NEW ORLEANS—Multibillionaire Elon Musk won and workers lost as a three-judge panel of the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the National Labor Relations Board’s structure is unconstitutional.
The most fundamental challenge in unionization in the USA is choosing a union to affiliate with vs. trying to be independent. Changing later is very challenging, amounting to a decert and reunionization, so choosing “correctly” the first time is important.
While most unions you can affiliate with are lackluster to say the least, the main challenge to being independent is you will lack strike funds, logistical support, and legal support that some affiliate-able unions would provide. Management tends to realize this and subsequently bullies the new union.
This really is the main actual question in US trade unionism: how to bridge that challenge. To improve existing unions to suck less? To make independent unions more viable? To make something in-between? All of these are actually very difficult and at the end of the whole ordeal you can still end up with a union with petty bourgeois interests that won’t work with your socialist org on a labor campaign.
With few exceptions you don’t even really get to choose who you affiliate with though. You either end up with the Teamsters or an AFL-CIO affiliate that was granted your employer as “turf” twenty plus years ago. If neither of them consider you a worthwhile investment then good fucking luck getting any help.
And then if you do affiliate they’ll tell you first contracts are always shitty and ram one through so they can get a security agreement in and start collecting dues.
That’s another good point I forgot to mention: often no unions will even take you. A shop will be ready to go, an easy win, but none of the relevant unions do anything because the shop is “too small”. The next least bad version is what you refered to: only one union will take you and they kind of suck. Though in my experience Teamsters can be pretty militant despite the union’s overall right wing tendencies.
The most fundamental challenge in unionization in the USA is choosing a union to affiliate with vs. trying to be independent. Changing later is very challenging, amounting to a decert and reunionization, so choosing “correctly” the first time is important.
While most unions you can affiliate with are lackluster to say the least, the main challenge to being independent is you will lack strike funds, logistical support, and legal support that some affiliate-able unions would provide. Management tends to realize this and subsequently bullies the new union.
This really is the main actual question in US trade unionism: how to bridge that challenge. To improve existing unions to suck less? To make independent unions more viable? To make something in-between? All of these are actually very difficult and at the end of the whole ordeal you can still end up with a union with petty bourgeois interests that won’t work with your socialist org on a labor campaign.
With few exceptions you don’t even really get to choose who you affiliate with though. You either end up with the Teamsters or an AFL-CIO affiliate that was granted your employer as “turf” twenty plus years ago. If neither of them consider you a worthwhile investment then good fucking luck getting any help.
And then if you do affiliate they’ll tell you first contracts are always shitty and ram one through so they can get a security agreement in and start collecting dues.
That’s another good point I forgot to mention: often no unions will even take you. A shop will be ready to go, an easy win, but none of the relevant unions do anything because the shop is “too small”. The next least bad version is what you refered to: only one union will take you and they kind of suck. Though in my experience Teamsters can be pretty militant despite the union’s overall right wing tendencies.