We’ve talked a lot about who might be sympathetic to unions (union members, obviously) but we haven’t talked about people who are not union members but might be attracted to the broad idea of “collective bargaining” or “labor rights”, or how that might split along age lines.
This is a pre-poll release write up at TPM:
We’ve all gotten used to polls in recent years that show Democrats with their strongest support among younger voters and Republicans with their best numbers among older voters. But I think most of us sort of implicitly figure this is significantly tied to what we call social issues — gay rights, sexual politics, racial politics, etc.
But when you look at this poll the pro-union / anti-union division turns heavily on age too. The younger votes have a far more progressive views on public employees, unions, collective bargaining and so on. That’s not great news in general for Republicans. But for those of us with somewhat longer political memories this is actually pretty different from the way things used to be in the ’80s and ’90s. Back then it was older voters who tended to have more Democratic views on bread and butter economic issues. And it was younger voters who had more libertarian inclinations.
Another key detail — the poll shows younger voters being generally more supportive of unions and collective bargaining rights than those in older demographics. That’s a reversal of what is often assumed to be the case — younger voters tilting liberal on social issues, while older voters lean liberal on the labor issues.
For example, 63% of respondents aged 18-39 opposed weakening collective bargaining rights, while 46% of respondents in both the 40-64 year-old and 65+ demographics said the same.
Younger people, who have heard virtually no pro-labor voices in media and perhaps don’t belong to a union, seem to be attracted to the general ideas behind unions. I’m wondering if that has anything to do with their experience in Great Depression II. And this isn’t very young, exclusively. It’s 18 to 39, so it’s working people.
Or, maybe, they’re just repelled by Walker as an individual and adopt whatever stance is opposite his?
BGinCHI
Perhaps part of this split is where these age groups get their news.
If you tune into Fox that skews the ideological spread, since their viewership is older. While younger folks may not all be tuning into Maddow or reading TPM, they are certainly not getting their news from tired TV sources or print media like the WaPo.
Are online media sources for the younger age group better at offering a balanced, factual view?
MagicPanda
Personal theory: it’s not that younger people are actively pro-union. They are just distrusting of corporations.
cyntax
Yep, overreach by the robber-barons. Who could’ve guessed that trying to have the whole pie, rather than 90% of it, wouldn’t go over well…
aimai
Well, something to remember is that kids don’t know who is in a union and who isn’t–but they tend to have a lot of interaction with people in public unions: teachers, nurses, firefighters, policemen. If they are white and middle class their relations with those groups are pretty much uniformly good, or at least they’ve been trained to respect those professions. So when Walker et al started by going after the teachers these really aren’t the people who have the worst experiences with teachers. These are people who are used to relying on Mrs. Whatever to pull them through at school and they really don’t enjoy seeing her reduced to tears. Or watching their parents look anxious over what their class size will be.
Plus, the republicans keep talking about doing things for “the kids” but the kids can see that republicans are trying to prevent them from voting, drinking, having sex, etc…
aimai
Kay
@aimai:
I think that’s true. But, where I learned to respect those professions is from my parents, who are…old people, actually.
Kay
@MagicPanda:
Right. But they are (meaning really young-twenties) have been so relentlessly marketed to, from birth, practically, so I would think they’d go the other way. It’s great if they resisted that barrage of marketing, but it’s not like corporations didn’t try :)
Zifnab
@MagicPanda:
This.
Also, the right-wing dogma isn’t so deep in the younger generation. We haven’t heard the “unions are all mobbed up” and “labor makes everything more expensive / less efficient” motifs that our parents were regularly exposed to.
People under 30 really won’t get the “lazy teamster” reference, because they never lived in a world with teamsters. Hell, they never lived in a world with modern manufacturing, much less the unions that went along with them.
NickM
Many people took for granted that the middle class was a natural phenomenon. Many – you know who they are – still do. But it is not; it is completely the product of policy, policy that was driven by democratic ideals. I think young people are coming to understand something about this implicitly, as the lifestyles their grandparents and parents disappear before their eyes.
aimai
@Kay:
Oh yes, I agree. But I’m thinking of the 15-18 year olds. I have a 14 year old. It was my grandparent generation that fought for union rights. My parents generation were professionals who took unionization for granted but weren’t unionized. My 78 year old mother and I turned out for the local rallies for the Unions here, in MA. But my age group–that is, the parents I know from school? Nowhere. They are all in that blurry group of “management” and “creative class” that think of unions primarily as those blue collar guys who screw you over the plumbing, or the electrical.
The things that piss older/middle aged taxpayers off about public and private unions simply don’t impact kids in the k-12 age range and they are uniformly taught to respect teachers, firemen, policemen etc… while they don’t grasp that the other people their parents don’t like are also unionized.
aimai
Chris
I don’t say this to demean my elders, but is it possible that we’re more pro-union because the race thing isn’t as big a deal with us?
I mean, it’s well recognized that Republican hegemony post-1968 is largely due to their playing the race card to divide the working and middle classes. Race isn’t as big a deal for younger people, therefore maybe we’re less likely to reject populist programs like unions or the welfare state that would benefit disadvantaged minorities like blacks or Hispanics.
It’s just a thought.
Anonymous At Work
It’s more likely a back-lash from the massive down-sizing days of the late 80’s and early 90’s when my generation saw that the benefit of hard-work and loyalty to a corporation resulted in extra dividends for stockholders, extra pay for management and pink slips for the workers to help boost the stockprice. I think my generation went, “If only we could consolidate worker power into a collective, and, united, bargain on more equal grounds with our employers.”
That, and being online, have shown many young people that strength in numbers can accomplish more *overall* even if individual recognition is somewhat diminished.
Console
I’m 27. I was ambivalent about unions until I joined one and saw that the benefits of a union extend beyond more than pay negotiation. Getting better working conditions, having worker input into big changes, the ability to have the union fight battles that would be too big for you to undertake on your own, getting benefits offered from the union that maybe your employer doesn’t offer (my employer doesn’t offer long term disability insurance but i can get it though my union, for example). It’s just all that little things that make you sit back and realize just how fucked labor is in the private sector.
WereBear
I think it’s an excellent thought; Our Corporate Overlords will have to think of something else to use divide & conquer on.
kay
@aimai:
Makes sense. I’m closer to it. My father was in a union, as was his mother and father, so maybe I didn’t have that interim generation disconnect you’re talking about.
geg6
@NickM:
This. And even some of the not-quite-yet Hoverround generation are starting to see that having and keeping a middle class takes work, which means policies that promote a middle class. It’s been amazing, just in the last couple of weeks, to see some of the proto-teabaggers at work who are suddenly radicalized by the consequences of the 2010 election, an election in which they all voted GOP. It’s all I can do not to scream “It’s all your own fucking fault!” right in their faces.
Just Some Fuckhead
Not sure why libertarian is the opposite of “union”. A union is just a militia without guns. Libertarians love militias.
Tunch
While always a democrat, I went through a phase in my twenties during the mid 1980s-early 1990s where I was down on unions. I thought they were archaic and too rigid. And I did see a lot of abuses.
But I have seen the light, and then some. This country needs a massive labor movement. People need more of a sense of dignity and security in their workplace, and they need more negotiating power against the plutocracy. Other than guillotines (which don’t sound like a bad idea), there is only one way to get it, and that’s to organize and demand it.
