Comment by scarmig
6 years ago
1) A lot of the good PR individual professions have is the result of union PR. Teachers, nurses, cops, etc all have unions that put out endless propaganda (no negative connotation intended) about how great and vital to society they are. A lot of our nostalgia for jobs associated with heavy industry comes from old union propaganda.
2) Good PR can easily be outweighed by negative PR. Coal companies have excellent PR departments, but their opposition has invested a lot in negative PR.
3) PR images always exist in your head, but regular encounters with union workers can cause that image, rightly or wrongly, to crash against reality. People think relatively highly of scientists, partially because they never encounter them in real life; compare their image with lawyers or corporate managers.
On 1) sure, I'm not discounting that. Great PR for the members. For the union itself? For the concept of a union? Not so much.
2) I said this further down the thread, but isn't that table stakes? If you're going to advocate for your members, you yourself need to have a support base beyond that membership. Otherwise you get the situation we've got now, where a request in support of the members is viewed negatively precisely because it's coming from a union.
3) Again, table stakes. Especially so if union members buy into the negative-PR-driven image and create a feedback loop.