There’s a petit-bourgeois mindset that it’s really hard to avoid in corporate America. It goes something like this, “There’s no union looking out for my interests, why should they have one?” The irony being that that the answer to that question never seems to be “why can’t office workers in the private sector put together a union of their own?” but always turns into an attack on working class people and the public sector on the whole. I want to make it clear that I’m speaking mostly about workers on the lower rungs of white collar life, because at the executive level it’s more traditional class based antagonism.

I think at least some of it is because it’s easier to live your life the way it is you believe their is no alternative. Stable, unionized employment makes it crystal clear that it doesn’t have to be like that. It’s such a powerful, pervasive and irrational emotion that I can feel even in myself sometimes and have to be careful to understand and control it.

It’s also a personal thing, because I remember my father’s descent into reactionary, neoliberal politics all too well. He’d went to college late in life, got a degree, and ended up in middle management at a power plant, which translated into just far enough up the food chain to be ineligible for union membership. His resentment was palpable and dovetailed perfectly with getting older, making more money, and going to church a lot. In other words, he became a cliche’. We were in deeply conservative part of an otherwise “blue” state, which certainly didn’t help matters any. I got spoon fed a whole lot of it before I even knew what it was and would spend a whole lot of years undoing it. So much so that I sometimes say that my 20s were defined by losing faith in Christianity and capitalism, those two great creeds of my youth.

In his defense the unions were very corrupt and I still cringe when people try to paint a rosy picture of what working class, union life is like culturally having experienced it firsthand. Still, it’s no excuse….

So the working class is already oppressed by the general social arrangement. Given that a successful strike / negotiation will have absolutely zero impact on the working class — it will slightly benefit the middle-class transit workers — the whole business has nothing to do with social justice. When middle class workers quarrel with middle class taxpayers, that’s supposed to provoke leftist empathy? Give me a break.

I am not that familiar with this blog and haven’t followed the thread of argument you outline. But I am strongly in favour of the government being able to deliver public services without input from unions, apparently a point of dispute in the BART strike. The idea that public sector workers are stakeholders has created, among other things, the police state you enjoy in the USA and which is spreading to Canada, via prison guard unions and the police unions which effectively immunise police violence. The infinite loop of consultation and cooperation etc. has, furthermore, made government services synonymous, in much of the public mind, with torpor, thus discrediting the idea of government intervention with a public — e.g. the working poor — who should be strongly in favour of it! Elected officials need to be able to crack the whip and get results. If the vast urban underclass in the USA, and the vast social problem of (say) aboriginal poverty in Canada, are ever going to be tackled, we need public servants who are willing to put in the time and effort to implement radical new policies. The public sector unions, by contrast, are deeply invested in the status quo — they are one of many institutions actively preventing reform.

Jack, you don’t seem to know much about US politics, which is alright since you are a Canadian! But stick to what you know or learn to understand what you don’t, please. The idea that public sector unions are the cause of a nascent police state in the US is not only profoundly ignorant, but frankly bizarre. I would be very surprised if that were the case in Canada either, but will reserve judgement, since I don’t know much about Canadian institutions.

Let me leave you with this, though: I gather than there has been some limited pushback against unions in Canada over recent years. In the US, there has been a 30+ year sustained *war* against unions. Fewer and fewer Americans every year are in unions – I believe the figure for 2012 was about 11%. What is it for Canada? Around 30%, right (almost triple)? This idea that surging unionism in the US is gushing across the border and infecting Canada is pure, and weird, fantasy.

Fun story. I’m with you but I have to tune out those complainers. I think the expectation that things should always be smooth and run efficiently is predicated on the same logic that increased “efficiency” = “productivity” and that we can squeeze out more. It sets up crisis management, a stress-inducing way to live. This “logic” is certainly classist and reflects entitled attitudes, but it’s promoted at worksites and can be internalized in many areas of life. Your story points out the importance of keeping the basics simple and supportive in home life.

Weird. Just yesterday I was playing with the phrase “disrupt the disrupters” in my head, after reading a Baffler piece on annoying tech dorks at SXSW. “These people, always talking about innovating and disrupting everything.” said I to myself. ” I’m holding out for the day when they get a taste of their own medicine, rammed right down their throats.”

gmta corey

$60,000 a year? My single mother supported four kids and herself with less than $25,000. Where’s the justice there?