Comment by CydeWeys
1 year ago
I would support the AWU if they were actually monomaniacally focused on worker issues like they're supposed to be (specifically I'd love to see a main focus on preventing offshoring). But instead it seems like they spend most of their time fighting the same kind of culture wars you see on college campuses, most recently Palestine. I don't agree with their views on that issue, and thus they've turned me off completely. They just overall strike me as young, immature, overly idealistic, and not actually suited to run a broad union that should be able to appeal to most of the employees (which is what is required for the union to actually be useful).
I always assumed these culture war unions were fostered precisely to make unions unpalatable.
If that's not their intent, they're certainly doing a good job of it. The people running them are cosplaying running a union, without fundamentally understanding what a union really is.
It's a common management strategy pushed worldwide by consultants. Undermining the opposition by promoting the worst in it. The people who are making the union unpalatable are not under threat from Google as they're in effect unwittingly performing a valuable service for management. Due to intrinsic deficiencies in humans there is no real way to fight it. What usually happens is that the organization, now free from internal opposition, is be able to make the large changes that it always wished to do only to find out that management did not see all ends, makes a bunch of mistakes, and enters into a terminal decline.