Labor Discipline is the point of resisting strikes, not making more money

 

Reminder that crushing unions/strikes isn’t just about the short term money it’s about maintaining the hierarchy of economic power https://t.co/E1HNwhNUTW

— Mac (@GoodPoliticGuy) January 20, 2023

The message of "labor discipline": You had better take whatever crappy job is on offer, or suffer the indignities of poverty [and an impoverished lot of public goods and services], even homelessness and starvation....and if you're extra ornery, we'll put you in a cage.

The U.S. has 5% of the world's population, but 25% of its prisoners.

 Meanwhile: If America Had Fair Laws, 60 Million Workers Would Join a Union Tomorrow - Jacobin

Excerpt:

But perhaps the most remarkable statistic highlighted in the EPI’s analysis concerns the number of workers who wanted to join a union in 2022 but couldn’t: some 60 million, or 48 percent of the entire nonunion workforce. It’s ironic, given the political right’s frequent justification of anti-union laws under the auspices of choice and voluntarism (evident in Orwellian phrases like “right to work”) that the appetite for union membership is so much higher than current union density would suggest. As the EPI’s researchers also pointedly note, “the large increase in the share of workers expressing a desire for unionization over the last four decades has occurred at the same time the share of workers represented by a union has declined.”

This divergence is owed, in significant part, to employer-friendly laws and regulations that make it incredibly difficult to organize a workplace even when a majority of workers might be in favor. A recent study by University of Oregon labor scholar Gordon Lafer, for example, finds that the climate facing workers at many companies effectively resembles that faced by democratic opposition movements during sham elections in one-party dictatorships. For one, existing laws governing unionization are almost comically slanted toward employers. Furthermore, when management does break the rules — employers are charged with violating federal law in more than 40 percent of union elections — penalties are often so lax that they can be treated as little more than the cost of doing business: a state of affairs that allows for rampant intimidation and election-rigging.