Comment by alsetmusic
7 hours ago
As a strong supporter of unions, that's the end of my donations. I've probably donated fewer than a dozen times, but definitely more than five or six. I felt reasonably good about it and went on with my day, no hesitation about supporting them. That's done.
Fwiw, unions often have support pages where you can donate or buy merch to support. One of my favorite tshirts advocates for a union that was trying to form at a huge retail chain (looking at you Starbucks Workers United). I did a quick search and this[0] appears to be them.
Curious why you support unions in general? It’s kind of like saying “I support governments” or “I support companies”.
It’s like saying ”I support worker’s rights.” There is in general a huge power imbalance between the employer and the employee, and a union does a bit to rectify that.
Yeah, if we had a country that was run by Unions, rather than Corporations so that abuses of power by those that ran the Unions was a big deal, I'd have a different opinion. But right now, I'm pretty happy to blindly back Unions, because they've been completely gutted.
I mean, I would say both, “I support governments,” and, “I support companies.” They are unique social institutions that provide value to their members. The former provides a monopoly on violence which (in my view) is superior to an anarchic world of all against all. And the latter are a legally sanctioned vehicle for accomplishing goals, particularly commercial objectives, that allows for business relations to continue after the death or exit of the founder. This allows for long term contracts and capital investments, whose benefits are pretty obvious.
There are certainly examples of both social structures being wielded to bad ends, but I don’t see anything unreasonable about supporting them in general. Same presumably would go for unions.
If the the government was spending a ton of effort to suppress business and trade, I would also be glad to say "I support companies."
It's a bit like saying "I support billionaires" but the opposite.
One can support both billionaires and unions. Sweden has more billionaires per capita than the USA while roughly 2/3rds of their workforce is unionized
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I stopped supporting a long time ago when one the top contributors was removed because he had a tiff with a woman who was dating one of the executives. I don't remember the exact details. But that showed me what the organization really prioritized.
I do find it interesting how pretty much none of Wikipedia's organisational controversies and institutional deterioration (a lot of which have been going on for ~20 years) really made it out to the general public.