The republican ideal is that everyone works multiple part time jobs that provide no benefits, no security and no dignity. That’s where we are heading, and it’s not a road I want to stay on.
piratedan
i think that distrust of corporations vibe has some legs. How many kids have seen their parents get the axe when jobs get outsourced overseas and watch jobs get canned simply to meet quarterly dividend projections and still see reports of skyrocketing corporate profits everywhere?
Apathy
26, and I’ve found reality having that old liberal bias.
Growing up and having a job in Texas has seemed to increase my DFH ratio more and more.
It is never one particular thing. Distrust corporations? Sure I have to buy cable service I don’t want so that I can get internet. There was literally one ISP available, no DSL to compete with, though apparently I can start looking into satellite net.
Maybe it was partly seeing the boilerplate of my job include “employer or employee can terminate employment at any time with or without cause” that makes me think right to work state is a lil oxymoronic…
Prolly a little of hearing my aunt may lose her job because Rick Perry has turned Headstart funding into a political football.
Quite bluntly, I think my generation is being mugged by reality but it’s resulting in the opposite of what the phrase usually implies.
Lawnguylander
Younger voters today are way more liberal than older voters and support for unions is a liberal position. I don’t see why this would be surprising. And I’d like to see some evidence for the author’s assertion about younger voters being less liberal than older voters on economic issues in the 80s and 90s. It might be true but claiming to have a “somewhat longer political memory” doesn’t equal anything like evidence.
Napoleon
@Zifnab:
Who represent UPS drivers? If it is the Teamsters the ones they see bust ass when they are working.
Pamela F
Now, if we can only get these young’uns to the polls…and everyone else, for midterms as well as presidential elections.
andy
Young voters are young workers too. The older folk, because they came into the workforce when union influence was much stronger, haven’t had the same experience of work. Nowadays, most of the people I know under thirty are having to hold multiple jobs, juggle schedules, and are dealing with abusive supervisors (because, really isn’t that why Management really truly loves a good recession?).
People trapped in this new work environment may very well wonder, as they are dodging the cock somebody is always trying to ram down their throats, why it is that has to be that way.
And the answer, after a quick Google at the history, is that no, it’s extremely possible for everybody to live like decent and secure men and women.
Halteclere
I have a disconnect with Unions. I support them and the concept behind them – i.e. collectively a group is always stronger than a single member. But, growing up and living in rural mid-west / southern cities my only experiences with Unions have been negative (couldn’t carry in and wire up the equipment I designed every time I went to a Las Vegas trade show).
Ultimately I think that the battles Unions wage in the Northeast have a ripple affect to workers and working conditions in the rest of the country.
MikeJ
@aimai:
And don’t forget the weird rules the unions supposedly force on everyone.
I saw the movie Silkwood for the first time in years (maybe since it came out), and against the backdrop of Madison, one scene really stood out. An employee at the plant need to find blood donors for a relative, and management told her there was a union rule against asking for blood donors. When confronted with the lie, the manager denies it, and is presented with the fait accompli of a scheduled bloodmobile visit.
Which made me wonder, how many times has it happened that some onerous rule the union has forced upon workers was actually just invented by management and blamed on the union?
kay
@Napoleon:
When Teamsters at UPS went on strike, I was at the postal service.
I thought I was going to die. Buried beneath parcels.
jamie d
@NickM:
This is huge. People my age (36) and younger don’t have the luxury of assuming that they will have access to a stable middle-class life. It’s plain as day that the middle class is being squeezed out of existence, and that unions are one of the few things standing in the way of that.
In some ways, the very fact that comparatively few workers are now unionized is part of the draw for younger people. It’s like unions are some sort of quasi-mythical nirvana, and the hope that someday you could land a good solid union job makes the whole thing worth fighting for.
The whole great depression 2 thing is entirely relevant. People are actively looking back to the first one and hoping for a new new deal, complete with strengthening of labor and social safety nets.
aimai
@kay:
If you read the NY times article today, it has a title like “teachers surprised by harsh reaction/criticism” and then read the comment thread you will see just how incredibly confused people of all ages, and all connections to unions, are about exactly what is at stake, what unions have meant, and what to do. Reading posts from self described unionized teachers who hate unions, or kids who love their teachers but don’t understand funding issues, or teachers trying to explain their actual work load to the usual bunch of “I know a teacher who makes 100,000 a year!” is really eye opening. I can’t tell you how little people seem to grasp the economics and structure of any form of work they aren’t engaged in–or the form of work in a multi state profession–or anything at all. For instance people routinely complain about School budgets as though teaching costs were the entire thing and not infrastructure as well. Or people complain about teachers pensions because its too heavy a burden for “the taxpayers” without grasping that pensions are deferred compensation not a gift.
aimai
stuckinred
OK. I’ll stick my neck out and get hammered. I’m 62 and have lived in Georgia for 26 years after spending the previous 21 in Illinois after the service. They were building a nuclear power plant in Clinton, Illinois in the 70’s and the “hod carriers” (laborers) union local was in Champaign. Many, many of my good friends worked there and some were union officials. It was a fucking joke. If you worked too fast you would get warned and then you’d get your ass kicked. The “trades” electricians, plumbers etc. were even worse. The whole deal was incredibly corrupt and who knows how much it added to the cost. I worked on the grounds crew at the university and the unions had it even fatter there. Their contracts were such that even if the unions went on strike they could still work. The unions had their place and I still support them in Wisconsin but there is plenty of bullshit involved with organized labor.
sorry
Crashman
This recent attack on public sector unions makes me want to go back and read Dennis Lehane’s The Given Day. The nihilistic GOP wants to go back to this.
stuckinred
And don’t get me started on the fucking postal workers union.
SpotWeld
I wonder if online gaming has had any impact.
There are so many guilds and other collective groups that organize around a set of common goals, the idea of collactive barganing just seems less alien to a lot of the younger generation.
Citizen Alan
A really good friend of mine (aged 29) keeps getting offers to join his union. He says he will if he ever gets on full-time, but as a part-timer, the benefits that membership would bring don’t justify the union dues. If he were full time, he’d join in a heartbeat.
aimai
@Halteclere:
I think that’s an interesting point. Except, of course, different localities can have different rules about who is liscenced to do work and enforce them and this can have nothing to do with Unions at all. Try to set up shop as a hairdresser in a new location? Or as a cook? You will need to be certified and pay taxes to cover the certification process and the inspection process.
I just had my house renovated, top to bottom, three years ago. I worked with a local contractor and all union guys. They were jerks, and they were nice–had nothing to do with their unions. But one thing I was really sure of: when the electrical went in, or the plumbing, I wasn’t going to find anything done improperly. It was all up to code. And since the house had to be certified as up to code the city was happy too. The union there stands in for professionalism and up to date technology and it protects the user/employer/buyer/customer from having to inspect each and every workers papers and training.
aimai
Ash Can
My own off-the-cuff, seat-of-the-pants theory: The older people were growing up and in their working-world prime when Reaganomics splashed onto the scene. It was new, it was wonderful — people could have government services without paying for them — it was glamorous and virile, the way it beat up the air traffic controllers and other godless commies. As time wore on, though, the bloom fell off the turd, and the generations coming of age now are far better able to see through all that Nouveau Gilded Age baloney. They’re able to look at American society unencumbered by that old ideology, which enables them to see that people are getting fucked over by plutocrats and that labor unions are an effective way to stop this.
I only hope they hold onto that common sense and clarity of vision. It’s what prevents me from joining the chorus here when people start wailing that we’re all doomed.
Corner Stone
My dad lives in a retirement community south of Tucson and it is violently anti-union. Overwhelmingly the old nutters living there hate, hate, hate unions.
