Well it doesn’t mean what it used to anymore. Now you just pay for a subscription and you get it. Hell, I don’t know why you ever thought the check mark pre-Musk ever meant anything other than somebody’s identity being verified as true judging by what you’re saying... Never meant that their opinions were Twitter approved or whatever.
I got higher at position as senior. But It wasn’t until I was able to join the Union that my income doubled. Year before I joined like in 2007 manager gave me a .10 raise. This shit is real.
The BLS data has historically been a method by which capitalists measured and managed labor power as a fungible resource. It has historically been a tool of capital to evaluate the influence of policy on labor, not a tool of labor to pressure capital for concessions.
Not to say the information isn't valuable on its face. But it should be worth recognizing that we are looking at autocannibalization of capital. The people most injured by dismantling the BLS are the people who do the bulk of the hiring, not the people being hired.
And I've never heard of a contract that explicitly ties non-union workers' pay to the union contact, but I'd be cheering the union guys on if they ever asked for a raise if that was the case.
That's actually more common than you think. It's not explicit.
My niece who works at a very popular coffee shop where some are unioned, the non-union ones get paid a bit extra and reminded on the daily about that benefit of higher pay for being non-unioned.
And my aunt works as a receptionist in a non-union hospital. Her counterparts in a union, when they went on strike and got a huge pay bump... She suddenly "mysteriously" got a pay bump aligned with it because the non-union hospital was afraid of employees unionizing (which secretly, they were).
This is how most people think and see the world, which is why we (the US) are in the boat we're in now. People don't see the big picture if they never have to or aren't taught how to think critically.
I think it's a complicated problem. To start with, the studies are usually paywalled. If you can afford to purchase access, you still need the capacity to understand and parse the formal academic language. Most people have neither of those requirements, and have to rely on the media to report the statistics accurately, which doesn't happen.
This leads to a situation where the media keeps trying to say, idk employment statistics are better than ever, and then everybody updates their mental blocklist to filter out the word 'statistics'.
Almost as of by design of corporate overlords and billionaires. Almost as of billions of dollars and collective hate can't fill the emptiness. Almost as if we should focus on healing everyone's (including billionaires ')wounded inner child schisms and social divides may start healing. Maybe
Part of the problem is that statistics can be abused. It takes a reasonable amount of training to be able to differentiate between reliable statistics and potentially dodgy. Even worse, we are often presented with them, striped or context.
The best solution is to teach people how to both spot problems and seek reliable data. The proper meaning of "do your own research". Unfortunately, a significant chunk just give up with them and only trust their gut.
They can be abused, by people who understand statistics talking to people who don't understand statistics. This is a good reason to learn statistical methods rather than reject them.
Typically, statistics are abused by politicians/partisan hacks who take data from reliable sources and lie/spin it to their narrative. The thing is, the average Fox News viewer with a HS diploma isn't going to dig any deeper. And I wouldn't say they trust their gut... they trust the propaganda narrative.
When Trump and Vance said immigrants were eating people's dogs and cats, they just nodded their empty heads.. you can't teach someone like that to engage reason.
My thoughts exactly. And how I love this complete dismissal style with the "False." at the beginning, that has established itself online. it's a perfect giveaway for " now my personal but universal opinion, also called Truth bomb, is going to destroy your statement" - which in my opinion is just extremely patronizing and never really true.
Especially when comparing your personal anecdotal experience with a fucking statistic.
Oh and nobody talks like that in real life, or at least the people that do start their verbal line of argument this way are idiots and everybody knows it.
Wow, that just threw me for a loop. I still remember the hits, like "Steamy Windows" or "We Don't Need Another Hero". But then, that was Tina Turner. Not Nina. 😅
This is the new American way. Zero-sum thinking all the way down. Anyone else's win is our loss. Every situation must have a winner and a loser. Win-win situations are considered immoral for these people. We've moved past rugged individualism to a full-on Hunger Games mindset.
Seattle metro area has the highest minimum wage in the country. The top 5 cities in the US are all in this metro. This is because when the wage increases were passed by city, they were tied to the inflation rate so that increases every year, so no new laws have to be passed year over year to get this increase. No arguing every year for a simple cost of living adjustment.
