I accede to your desire not to talk about this at length. I so understand that feeling.
I'll give a brief personal response to your points.
I think you're correct that many, not all, unions have become entities seeking primarily their own organizational interest. Power does its thing with all entities.
However, the eight hour day (for one example among many), a benefit to knowledge workers and ditchdiggers alike, we owe to the historical efforts of the poor devils who won the right to organize, which management fought bitterly at every level and would be fighting still, if individual workers and small committees of them had limited themselves to putting their ideas in management's suggestion box.
I know this doesn't mean that the system is working well now! I don't like the bureaucratized, creepy unions of today any more than you do. Their resemblance to underregulated quasi-criminal corporations, of which there are so many, is unmistakable.
I remember, though, that when management had its way, workers had the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. I read a book about that when I was sixteen. It made a big impression on me. |