It’s been amazing to me to watch these old fools scream against basically everything involved in keeping society running.
kay
@stuckinred:
We have a good friend who is a union electrician and he says Wal Mart bring them in now right at the front, because they were having to bring them in at the end to fix the job anyway. But if your experience was different, that’s fine, though. I don’t think they’re perfect, or an ideal system, but I do think they have to survive, or we’re going full-bore crony capitalism.
stuckinred
@kay: Yea, and this was 30 years ago so it may not apply. I just can’t forget how the dudes in the union talked about what bullshit it was.
Lawnguylander
@Ash Can: I wish there were a universal pie filter available that would prevent me from reading any, “WE’RE SO SCREWED” comments anywhere. What kind of boring person writes something like that?
The Moar You Know
@Zifnab: Pet peeve of mine, here. The United States is still the world’s largest manufacturer, by an overwhelming margin. Germany is second. China is third. That we occupy that position in spite of only 19% of the labor force being employed in manufacturing is precisely because we have, by far, the most “modern manufacturing” on the planet. It also happens to be the most automated, ergo, the 19% employment figure.
Peeve over. An interesting thought experiment; what happens when you can just chuck raw material into one end of a factory and finished products come out the other end without human intervention? What happens to labor then?
Corner Stone
@stuckinred:
There’s plenty of BS everywhere, I’m sure. I’ve worked in a union shop before and watched management try to fire a guy for yelling at a forklift driver to slow down as he drove across the loading docks filled with people moving freight by hand.
Management accused him of instigating a “work slowdown” and wanted him gone.
Just Some Fuckhead
We had this new guy end up in a cast..
He wasn’t union and he worked too fast.
Then one day he fell down in the storeroom
It isn’t if we didn’t try to warn him.
He saw the light when he heard his shoulder crack
He joined the union the day that he got back –
We’re Union, and we’ve got the card to prove it, too.
You’ll join the union, if you know what’s good for you.
kay
@stuckinred:
My friend is actually close to your age. He’s a remarkable person, generally, though. He runs marathons and things.
Why would you hate the postal service? Three quarters of them were veterans. I was surrounded by veterans. You-all get that HUGE civil service score bump, that I had to overcome ON MERIT :)
I actually agree with it. I’m teasing.
stuckinred
@Corner Stone: Yea, I probably shouldn’t have said anything but what the hell.
polyorchnid octopunch
I’m 43. It’s very simple. We (people my age and younger, Gen X on down) are treading water at best. I was doing better in 1999 than I am now… and in a lot of ways I was doing better in 1989 working for a pittance over minimum wage than I am now, even though I make literally three times the money. This is thanks to the fact that I’m also paying three times the rent and got to learn up close and personal what happens to people when they take on educational debt but don’t end up working in the field they’re educated in.
Folks who are not in that group don’t really understand how badly the deck is stacked nowadays. They really don’t.
wengler
@stuckinred
Wow, we could work in a world where ordinary people have rights in the workplace and good pay and benefits. Or we could live in a world where they live in right-to-work-for-nothing states like Georgia where apparently you have never had a problem with people working hard for no money.
Ash Can
@stuckinred: Power corrupts, and effective unions have power. I’ve heard of other instances like this, and like what Halteclere describes too. I would never argue that union rules and leadership are perfect. However, I wonder if any of what you saw has changed since the 70s, and how much. An even bigger issue, though, is whether the trades — as well as we consumers of their services — would be better off without union organization, warts and all. I suspect not. I’m no fan of corruption, on the part of unions or anyone else, but if getting rid of the problems means accepting a situation that’s even worse, count me out.
freelancer
Exactly. The conservative attack and framing on union “thugs” and “goons”, holds NO water with a generation who can see with their eyes that unions aren’t exactly shoulder to shoulder with imagery of Jimmy Hoffa, Tony Soprano, bodies buried in endzones, and corrupt kickbacks anymore. It doesn’t take a genius to see that if you hijack a freight truck and fence the goods, you go to jail for 5-10 years, but if you steal a trillion dollars off the backs of people just trying to pay their bills, you can hide it all, declare yourself bankrupt and the system will give you billions more.
@Console:
This. You all know the right-wing chest-thumping about freedom and Democracy, but “Oh, the Marxist dystopian horrors would that it actually arise within the workplace!”
AAA Bonds
I’ve been saying this for years – 20-somethings have all heard about these great things called unions and would like to see them return in force. Plenty of us are joining them, too.
For all the noise you hear about how unions advance the causes of senior workers, a great many newcomers would like to join an organization that has their back as soon as they get established in any job. We know that when workers don’t stick together, we get hanged separately.
More than anything, we feel cheated that we entered the working world after they’d already been dismantled by a captured government.
stuckinred
@polyorchnid octopunch: Who doesn’t feel like they were doing better when they were in their 20’s and didn’t give a fuck about anything but NOW!
Yutsano
@stuckinred: That’s because it probably was bullshit. Even now people do like to take pride in their work and not have a ton of restrictions laid on them while they do it. I don’t claim to know how things ran back then (I was still a hatchling) but abuse is an unfortunate side effect of any human system.
And I’m in a union now, and wouldn’t trade that off for anything.
MagicPanda
@jamie d: Yes, that’s it.
Most of us don’t have first-hand experiences with unions. But we *do* know that we are getting screwed, and that maybe there is a better way.
I don’t think it’s that people (most of us, anyway) literally wish they were in unions. It’s that we wish there were a way to take some power away from the powerful and give it back to the average worker.
TheMightyTrowel
@polyorchnid octopunch: A combination of going to university out of the country, working several jobs, getting scholarships and being an only child with parents willing to 2nd mortgage their house means that I managed to get 3 degrees with no debt. I’m two years out of my phd, still working 3 part time jobs with no prospect of full time employment on the cards and barely keeping my head afloat. I can’t even begin to imagine what that same scenario looks like from beneath a mountain of debt.
Watching the UK govt blithely walk down the high price education path (“What, universities actually want to charge 10,000 pounds a year without providing markedly better access to poor students? who could have known it?”) because ‘it works so well in the states’ (I shit you not) just makes my teeth grind in fury for all my friends who didn’t have my luck and all my (future) students who will have to shoulder that burden.
The Moar You Know
@polyorchnid octopunch: We’re essentially the same age; I’m two years older. I enjoyed my best standard of living in 1986, and it was all downhill from there until about four years ago, where I could not only say that I’m finally “caught up” from those days, but just a small margin ahead. And I still lived in a nicer place back then than I do now.
In order to get that “small margin ahead”, I now have to take home ten times the hourly wage that I was making back then.
It ain’t right.
Just Some Fuckhead
Someone needs to chart union participation rates and income inequality, year over year, starting back when union participation was zero. I’m sure it will be illuminating.
PeakVT
@The Moar You Know: 19%? Try more like 9%. And how much of that manufacturing is non-defense-related? The fact is that the US makes very few consumer goods outside of cars and furniture. That’s a problem, because spending on consumer goods is much greater than spending on capital goods, where the US is holding its own for now.
stuckinred
@wengler: No, you can go where the fuck you want to.
Corner Stone
@stuckinred:
I hate to go against the BJ grain, but I am kicking the absolute shit out of the 20-something version of myself.
In just about every way.
Chris
@Ash Can:
Time for a Winston Churchill paraphrase. “No one pretends that unions are perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that unionization is the worst form of labor system, except all these other forms that have been tried from time to time.”
