this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2025
1 points (100.0% liked)
GenZedong
4344 readers
36 users here now
This is a Dengist community in favor of Bashar al-Assad with no information that can lead to the arrest of Hillary Clinton, our fellow liberal and queen. This community is not ironic. We are Marxists-Leninists.
This community is for posts about Marxism and geopolitics (including shitposts to some extent). Serious posts can be posted here or in /c/GenZhou. Reactionary or ultra-leftist cringe posts belong in /c/shitreactionariessay or /c/shitultrassay respectively.
We have a Matrix homeserver and a Matrix space. See this thread for more information. If you believe the server may be down, check the status on status.elara.ws.
Rules:
- No bigotry, anti-communism, pro-imperialism or ultra-leftism (anti-AES)
- We support indigenous liberation as the primary contradiction in settler colonies like the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Israel
- If you post an archived link (excluding archive.org), include the URL of the original article as well
- Unless it's an obvious shitpost, include relevant sources
- For articles behind paywalls, try to include the text in the post
- Mark all posts containing NSFW images as NSFW (including things like Nazi imagery)
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Union organizers and other labor activists still get blacklisted, harassed and propagandized against by larger industries/capital. It's an evolved form of the "red-list" that existed all the way up until the 90s. A friend of mine had their father put on that list back in the day and basically was unable to find a job for close to two decades.
It goes both ways. I ran a restaurant in a very small chain, it needed a small exterior wall repair and the guy who oversaw all five locations hired his brother in law to do it, the BIL was a contractor and did it cheap, it was a small job. The next week I was told by a couple of my regular customers that they couldn't come back to eat there because we got blacklisted for hiring non-union workers. As a GM I'm supposed to drive sales through good product and service - and I did! But that was out of my control and honestly made me less friendly towards unions. I've tried to get union jobs, that's less than 5% of jobs in my area and I've never gotten one. That standard is still ridiculous to me. Why the fuck would you blacklist a company for not hiring union workers when all of their employees aren't uniion and are making slave wages, and no one can actually get union jobs? I know huge corporate America is doing okay, but the common man can't afford anything extra right now.
It doesn't go both ways. Capital has an advantage initially because they are the ones who own your workplace and take a cut of your payment AKA the franchise of the restaurant you ran. You either have the administrative ability to approve a contract/bid, or the franchise has to do it for you. The administration that the union operates under is the one typically making the choices for the union. The union is just trying to protect itself. Unions and labor activists have been the target of the FBI and have been subject to government perseuction.
That is how a lot of union services work. You either want to work with the union(s), or you want to go with cheap contractors, so cheap contractors you will get. Nobody wants to waste time with cheapskates who negotiate the value of the job by hiring some third-party handyman who may or may not actually get the job done right. I'm not saying this is you, but you deal with a lot of people like this when it comes to be a contractor.
What likely happened is that you didn't get black-listed, but most of them likely figured that you are more likely to take the bid on third-party contractors if they undercut them and they don't want to waste time and resources on dealing with that and decided on bigger jobs. I've had plenty of experience with those types as a maintenance guy and I'm not even union. I've helped union guys before and even gave them contracts and vice versa. It's not as cut and clear as you are making it; could be just your area. OR your franchise has an issue with your local union OR administration, for whatever reason and you were just caught in the cross-fire. (when I worked at a place we had bills at another place under the franchise and I couldn't ask for any more bids on projects from that company until the franchise paid off the owed amount from the other place)
Also, most restaurants already run on razor-thin margins. In my area most of them just use contractors. No point in bothering with a restaurant as a unionized workplace when there way bigger jobs out there. If you're a GM you should understand full and well why their standards are so high because of the high number of chucklefucks you've probably ran into during your time at a near-minimum wage restaurant.
Your complaints are valid though in some ways, unions are largely captured and have been defanged by corporations and the administration that they deal with. There is no actual revolutionary zeal or spirit inside of them and they fall victim to corruption, nepotism and collaboration with capital. That is the reason the I.W.W exists and why communists inside a union have a due diligence to agitate and participate. Beyond that though, there has been a slew of legislation that has negated the power of unions from even early on most notably the Taft-Hartley Act and later on during Reagan's administration (airport workers). Trade unionism has plenty of criticisms from us Marxists for its own reasons.
That's a lot of words to say it does kinda go both ways. The FBI is almost as hostile to small business as it is to unions. You acknowledge restaurants run razor thin margins, and that restaurant chain didn't have much capital - leased buildings, inflating costs and some months they ran at a loss. Also I've had some good friends who were shop stewards in different unions and they all told me that the unions were full of "chucklefucks" as you say too.
Also, we were most certainly blacklisted. A friend of mine showed me our name on a printed list. It wasn't even because of a previous issue, one of the workers got asked by a union customer about their crew and bam the restaurant location got added to the list. It was a $2k stucco job and the BIL specialized in stucco so the finished work looked great. My wife works union. I'm not anti union. But their Mafia practices are probably unfortunately necessary, and also work against their public perception to those who aren't fortunate enough to know someone to get them into the union. And for most people who are just barely sustaining food and shelter, hiring union workers is just too expensive.
Small businesses are the petit-bourgeoise that extract surplus value from people who aren't employed by the major industrialists or financiers. If it's a local franchise, I still have no sympathy for them because at the end of the day they are scraping a part of the entire worth of the workers' labor in order to keep those "razor-margin" margins that always tend to line the pockets of most owners at the expense of the worker. The owner may be struggling, but they aren't struggling like the person getting paid just above minimum wage to do the work to make THEM money. The fact that they have collateral such as real estate demonstrates that point entirely. More and more people can't even afford a house. In the months of running at a loss; what was the owner of the franchise's paycheck like?
I laid out plenty of reasons why you may have been black-listed. Could be the union or the fault of administration, not wanting to deal with restaurants because of those profit margins, etc.
I guess I'm doing it wrong. I run a small nonprofit now, and other people there make more than I do.
Non-profits, all though they can be exploitative, do not run under the model of extracting the value from workers in order to line the pockets of their owner, instead going to the cause they work towards.
I also do volunteer work. People make more than me everywhere.