| re: Sen. Schumer and entertainment unions | |
| Posted by: Singapore/Fling 04:43 pm EDT 03/28/21 | |
| In reply to: re: Sen. Schumer and entertainment unions - singleticket 12:54 pm EDT 03/27/21 | |
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| Good points. Some of that is by design: starting in the 1980s, right-wing political strategists began using social issues - what we now call Identity Politics - as a wedge to cleave off working class, union members from the Democratic party, which effectively weakened the unions' power as a voting bloc, which then allowed the right to usher in "Right to Work" legislation that further crippled unions' power and made it harder to create new ones. Over time, and also by design, those same Identity Politics issues became an outlet for economically disenfranchised people on all sides of the political divide to express their frustrations over losing power as working class people (i.e. don't blame the bosses and the corporations, blame the immigrants and working women). Likewise, as unions became disempowered, it also became difficult to have an intelligent conversation about them; point out ways that unions have themselves become tools of political empowerment and enriching union bosses rather than workers, and you are in the territory of arguing why unions don't work and should be abolished, rather than reformed. It doesn't help that in some industries, different unions are fighting for the same piece of a small pie and the unions that have fought the hardest for their members' paychecks are cast in a bad light by management, partly as a ploy to stir up resentment by the other union members - see the situation at the Met Opera for a very stark example of stagehands, singers, and musicians being put in competition for the small sum of money the Met will deign to pay artists, and how much of that pie the stagehands take home relative to performers, and how the Met is attempting to make stagehands the villain, same as happens on Broadway. And I'll admit, there are definitely times where I get frustrated by the stagehands union, but when they are being attacked by someone who is in the moneyed/producer class, I'm going to defend them because that is the binary that we find ourselves locked into. |
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