It’s perfectly legitimate to bitch about union corruption. I think it’s the current trend of “there’s corruption in unions, therefore screw all unions” that drives people up the wall. They’re not perfect, but they were vital to creating the society we live in and will be vital to maintaining it. Saying we should get rid of unions because of corruption or mistakes in organized labor, like so many people are saying nowadays, is as absurd as saying that we should have gotten rid of democracy after [insert political corruption scandal name here]
stuckinred
@Corner Stone: $15 lids, that is all.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
Good explanations above.
I’ll add one more: in the 1980s unions were very heavily scapegoated as having helped to cause the wage-price inflation spiral which was such a noticeable feature of the stagflationary economy in the 1970s. Younger folks don’t remember that era and don’t have the instictive horror of inflation that older folks do (a horor which tends to vary in direct proportion to the wealth of the person who lived thru that era, since the other noticeable feature of the 1970s was stagnation of the stock market and consequent erosion of the value of equity capital).
Corner Stone
@stuckinred:
No biggie. It’s just I watched my dad fight like hell for the union members he represented that management wanted to fire or punish for one reason or another.
There’s good and bad everywhere, obviously, but the things railroad management wanted to get away with…just make your blood boil if you were exposed to it. As I was.
wengler
I grew up in the South. If your poor there you can’t fucking go anywhere. We are in a war of capital vs. democracy. Here’s a map from a site paid for by the antidemocratic side Right To Work.
You notice any political correlation? Or are you going to go off about how lazy those damn unionis are?
JPL
@Chris: Good post.
I worked for a major computer corporation in the early seventies and because of the threat of unionization, they were conscience of the fact the typewriter and computer hardware maintenance workers had to be paid a living wage.
Unions affect companies other than union shops.
fucen tarmal
my oughttwo is that younger people have not had a pro-labor voice in the media, or a pro-labor media outlet.
yes.
exactly.
and the voices they have heard, and the issues and positions they have been clubbed over the head with, are the ones they trust the least, to the point of seeking their own info, or as a lazier option, taking the opposite side.
Legalize
I think it’s that right-wing dogma and ideology doesn’t really sink in to younger people. They don’t see where this latest attack on teachers, nurses, cops, firemen, county clerks, etc., i.e. THEIR PARENTS, fits in with their experience. I don’t think they get the dog-whistles and resentment – not because they’re not bright, just because it’s so old-timey, weird, and totally contrary to their experience.
JPL
Twenty something have seen the raise in income inequality and the loss of the American Dream. Someone above mentioned peaking in 1986 and that’s true for a lot of folks.
stuckinred
@wengler: Did you read what I said?
“The unions had their place and I still support them in Wisconsin but there is plenty of bullshit involved with organized labor.”
The thread is about the age split and I was trying to articulate my experience. If you want to get all pissy with me go ahead.
JustMe
I’m 62 and have lived in Georgia for 26 years after spending the previous 21 in Illinois after the service.
But that’s the thing– you are 62. Those of us who are half your age never encountered any of that stuff… but the nurses, teachers, and firefighters all do a pretty good job. same with the unionized college professors and maintenance staff where we work.
Stefan
It’s perfectly legitimate to bitch about union corruption. I think it’s the current trend of “there’s corruption in unions, therefore screw all unions” that drives people up the wall.
Exactly. No one says “there’s corruption in corporations, therefore we have to get rid of all corporations”.
Corner Stone
@JPL:
And you can argue this with non-union people until the end of time and they will never get it.
stuckinred
@JustMe: I guess I missed the part where Kay said “please only comment if what you say makes everyone happy”.
Jules
I just think a good amount of folks over 50 are selfish bastards who very are much of the “I got mine, screw you” mindset.
They want to make sure what they have is preserved but have no problem with everyone else having a bit o’ pain and sacrifice.
(and see I did not say everyone….but my dad was a teamster all his life and walked picket lines and he says some of these union guys who are retired now are the worst R’s you’ve ever seen, it’s like they forgot everything they all worked and fought for.)
dianne
The younger kids aren’t taking it for granted (like we used to) that the powers that be are on their side. They have become jaded enough over the years to see much more clearly than their parents.
Gaardian
I think a lot of it is because most people my age, I’m 31 have never really seen an active labor movement in their entire lives. In my lifetime, I can’t remember a big strike, (Millionaire striking baseball or hockey players really doesn’t count for me) and I like to think I’m fairly plugged in.
What we have seen is their parents and later themselves systematically screwed out of the products of years of hard and honest work in the private sector. We have direct experience either through ourselves or our friends and families of struggles with health care costs, energy costs, housing costs, while even in “good” times corporations cut benefits and raises become nonexistent.
Those of us who work almost exclusively in the private sector, have no such corresponding negative experiences with unions because for a lot of us they exist as some kind of myth on the priphery of our professional lives. Don’t get me wrong, we know that unions can be corrupt, sometimes hurt productivity etc. But after the last two years of watching investment bankers and hedge fund managers rob the country blind with absolutely ZERO consequences, we have to ask ourselves, could it possibly be more corrupt than what we have now?
Sentient Puddle
Speaking for my 26 year-old self, I’ll add a chit to the distrusting of corporations theory. I have no real experience or direct exposure to unions (or at least not that I’m aware of, which might be by design), but I sure as hell think there needs to be a counterbalance to the power corporate officers hold. Because really, it’s hard for me to accept this notion that union members are thugs when we see the way some CEOs are.
Mart
In the early eighties I observed Union employees abuse rules to slow down getting work down. Some projects would require a plumber, mechanic, electrician, etc. all present to complete the job. Invariably a radio would go off and there would be an emergency requiring one trades presence, and the job would need to be rescheduled. Over the next decade the Unions proceeded to get the shit beat out of them. Factories were pouring out of Union states to right to work states (prior to jumping to China). To their credit the Unions responded. Union workers now multi-task trades – so one or two employees can get the job done, not a half dozen. They took hits in pay and benefits. They also lost millions in membership. I see no difference today in the work effort and dedication between Union and non-union workers.
One Federal law progressives should keep an eye on is when a company accepts federal money, like provided by the stimulus bill, they must pay the going union rate in the area. This applies whether they hire a union of non-union firm. I expect the conservatives will try to strip this out.
Finally, why is it a general rule that the lower the pay the harder the work?
Corner Stone
@Jules:
Completely with you. My 68 year old dad says the same shit about his local cohort.
RalfW
I think younger people have a belief in collective action, and can extend that notion to unionizing.
The 100s of thousands of folks who joined OfA to help elect Obama understand that standing together is the only way to fight the moneyed class. As the saying goes, power is organized money and organized people. The conservatives have the money, the progressives have the people.
I also think Unions were very smart to start hiring a new cadre of union organizers who are still mostly under 40 to start (very much just a start) rebuilding unions.
El Cruzado
The way I see it, the guys in charge won’t stop until they make straight-up Communism look good again.
Probably they won’t stop then, either.
Mart
Also, too, what Comment 1 says, old people are brainwashed by Fox into hating everything they stood for.
polyorchnid octopunch
@stuckinred: I was still paying a smaller proportion of my income then than I am now, live in the same neighbourhood with about the same quality and size of housing, yet I have nearly tripled my income in nominal terms. Rent for my size and quality of apartment have gone from being around a hundred and fifty to two hundred bucks to seven to nine hundred… and that’s ignoring the insane difference in how much it also costs to keep the heat going in the wintertime. Food has also risen significantly in the meantime, as has transportation costs (gas is four to five times more expensive than it was back then, and the changes in the cost of insurance has to be seen to be believed).
