this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2024
2 points (100.0% liked)
Asklemmy
43864 readers
1679 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Unions tend to target a specific industry, and "work from home" encompasses a lot of different kinds of work, in a lot of different kinds of industries.
Work from home can range from anything from an IT worker who spends most of their day in SSH to a Customer Service Representative who spends all day on the phone with customers.
I don't think there are necessarily any rules stating that a union has to be people in the same industry... that's just generally how it's done. It's definitely likely possible, since people who work from home have similar needs in terms of union representation., however it might be confusing to have all those different types of work under one union representation. I don't know, someone else probably knows more.
Organizing people who are by their very nature, separated from one another, seems like a tall order, but one worth exploring.
In my light research I noticed what you said how unions are industry specific but also didn't see any rules that it had to be. In the wake of covid and the great work from home experiment I think the new working world needs a new type of union to represent all of us who experienced first hand how much better wfh is for life balance and are equally upset about that rug being pulled out from under us because some executives say so.
I think the reason unions tend to be industry-specific is because the execs for a certain industry tend either to collude or snipe at eachother depending on the situation. So if an entire industry goes on strike it means that the execs from one company can't capitalize on the opportunity of another company going on strike. In theory, if the widget-maker's union goes on strike, it means the entire supply chain of things made with widgets gets choked, which exerts a lot of financial pressure on management.
This is a really good point, with WFH workers being diffused among the workforce, having just your work-from-home employees on strike might not actually put enough of a dent in your operations for you to care, as an executive.
But on the other hand being part of that single digit percentage of wfh employees might put you in a disadvantage in every company, union and policy.
Funny, just like being of any other minority.
I agree, it's just going to be tricky, and asking a lot of union representatives to represent different types of work with different needs.