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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   29798 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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To me, the more interesting question is how 44% gets an endorsement, but 58% gets no endorsement.

I have never been a union member. My only experiences interacting with unions have been profoundly negative. As such, I am unqualified to make any suppositions about why the leadership would act in such a way.

Is there anyone here who could speak to the culture and explain it?

Leadership wants to endorse Harris. It is almost certainly that simple.

That’s what I thought at first but it seems like they’ve got the same background as the members. How do you account for the split between leadership and members?

Unions, get captured just like any other org. The people interested in work will work. The people interested in advocacy and slacking off will get involved in the union.

Sure but where does the difference in politics come from? Why would Trump appeal less to a union boss than a union worker and vice versa with Harris?

Union leadership and the rank and file often have different interests for iron law of bureaucracy reasons.

The union worker is interested in his wages, which are dependent on the health of the company, the quality of his coworkers, and the strength of the union's bargaining position. The union boss's wages are often on a different payscale that rewards expanding his unionbase. He eventually no longer has much interest in any individual company his union operates in, and often was drawn from the ideological subclass interested in union advocacy from the start.

Union leaders are professional activists getting very nice checks for playing nice with democrats.

In this case Trump talked about firing workers who strike. Which is a pretty big issue for a union. And the union leader was very vocally unhappy about that. Without that he probably gets the endorsement, given the Union leader spoke at the RNC and the majority of members liking Trump.

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