The Union movement is dead.

That is clearly bullshit, Hightor.

You may notice, White Collar workers are not being fired (in any great nunbers) for defying vaccine mandates.

It's **** the unions all over again.

It is strange.... Here (on Able2know) end elsewhere you have mainstream liberal cheering the firing of tens of thousands of municipal workers and the loss of appeals in court.

The word "union" is often used as a proxy for some complaint against capitalism in genera. But, the idea that workers should have leverage to push back against employers is something that no believes in any more.

The union is not only dead. It is something that no one really even believes in anymore.

Liberals used to believe in the union movement. But then against, liberals used to believe in due process and free speech. Maybe I need to accept that what it means to be a liberal has changed.

Labor unions have been around for a very long time, and like many human movements and organizations, they have a youth, a maturity and an old age. In their early years Unions engaged the excesses that accompanied the rapid industrialization of the 2nd half of the 19th century, continuing through the early decades of the 2oth. A great deal was achieved, ranging from workplace safety & hygiene to working hours and compensation, and restrictions on child labor. All involved needed transitions from the accepted conditions of the largely agricultural age that preceded it, but were intolerable in an industrial setting. In this process the unions were a necessary and beneficial element in our industrial and economic growth, contributing significantly to the national welfare. A brief maturity followed in the decades between 1940 & 1970, and a decline followed that. What happened?

Labor Unions successfully addressed many issues attendant to those indicated above, and in the process developed their own management structures, which, like most such things, tended over time to look to their own interests more than that of the workers they represented. Lots of criminal activity and connections with organized crime grew among the Teamsters, Longshoremen, and Construction industries in particular. Meanwhile nearly all union management teams learned the arts of formalizing grievance procedures, influencing (and in some cases nearly controlling the personnel management activities of employers for their members), instituting automatic withholding of union dues, & their payment to the union by employers, and defining labor and job categories and seniority "rights" in an inflexible way, limiting what any worker could do, -- all in an effort to maximize employment and union membership. Finally Unions developed and sustained their political influence through extensive lobbying and political contributions to government officials, and in many cases successfully developed laws supporting Union objectives, including in some cases forced union membership. U

All of these things tended to reduce whatever levels of teamwork and organizational morale might have existed in the companies whose employees they represented, and, in many ways tended to reduce their economic efficiency and ability to compete in the marketplaces the employers served. All this stimulated new competitors to locate their manufacturing facilities in new places where unions weren't so prevalent or powerful, and unionized companies to pursue automation and outsourcing in efforts to escape the effects union restrictions on their productivity. These factors together started the measurable decline of the unionized workforce starting in the late 1960s.

Now most new manufacturing facilities are located in States with laws precluding forced union membership , while already heavily unionized industries automate and outsource major elements of production - all to reduce the adverse economic effects modern unions bring.

I believe the key point here is that, like most human activities and organizing structures, unions are born out of necessity, initially thrive as they achieve their founding objectives, but eventually become corrupted by the humans who run them. There's a saying in Biology noting that a intelligent, or successful, parasite usually doesn't kill it host. For the most part today's unions are not intelligent parasites. As a result private sector union membership has been declining fast. Indeed nearly all of the growth in union membership over the past two decades has occurred in various State & Federal government activities, where the unionization of the employees is brought about by the raw political power of the unions and without the votes or consent of the employees involved.

Labor unions are more popular with Americans than they have been in more than half a century, according to a new poll from Gallup.

Sixty-eight percent of respondents said they approve of unions, marking the highest level since 1965, when 71% said they approved. The high ratings continue a trend of growing popularity for unions since the Great Recession of 2007 to 2009, when favorability bottomed out at 48%.

Gallup conducts the poll on unions every year. Gallup’s Megan Brenan wrote that this year’s rate of 68% matches the average approval rating between 1936 and 1967, much of which was a historic period of growth for organized labor.

The approval of unions in the latest poll was particularly high among Democrats, at 90%. Forty-seven percent of Republicans said they approved of unions, and 66% of independents. Respondents were also more likely to approve of unions if they were young (77% of those ages 18 to 34) or identified as non-white (76%). (The full poll results can be viewed here.)

Despite more people saying they like unions, union membership is still hovering near a historic low. Just 9% of Gallup’s respondents this year were union members, consistent with the latest membership rate of 10.8% from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The rate tends to be even lower in the private sector alone, where BLS reported that just 6.3% of workers are union members.

Unions have been pushing for what would be a historic overhaul of labor law to make it easier for workers to bargain collectively. The Protecting the Right to Organize Act, or PRO Act, would create new monetary penalties for companies that illegally bust unions, outlaw “right to work” laws that are on the books in a majority of states and give workers an easier path to securing a first union contract.

The PRO Act would carry out the most sweeping changes to collective bargaining law in more than 70 years. It has already passed the Democratic-controlled House, but it hasn’t garnered the support of all 50 Democrats in the Senate, let alone the 10 additional Republicans that would be needed to overcome a filibuster.

Democrats are considering trying to push some parts of the PRO Act through Congress on a party-line vote, through a process called budget reconciliation. Such a strategy would avoid a Senate filibuster but would limit how much of the legislation could be implemented. Unions are pushing Democrats to pursue the measure that would fine companies found to have violated labor law during organizing campaigns.

The reconciliation route, if Senate rules allow it, would still require more support than Democrats currently have for the PRO Act, since centrist Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) hasn’t yet signaled she would back it.

Liz Shuler, the new president of the AFL-CIO labor federation, recently told HuffPost that unions should seek to pass the PRO Act in its entirety but also take a piecemeal approach if that’s what the politics dictate.

In a statement Thursday, Shuler said the latest polling from Gallup should come as no surprise,” since workers “have finally been recognized as essential to our economy and society during the coronavirus pandemic.”

“The writing is on the wall, and it is time for Congress to respond to public opinion and the will of their constituents by passing the PRO Act,” she said.

There is a big cognitive dissonance here....

Union leaders are making the distinction... you can be pro-vaccine but still disagree with forcing workers to be vaccinated by threatening to fire them if they don't comply.