And as I understand it, you guys south of the border have it even worse than we do up here; at least we don’t have to deal with the serious rooking that your health system gives to all of you.
Tell me again how much of a wastrel I was when I was in my twenties. Go on, tell me.
Ruckus
@aimai:
unions primarily as those blue collar guys who screw you over the plumbing, or the electrical.
This may be part of why people hate unions as well. If you have no idea how to do something you have no idea what it should cost to fix/install or the training for it either.
Soprano
@Console
It’s just all that little things that make you sit back and realize just how fucked labor is in the private sector.
Once the unions in the private sector were systematically dismantled thus diminishing or eliminating health benefits, decent working conditions, and pensions (not to mention job security) for private-sector workers, it became easier to convince large numbers of screwed-over workers that public sector workers’ quite-modest pay and benefits were too generous and “out of line with the private sector.” That’s because there were few benefits left in the private sector with which to compare them!
geg6
@stuckinred:
Because, of course, your experience is what unions are all about. (Rolls eyes.)
FTR, I, for a time, was anti-union myself. I worked under a grant for the local community college. Everyone at the college (faculty, support staff, maintenance and janitorial, campus police) were unionized. Except grant-supported staffers like me. All around me, for nine years, everyone got guaranteed raises and had pensions. Not me. I went through my last five years there without a single penny of increase to my crappy salary of $17,000/yr. (with an MEd!). The last time I asked for a raise, I was told by my supervisor that they couldn’t do it (even though I had written the grant and knew that funds were there for a raise) and, anyway, my live-in boyfriend had a good job and I didn’t need a raise because of that. I reported him to HR, but was told that without proof, it was just a he said/she said thing. I had no one to turn to to help me take that bastard down. Two years before I quit, the support staff union was talking strike. Other grant funded staffers went with me to the union, asking them to allow us to join. They said no due to the fact that we were basically contract employees because we were only funded as long as the grant allowed and none of our wages came from the college. We just couldn’t understand it. I was pissed and bad mouthed unions for a few years after that.
I’m still not unionized. The only people at this University who aren’t unionized are exempt staff and administrators. But I don’t resent the faculty and OPP (Office of Physical Plant) employees any more. I thank them for fighting for us when they fight for themselves. I’m still underpaid and overworked, but it would be much, much worse without them. And those union rules are there for a reason. You may not know or understand the reason, but, believe me, what you see as a nonsensical rule is actually a protection put into place due to a past violation of a worker. When thinking about what unions do, you need to get past yourself and understand that none of those rules came out of the blue. Someone, often many someones, was abused by the lack of that rule and that is why it is there.
stuckinred
@geg6: yes, that is exactly what I said. My experience is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Ruckus
@Tunch:
I agree here. In the early part of the 20th century unions were absolutely necessary. But we went though a period when things were not bad if you didn’t belong to a union. And the need diminished. But we’re back to what the country was like a century ago. There is a slightly larger middle class but otherwise not so much different.
The monied class is trying to screw us in every way possible.
Unions are always necessary in class warfare. They have money and therefore power, we have numbers and therefore can much better say the word no.
RalfW
@Gaardian:
This.
pablo
Typical(?!)Union people.
bemused
I’m about to freak out about the insanity in WI, Ohio & elsewhere. The R’s have assigned staff of the 14 Senators to R Senators and they must report to them. David Obey couldn’t get into the Capitol. Walker’s henchmen created a new rule that the Dem Senators will be held in contempt of the Senate if they are not back by 4pm.
The little I’ve seen of cable news pundits ignoring that we have a bunch of Republican Gaddafi wannabes running rampant over democracy makes me want to vomit violently.
jl
My theory is that people who have had to navigate college financing and curriculum, and entered or were new to the labor force in the late 1990s and early 200s view themselves as an oppressed class, due to years of reality therapy. And they will retain that view on things for some time.
Wingnut governors like Walker, Kasich and Scott are heaping on a second dose of that reality therapy.
jl
@pablo: See, those union people are all lazy, ignorant, lying thugs who don’t give a damn about the quality of their work. It’s true.
polyorchnid octopunch
@jl: Not just those that entered in the late nineties… people who entered the labour market in the late eighties have had even more time soaking up that reality therapy.
NickM
@Napoleon: It’s the Teamsters, and there are still plenty of Teamsters around!
From Both Sides
I also wonder how much of union support comes from university experiences. I know that when I teach Western Civ, one thing I have to cover in the Industrial Revolution is what conditions were like _before_ the unions came on the scene – 18 hour workdays, six-day weeks, no worker’s comp, no safety precautions, deadly work environments, and the like.
What, the machine ripped your arm off? You need two arms to work here, so out you go. What, you don’t want slave wages? I’ll just hire someone else. What, you got black lung disease? Out you go. I need workers with smaller fingers? Hire children – and they cost less!
When students learn about that – and then see all the sh*t attempts to bring that _all_ _back_, it’s no wonder they turn to what first worked to stop it.
OGLiberal
@Just Some Fuckhead: Was thinking the same thing myself the other day. Don’t have both sets of data in a single chart but here’s income inequality (and marginal tax rates)since the Great Depression:
http://www.businessinsider.com/plutocracy-reborn
And here’s union membership – broken out by public and private sector – from 1945 on:
http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/8076/693/1600/private-sector-union-trends.jpg
Notice that the peak years of public sector union membership ’53 – and private sector union membership – ’70 – match up almost perfectly with 2 of the 3 the lowest gaps in income. The lowest gap was right before the huge rise in inequality and huge drop in union membership started, right about the time St. Ron the Gipper took office.
Very illuminating, indeed…
Monala
@stuckinred:
I have much respect for the postal service. As Bill Maher once said, they can take a letter from him in LA on Monday, and deliver it to his sister in NJ on Wednesday, all for 44 cents. Where else can you get a deal like that?
And you know the old saying, “Neither snow nor nor rain… blah blah… shall keep these [postal workers] from their appointed rounds”? The week of Christmas 2008, western WA was hit by a blizzard. My town has one working snowplow, which was used only on major roads. On side streets like mine, you were stuck.
On Christmas eve, my daughter and I went outside to build a snowman. The street was silent and there were no car tracks anywhere, when suddenly we noticed a vehicle coming our way. It was a postal truck, which stopped in front of our home to deliver two packages to my daughter, one from each grandmother.
Meanwhile, she was supposed to have had gifts coming from other relatives, sent for much more money via FedEX. The following weekend, I stood in a long line at the main local FedEx facility trying to pick up the gifts that weren’t delivered. A Seattle Times article later wrote about people’s outrage at FedEx and UPS for not making their Christmas week deliveries.
polyorchnid octopunch
@From Both Sides: Oh yeah. We actually covered that period of Canadian history in high school… at least, back when I went to high school. I don’t know if they do it now.
Fe E
@aimai:
I have a couple of thoughts to add to this: First people AUTOMATICALLY assume that if they don’t know what you are doing, you don’t know what you are doing — so by extension you aren’t doing it well
Teachers aren’t the only targets of this, but they really seem to be the most popular one right now.
Next, I’ve known plenty of union-hating union members(as a union member myself I often run into lots of them)and I’ve noticed that they almost without exception have never worked a non-union job, at least not as an adult. I think they get a lot of weird ideas about how weird their workplace is, and it’s union, ergo the union makes it weird, not knowing that every workplace is kinda f’ed up. I’ve had a lot of jobs, only one of them unionized and I’ve noticed that nobody ever gets canned for being useless, you only get fired for not showing up.
