stuck. Similarly, it can hire replacement workers if they stop showing up for work (It can also do that against unions now, but couldn't before 2008).
If the company shuts down its location, the employees get laid off. If the company shuts down a unionized location, then the union hold power over the vacant building and must be reinstated when someone else buys it.
Some type of unions being able to exist without government backing isn't much of an argument that the currently existing ones could. Heck, I'm not sure if your "bunch of employees [that] agree to bargain together" even deserves to be called a union.
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Then the airline would hirer different workers. Unions primarily only exists because the Gov gives them special rights. And if the employer violates those rights they sue and the government then uses violence at some stage of the dispute to enforce their ruling.
In my country for most unions at least joining is optional - I joined the union for retail workers when I was a retail worker, and in exchange for a small reduction in my paycheck (about the price of a single homecooked meal a month) I received access to a bunch of services provided by the union. I was happy to support it anyway because they'd also negotiated several really useful concessions and pay-raises. I haven't joined the union for my current industry because the last I checked it was captured by ethnic nepotists who believed that the best answer to falling wages and increased competition in the industry was to massively increase immigration of indian workers into the country.
I think the union was a net good - and companies could absolutely hire non-union workers, who were mostly travellers and students who took the job on a very temporary basis. Most workers just joined the union because it legitimately worked out to be a better deal for them, even beyond the additional negotiating power. I'm struggling to understand your opposition to unions here because the kind of organisation you're describing just doesn't have anything to do with the unions I've encountered in the real world.
Well American ones all promote things I think are awful.
From a broader point unions are bad for society but can be good for individual workers.
The best example in the US was when the big three automakers controlled the US market for cars before Japanese cars entered the market. Auto unions could negotiate hirer wages and since all 3 auto unions had to use auto union labor the automakers had the same costs which means they could all pass the higher autoworker wages on to everyone else.
You know who suffered? Every American who had to pay higher auto costs but didn’t work in a protected industry and couldn’t get similar wages. Everyone else losts.
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