Most of my shop-floor life was spent in union shops. USW, UAW, IWA, Ironworkers... probably a few more. It wasn't that I couldn't hold down a job. I just got bored.
But I did gain some insights into union politics. Not that I was into union politics; I was an IWA shop steward for a few months, and that's it, but I have a few observations.
At the factory level, unions are very democratic. Anybody can run for anything. General apathy has been killing that democracy since as long as I can remember.
Guys get a job at a union shop. They're grateful for the extra pay and the benefits and all. They might even make it to a few union meetings.
Six months down the road, they don't bother with the meetings anymore. They've convinced themselves that the enhanced standard of living they've enjoyed since they joined the union shop is due not to the union, but to their own merit. Six months after that, half of them are convinced the union is holding them back.
That's what's at the root of shop-floor folks voting conservative while the leadership goes in the other direction.
Meanwhile, in the upper echelons of the major unions, a bureaucratic elite took hold, as they do in any organization, left, right, fascist, commie... it's the same dynamic whether we're talking about a department store chain or a NGO. (A quick shout-out to my old Soc prof Sam Sidlofsky. We had this discussion forty years ago.)
Once the union bosses are making pay packets that resemble those of the corporate bosses, they soon find themselves living in the same neighbourhoods. Their kids are in the same schools. Before you know it, they're golfing together at the same country club!
Once the big unions began to debase themselves by acquiescing to two-tier contracts, they made themselves irrelevant. There is no possible way the next generation could buy in after you signed deals that specified in dollars and cents how much less worthy they were.
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