PTirebiter
ATunch
My experience exactly during the 70’s & 80’s. I was quickly disabused of most of my union sympathies after dealing with the Teamsters in New York, the IBEW in Chicago and IATSE in Las Vegas. They had forgotten where they came from and what they were supposed to be about. They handed Reagan the sword
and the Koch Bros are still wielding it. Hopefully a healthy tension between labor and business can be restored.
Dr. Morpheus
It doesn’t matter one bit how supportive younger people are of unions or how liberal or how anti-racist they are if the stupid fuckers don’t turn out to vote in the midterms.
OGLiberal
@Just Some Fuckhead: Here’s a chart that track middle class share of income together with union membership. Direct correlation between the two – ie, in the last 40+ years they’ve been dropping like flies at pretty much the same rate.
Also note from one of the previous charts that the years that track smallest gap in income inequality pretty much map to the years during which the government in DC was pretty and/or relatively progressive. (the “relatively” is why I include the Eisenhower and Nixon years) It’s only during and after the age of Ronbo and Gordon Gekko that the gap really went haywire. The only dips you have after 1980 are during recessions. And I think this last great recession broke that trend – the gap didn’t fall…it rose, reaching a record high in 2009.
But it’s all good because John Galt.
stuckinred
@PTirebiter: Hey, you can’t make judgments, or even comments, based on your personal experience!
OGLiberal
@OGLiberal: sorry, here’s the chart I referenced above:
http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2011/01/20/report-incomes/
quaint irene
Yeah, saw this on the DailyKos.
“Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald Thursday morning ordered the apprehension of the 14 Democratic senators who left the state two weeks ago to avoid a vote on Gov. Scott Walker’s controversial budget
Did he swirl his toga about him while shouting ‘Seize Them!”
James Hare
Walker became far more repulsive after the prank call. It became clear he was every bit as cynical as the Democrats had made him out to be. It was really quite shocking how much of a tool he sounded like.
aimai
@Fe E:
Great point Fe E! People tend to reify their own situations and also to pick out one aspect and think its the most salient aspect. Its only human. I noticed it in a different place: family and parenting experiences. People only know what they know from their own experience and they tend to attribute what is happening to their particular circumstance. So I had a friend with an adopted daughter from China fume to me, in a fury, one day because people had stopped her in the grocery store to compliment her on how cute her baby daughter was. She was sure it was a subtle dig at her for being an adoptive mom. Or somehow racist because they thought her daughter was cute. Of course people stop new mothers and babies all the time to compliment them on the child. Its considered polite. They pretty much ignore you if your kid is ugly. But you wouldn’t know that if your primary experience of busybody old ladies was because you had a cute kid from china. You’d think the reason they were stopping you to compliment her is because they are brooding about your birth status. They stop everybody and compliment every kid. Because they are bored. And because kids are cute.
Similarly every workplace has some screw ups, some fuck ups, some people who are unwilling to work with others. In a non union shop those people are simply management’s nephews and nieces. What’s the difference from the point of view of the worker/customer? A well run shop is a well run shop and a badly run shop is a badly run shop. Nothing to do with the union.
aimai
polyorchnid octopunch
@stuckinred: Stop strawmanning… it’s not becoming of you.
jibeaux
I think stuckinred’s experience illustrates quite a bit, really. There *are* a number of examples from the bygone days of union abuses and really shady union dealings. Jimmy Hoffa was tight with the Mafia, no? But to my generation (36) Jimmy Hoffa is a primarily a joke along the lines of that thing that’s gone missing from your house must be wherever he is. To an older generation I suspect he means something more than that, and it’s not entirely positive. Reading about the five families in NYC in the ’60s and ’70s involves a ton of interplay between unions and the mafia in industries like construction and sanitation. These are going to be well-formed associations for people growing up in those years.
I remember there was a well-known This American Life episode about a GM plant in California and its transformation to the NUMMI Japanese model of plant management. The description of the way the union handled the plant was kind of unbelievable, and included things like drinking and sex on the job. Now, hell, nobody even seems to have a union any more — I think I read 6% of the country is in a union — so your dominant thought about them is likely to be one of powerlessness.
PTirebiter
@stuckinred: My bad. Of course I only meant to comment on the possible reasons for different perceptions between the age groups. And while I’m generally sympathetic to geg6’s point, some of the rules did just come out of the blue. I’m sure the genesis could be traced to some egregious past abuse, but they weren’t being enforced because they were needed or made sense, they were being enforced simply because the union, at the time, had the power to enforce them. It was some of that short term thinking that has come back to really hurt their cause today.
stuckinred
@polyorchnid octopunch: Now what are you talking about?
stuckinred
@PTirebiter: I was kidding, or strawmanning I guess.
Stefan
“Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald Thursday morning ordered the apprehension of the 14 Democratic senators who left the state two weeks ago to avoid a vote on Gov. Scott Walker’s controversial budget
Oooh, they must be trembling. Since the Democrats are all out of state, and since the Wisconsin legislature has no power outside of Wisconsin, this basically amounts to Fitzgerald stamping his widdle feet on the floor.
Still, I’m amazed how little press the Republicans’ increasingly authoritarian and anti-democratic measures are getting. You’d think that, given all the news about the North African/Middle Eastern protests the last few weeks, the news media would have a fairly easy hook…but then again, it’s not their job to inform.
Pongo
I had this very conversation with my 25 y.o. son this week and he pointed out that, while younger people haven’t heard many pro-labor voices, they also haven’t heard the anti-labor rhetoric or been exposed to the constant barrage of scandalous corruption stories about the unions that us more seasoned folks were subjected to in the 60s & 70s. Remember Jimmy Hoffa?
HBuellA
I began my work history by belonging to the CWA union of a private company. We had superb benefits and the pay was 3xs that of an executive secretary of a major corporation. We did not contribute 1 cent to our benefits.
After further education, I received a government job and belong to CSEA/AFSCME/CIO. The pay is mediocre in comparison to the 1st job above and I contribute to half of my health insurance plus everything to my retirement. Still unions are vital.
Between those 2 jobs, I worked at other ones where I wished they had a union. The conditions were abominable. I often went 9 days without a day off and 75 hours in one week without extra compensation. It was vital that I stayed at my post and had no one to relieve for 8 hours if they showed up to work at all. I shudder at thinking this is the plan for breaking up the unions.
PTirebiter
@stuckinred: I realized that. I just couldn’t resist expanding on it.
Ruckus
I don’t get the stuckinred hate here. The man had experiences that he shared here. They reinforce union stereotypes. So what. Those are his experiences. He didn’t present them as all unions were or currently are like that. You have only 100% positive union experiences? I didn’t think so.
I have never had first hand union experience but I have seen both the good and the bad of unions. I swing my balance way towards unions though because in the end for all the silly work rules, even all the union thugs (need we even mention the Pinkertons or the army being used for strike busting?) unions have made working life better for everyone who holds a job today. End of story.
stuckinred
@Ruckus: Aw it’s cool, I can take it. I did say I knew I’d get hammered so, as we say, if they can’t take a joke fuck em.
joe from Lowell
The 40-64 demographic consists of people who were between 9 and 33 when Reagan was elected, 13 and 37 when Reagan beat Mondale, and between 17 and 41 when Bush beat Dukakis.