Shit even Republican voters and Republicans "should" want minimum wage tied to rate of inflation. Why? Because it creates incentive for the Federal government in keeping inflation lower, keeping inflation lower being something that "supposedly" the average Republican voter wants.
Fucking thank you! Why is this so complicated?? Why fight for $15 or whatever if you know by the time your get the fucking laws past your dollar is worth half as much.
It's so transparently flawed to because tying minimum wage to a formula/basket/col/astrology FFS, Would mean not having to revisit this fight every. Single. Year.
Mate, you should be arguing for increased wages, not trying to keep others down.
It’s my opinion that people like this aspire to be their own boss, make their own money, and look up to business owners as mentors.
None of that is inherently wrong, until the mentors/business owners start espousing the evils of increased wages, how paying taxes is preventing pay raises for their workers, etc.
So not knowing any better, these wannabes go out and parrot what they’ve heard their heroes say as if it’s gospel. And of course the talking heads that they listen to say the same shit, further solidifying the class warfare mentality.
How is it even legal to have explicitly preferential pay for people not in a union? Is there a limit to that, or can companies just say, "Anyone who joins a union will be paid minimum wage." Ofc with at-will employment they can always just fire you, but like, if you think about it it's pretty fucked up right?
I don't think it's preferential pay. It's just that they pay more, somebody in the union also can get more money than the union minimum. Somebody not part of the union can get less or more than somebody in the union, just not below the union minimum.
It's not that if they join the union that they get less money.
The union + 0.5 just means that they earn better than the minimum and the employer gives them more than the minimum, because people like that.
At least that's how it works where I live and union contracts are common.
Not everyone part of the union has to get exactly the union minimum, it's just that you cannot legally get less. People might not be part of the union but they still fall under the union contract negotiated by the union, because it applies to the entire company.
So even then, the union people might be making more than the union minimum, so the non union person might still be making less than an average union person while not getting any union benefits.
How is it even legal to have explicitly preferential pay for people not in a union?
Other than the minimum wage and protected classes, there's not really any laws around how much employers must pay. They can have two employees, Bob and Tina, and pay Bob half of Tina's salary because they just hate the name "Bob". If Bob doesn't like it he can quit.
What I'm saying is that if they can set "$0.50 above union rates" as the company policy for everyone, they can also set "$5 above union rates" as the company policy for everyone and then cut union rates by $5. It's essentially just bribing people to not join a union or penalizing them if they do. It being company policy for everyone is irrelevant.
It really is a kind of solipsism, emotional immaturity as a self-justifying worldview. Problems don't exist until they impact me personally, repeat and nauseam.
I will forgive people who were previously had a low enough income to have benefits that magically disappeared completely at a certain threshold when they received a raise for assuming that making too much money could be a negative. They generally never made enough to understand how tax brackets work and assumed the worst.
If it is explained to them and they refuse to learn, that is on them.
This is what Swedish unions did even more directly. A company hired labour from Latvia I think it was. The union showed up and said that thats all fine, but you have to pay them properly. None of them were members. They picketed the company for the sake of non-members wages. Why? To avoid social dumping down the line.
We could've had Nina in DC if not for some corporate Dem's wounded ego. It's almost like we should work on healing egos instead of fracturing them with culture wars and id pol unless.... That's the point of culture wars and id pol. 🤷♀️ 💡
Fuckin Thomas Sowell. Unlearning Economics has many hours of content on why that guy is such a blight on economics and the world that are worth a watch
I would argue that the problem with police unions is that they're too good at what they do. They've managed to achieve a degree of militantism that rivals any black panther or international world worker.
A single, heavily armed, deeply insular and dogmatic, horrifyingly MAGA-pilled community of workers would be bad in any sector. But to make matters worse, police have this natural affinity with media that makes them the recipient of tons of free positive publicity.
Would that everyone could claim membership in a union this strong.
Individual workers do not have the leverage to "stand up for themselves," they just get knocked down. In all likelyhood, this was just the contract that Cathy was offered.
Their leverage is their value to the company. If you're not capable of providing more than minimum value for your employer, then why should you work for that company? Find a company you can do more for.