The Republicans won young voters in those elections. There were a lot of people in that age group whose political coming of age came about during the big Reagan realignment. Age-related voting patterns aren’t just a consequence of stage of life. They’re also generational.
grandpajohn
@Stefan:Well it appears that the counter attack may have begun and the recall revolution is under way according to Steve at Washington monthly. The process of getting signatures for the recall of 8 repub senators is now underway. Only 3 dems are needed to retake control of the senate and several of those targeted for recall barely won election.
polyorchnid octopunch
@stuckinred: I haven’t seen anybody say you can’t talk. They might disagree with the /significance/ of what you say, but that’s hardly the same way you characterised it.
stuckinred
@polyorchnid octopunch: take a break will ya pal
Corner Stone
@Ruckus:
We’re just jealous he gets to go wade/surf fishing in a lot of cool spots.
stuckinred
@Corner Stone: Yea and I’m one of those old nasty entitled Nam vets that is sitting back hoping he can keep his job until he is 67.
Lihtox
@Pongo: I’ll agree with this; as a 35-year-old, I haven’t been exposed to very much talk about unions in my life, either for or against. They often seem like something out of the past: my mom would talk about her father and how he would never shop at a store that didn’t have a union, etc. Even Hoffa was kinda before my time, I heard jokes about Hoffa as a kid, but didn’t understand what they were about.
Maybe the reaction of young folks to this Wisconsin business is “Wait? There are still unions? Cool! Where do I sign up?”
polyorchnid octopunch
I don’t expect to be able to stop working until I can’t.
PhoenixRising
I’m 39. My mom is in her 3rd year of retirement, on a pension that actually supports her so I don’t have to–courtesy of a union.
In 1981, my friend’s mom was placed in a foreman (supervisory) position over 14 men at Ford Assembly, thus allowing her to buy my friend shoes that fit and also feed her other 3 kids–union rules required seniority for promotion, even though no woman had worn that hat before.
I’ve never had a job that had union protections, but I would jump on them in a minute.
How about the explanation, People under 40 recall what it was like to live in a country that paid labor fairly–and we’d like to raise our kids in one that did?
polyorchnid octopunch
Part of the reason why I feel so pissed off about the union bashing is I can remember my grandmother telling me about what it was like to work in the first decade of the twentieth century. She left home at twelve to go live at her employer’s house where she worked for over twelve hours a day seven days a week and was on call for all twenty four… and this was considered a GOOD job. She told me about her father who worked twelve to sixteen hours a day in the factory. She told me about all the street kids that were around in those days… those kids that had been turned loose by their parents when they were ten to twelve years old because the parents couldn’t afford to feed them and their younger siblings.
If that’s what you want… that’s what we all seem to be getting. I’m not particularly down with that, thank you. The fact that there were some places and times where there were problems pales in significance to what it was like working post civil war to post WWII.
Corner Stone
@stuckinred: Well, we can agree you’re old and nasty.
uptown
It’s time to remind those older folks that their Social Security income and Medicare payments are completely reliant on the income of those still working and paying into the system.
stuckinred
OK, had time to walk the dogs and think about this. The stuff I wrote about in the 70’s was AFTER this shit:
The Hard Hat Riots and all that other super-patriot right wing union shit. The unions were anything but progressive.
wes
i think it’s less about younger vs older people and more about who we are when we were young and when we are old. the young people in the 80s had libertarian views and those SAME people are now the older people today. likewise, i suspect I’ll always feel that people of all race, sexual orientation and gender should be treated equally and not be discriminated against (i’m 24), and 30 years from now, i suspect i’ll feel the same.
that’s what i think. does that theory that hold ground?
Cerberus
Skipped a bit ahead in the conversation, but I wanted to give my personal experiences as a young person.
To answer your question, it comes from being extremely dicked around by the system. We’ve got a system guaranteed to fuck us of everything and anything, that does not hire us, that keeps us trapped with our parents, and makes it nearly impossible to have basic levels of shelter, food, etc… and where our bosses if we can find employment let us know in no uncertain terms that we are considered slave labor that can be removed with a thought and are expected to have no humanity and certainly will not be taken care of.
So point 1, we’re not fans of modern capitalism.
Now, more central to your specific question. Do you think young people haven’t noticed that the sole remaining route to the middle class for entry-level and impoverished workers is government-based work? Everyone my age is scrambling and hoping for a job somewhere in government, because they hire college graduates, they hire poor people without counting the stop and go nature of employment in this economy against them.
And most critically of all, they provide a survivable income, good decent health care rather than discount health care you can’t use or contract or part-time positions that “can’t provide health care”, and a strong sense (even with the constant attacks by republicans) that there is job security in those fields. If you get a government job, you won’t likely be fired in a couple of months or years and you can relax from the endless job hunt. You have actual meaningful health insurance, so you can check up on those health issues you’ve been waiting on for years (oh yes, years). And you have an income that seems tiny for the older people, but for us young people feels like the best head in the world. Remember that among us youth, we’re lucky if we’re surviving on 1000 a month. A 2000-3000 a month salary is what your lucky friends have and said lucky friends end up being the people trying to help keep the rest of us afloat. That’s what I did when I was in Denmark for two years, keep the people back home afloat.
So Point 2, government jobs are held in good esteem for selfish reasons.
Also, the social liberalism and the getting screwed means we know personally that government regulation, protections, and safety nets are non-existant and thus that we need to protect the few agencies left. Not to mention that we are smarter than old teabagger fucks and as such don’t hate our teachers, but rather respect them and education.
So point 3, we like government jobs as a matter of public policy.
And let’s be frank. Many of us were too young to really get sucked into the Red Scare bullshit. As such, our relationship with the dreaded S-word has been reading history books about how the massive attack on commies under McCarthy and the blacklist coincided with a massive drain on union power and an overall increase in conservative economic policies that have made our lives a living hell. Also, when we think of the word, we think more of Denmark and Sweden and less of USSR. Not to mention that we have the privilege of looking back at seeing how the service industries got so screwed owing to the fact that they were blocked or didn’t unionize when the industries and job types were found, leading to a lot of people getting screwed over in practices like mass layoffs, draining of pensions, sudden catastrophic changes to health insurance, and other bullshit that are harder to do with union shops. Not to mention that we weren’t there when Reagan’s hallucinogenic drugs entered into the water supply and people started thinking it would be great to sell everything off for short term gain that would all go to the richest fuckers. So looking back, it looks like the catastrophe that it was rather than something to continue to double down on because you think the drug-induced feeling of “It’s morning again” will somehow come back.
So Point 4, we like unions and have a softer outlook on the S word.
Finally, we’ve been told that we’re lazy freeloaders and our parents have sighed at us and recounted their tales of easy jobs and easy transitions into the middle class straight out of high school and college that we know aren’t happening to us. Even those who never entered the workforce until they completed their PhD are fucked and what worked for our parents will never work for us. We often have to struggle with no safety net and try to make our own industry or be our own bosses just to have anything and we have to acquire obscene numbers of skills just to get a second look at the burger flipping shop. The only people of our age range who win are the ones who left the system more or less and made themselves into internet celebrities. The rest of us, simply struggle and die, unheard and uncared about.
So last point, the system is fucked beyond repair, and we can see the attacks on unions as the last attempt by that system to destroy the final holdouts and make everyone’s life suck as much as ours. Even if we’re fucked, we still have empathy, damnitt.
So yeah, this is straight from the horse’s mouth of a young’un.
And yeah, it’s not just my lefty ass. I grew up with a number of raised fundie friends who will trend commie simply from the personal experience of being so jerked around by the system.
piratedan
it is kind of strange….. the South can’t let the Civil War die and move on from their states rights fetish, yet we can all blissfully forget events like these:
http://libcom.org/history/1914-the-ludlow-massacre
http://www.matewan.com/History/battle2.htm
Unions aren’t a cure-all for the ills of the nation, but just like federal regulation, they perform a function of preventing the rich and privileged from abusing those that they employ. Without them, there’s a definite history to back the notion that it is necessary.
Fax Paladin
Surprised no one’s mentioned Strauss and Howe and “Generations” yet, though a couple of people have mentioned the basic idea: political leanings tend to relate to generational cohorts rather than age. Strauss and Howe identified a four-generation cycle that results from the way generations interact and the way they respond to (and in some ways create) defining events.
If the theory holds, then today’s youth more or less match up with the WWII generation as a “civic” or “hero” generation (the cycle goes: “idealist”/”prophet” (Boomers), “reactive”/”nomad” (Gen X), “civic”/”hero” (GIs, Millenials), “adaptive”/”artist” (Silent, Gen Z/”Homelanders”).)
Kathryn
Gen We is amazing. They trend towards acceptance and tolerance to a huge degree. I went back to college at 43, got a BA and an MA — the MA at Florida State, Tallahassee. And watched some really abused, young, TA’s bring a union in for themselves (circa 2008).
Talking to them was really inspirational. I asked some of my students why there were no rallies or protests, and the answer came back nearly always as, “we don’t do it that way, we do digital dissent” — and I asked, what? how does that work? And they would lay out principles of cooperation and shared interest, almost I think capable of cloud thinking, being. Which goes back to the poster who talked about gaming being an influence (@spotweld). There is something very unique about Gen We and it’s immersion in digital cooperative life from the beginning.
Now there are problems with this of course and one of them is getting their attention. But I taught comparative religion and ethics, and most of the time (even in seriously red Florida) the undergrads would go in a very non-traditional direction for their ethical answers. Even in the religion department (me being the only mystic) I had a lot of students at my door wanting to talk about being “spiritual rather than religious.” In Florida. And that spiritual side was immanent mystic-in-the-world. Amazing.
Ruckus
@uptown:
And that’s why us old fogies want you to make good money and have good jobs. We did it for those ahead of us and we need you to do it for us. It’s not the only reason of course. A healthy, comfortable workforce makes a much nicer place to live. For everyone.
That’s what I don’t get, why people don’t want better for everyone. They are part of everyone so WTF.
Ruckus
@Cerberus:
I’m an old fart and yet I agree with everything you say. Things get better, they get worse. In a lot of ways the 60-80 time was better. In terms of what we are discussing here anyway.
Over the course of history the swings have been small and far between. We are now seeing swings in 2-3 generations and the swings are bigger. And as more people got a little farther up the have/have not scale, more are being affected by the downward swing of employer “power”. I wonder what would have caused the largest recession ever if it hadn’t been housing?
gelfling545
@Lihtox: I am reminded of the reactions of some of the young people I know when Palin started calling Obama a socialist. After a bit, some of them started asking – what is this socialism of which she speaks – and when it was explained to them thought it sounded like a pretty good deal. They had never been exposed to the whole evil socialist/godless communist rant I heard while growing up so their minds were open to all kinds of ideas.
Barry
@stuckinred: …and the examples you cite are from 30 years ago.
Paula
Fucking boomers …
Just kidding!
People think that the clerical union at the place where I work is shitty, but I’ll pay monthly dues for their so-called shittiness if it means having someone negotiating regularly for my living wage.
aimai
@Kathryn:
Wow. Fascinating. I’m glad you brought up spotweld’s point too because I thought that was a very cool one and kind of lost in the discussion. I was just watching The Making Of The Lord of the Rings documentary (it comes on the dvds) and noticing just how much group work was required to pull off the LOTR. Its totally different from the model of solitary work/solitary grades that were promoted for my generation and much closer to the kind of group work that my children experience in their K-12 modern schools. And you can see how necessary a group orientation and a willingness to work collectively is to any big project. I guess I should get my kids involved in RPGs so they can learn to organize.
aimai
Another Commenter at Balloon Juice (fka Bella Q)
@stuckinred: OK, ya got me there.
Thomas
Late to the party here, I assume no one’s actually reading at this point but just in case there is, I have to say this. The age breakdown isn’t surprising to me. For a lot of older age groups there is sort of tendency to favor whatever benefits the rich (don’t raise taxes, don’t allow unions etc.). These people believe they will be rich one day as well. They essentially have bought into the notion of the “American Dream.” That everyone, no matter where they were born can be the factory owner if they just work hard. The thing is, younger people these days, drowning in student loan debt, toiling in crap jobs they are overqualified for or looking for same while filing for unemployment, are beginning to see the “American Dream” as a fairy tale. There has been a series of pieces on Frum Forum recently retelling this exact story. That means they have abandoned hope of being able to single handily improve their station in life. Once that happens collective action will seem, not AN option, but the ONLY option.
I hope the oligarchs running this country have enjoyed themselves these last 30-40 years. Their joyride will come to end once this feeling of hopelessness reaches a critical mass.
stuckinred
@Barry: Jesus christ the thread is about age and perceptions and I tried to explain mine.
ogliberal
@joe from Lowell: I’m at the tail end of that generation….the selfish bastards who thought Gordon Gekko was the tragic hero of “Wall Street”. The “black/Mexican guy getting something for nothing” and “I’ll be rich someday” myth runs strong among my people. They also seem to be the first people to piss their pants in the face of some sort of threat…too much, “Red Dawn”, I guess. I once had a friend of mine – a socially progressive dude, smart guy, and hardly a wingnut – tell me that he voted for Bush over Kerry because of “the war”. In his next breath he then told me that he would have voted against Bush if Kucinich had won the Democratic nomination. He was dead serious. How does one even begin to understand that thought process? (I’m not sure how this story is relevant other than to highlight the fact that folks who grew up during the Reagan years are just darned goofy politically.)
Ruckus
@stuckinred:
I always heard it as
Joke em if they can’t take a fuck.
Morat20
I’d say it’s because the excesses of unions are in the dusty past, whereas the excesses of corporations and the screwing of workers is “right now”.
Unions can take it too far. Management can take it too far. Back in the 80s, people were still living off the fruits of wide-scale unionization, but the excesses of unions were “in your face” so there was blowback.
Now, the younger voters learn of that as history — and the abuses and excesses they see daily are from corporations, and they’re worried about pay, and benefits, and how long they’re being asked to work.
It’s one of those pendulum things.
PanurgeATL
@Cerberus:
Another poster mentioned the Hard Hat Riots. I think this might be a good time to point out something everyone knows–that the flashpoint for anti-Vietnam War protesting was SCHOOLS. OK, mostly colleges, but the sensibility filtered down through high school. And there were darn good reasons for it, too. So there are a lot of former (and not so former) White Rawk Dudes voting GOP now (Nuge, Alice Cooper, Gene Simmons, that sort of thing) because of that–because so many of the teachers who expelled them for growing their hair and the union guys who beat them up turned out to be Dems, or at least supported by the Dems. (Something lots of people who aren’t white men don’t understand is that most white men aren’t any freer than anyone else–they’re just highest in the traditionalist pecking order, which is not the same thing. Eventually enough white men to make the difference took the deal with the devil.)