Why are union subs so high in the US? As a part time worker I pay under a tenner a month, but even as a full time worker, I’d be paying £16.
Because here they have to fight constantly and legal battles are expensive as shit in the US.
Because Unions pay strike assistance.
For example UAW pay 100$/day https://uaw.org/strike-faq/
This way all members can participate in a strike and give it the necessary strength to achieve something. Still most Union fees are ridiciously low. Usually they are in the area of 1,5% of your salary.
Last I was in one it wasn’t nearly that much, but that was a couple decades back. My best guess is that so many places try to kill the unions by passing ‘right to work’ laws where people are not obligated to join even in a union voted shop. It makes it pretty tough to force a good deal when only a fraction of the workers are in and paying while they probably live in an area where people aren’t concerned about working across a line.
Woah, a correct reference to “right to work” state. Nice!
I can also attest to the higher dues because of RTW policies. I was once in a union that included all the restaurant service workers at an American airport. The servers and bartenders made excellent money and it was a viable career, thus the union made sense.
But, our union also included the food court workers, who were generally younger and didn’t view their job as a career. Most of them opted out of paying dues as health care and future raises weren’t their concern.
There was also the issue of the servers paychecks being too low to pay dues as well. Since taxes had to be paid on credit card tips, our checks were often $0 so we had to manually pay dues. That never happened though…
Getting a workplace unionised is an uphill battle here too. Unless your company already has an officially recognised union, no one wants to join. I tell them it’s £9.65 a month and they’re like, yeah forget it.
What bothers me about where I work is as a bike technician, we actually have the same job title and pay as the till staff who do no skilled work at all. And on top of that, we also have to cover for them (for instance, even though I work in the bike section, I was forced to do car seat training even though the auto section till staff should be the ones doing it). So we’re doing skilled work, plus their work and we get the same pay. But no one is interested. They’ll grumble and groan, but actually doing something about it is too much to ask.
Getting that critical mass is the big hurdle as I see it. People are afraid to show outward support for mass action if the perceived mass is only you and Bill from accounting. There’s the risk that if you start making noise, regardless of whatever laws might protect organizing, the company tosses you for ‘other reasons’.
I worked in a place for about 6.5 years that towards the end started hemorrhaging workers to the tune of about 1/3 the staff over a summer. Having grown up in a union household I gave some smoke break talks about how we could start one. Eventually without traction there I put together a local area study of similar work and brought that in to the VP in charge and after it went up their chain everyone in the place got around a 15-20% raise. Then about 6 months later I was dismissed for ‘poor performance’ after 6 years in the same role. 🤔
Mine are currently at about two hours’ labor per month.
Well worth the cost
I wouldn’t necessarily assume they’re being truthful.
The Mafia needs their cut
Better return on the dollar than Congress.
Yes, the vicious Post Office Mob. Watch out, they have the key to your apartment’s entry way!
Typical dues are 1-2% of pay
“Explain how!”
“Collective bargaining is a means of using a large labor base to argue for better wages and benefits!”
“Woo-hoo!”
wages fly out the window
Not American, but my union gets 1% of my payment every month. But every year, almost, we get raises and benefits from this
The LYNX Corporation (of Hardspace Shipbreaker) would be proud of Delta…
Union membership sounds good and all, but think of the extra oxygen you could buy…
I’ll take the mystery box! A boat is just a boat. A mystery box could be anything! It could even be a boat!
Narrator “It was a sausage”
Simpsons did it first
Not to forget the union puts restrictions on how often the boss can call you out, so you may actually have the time to play those video games.
Not American but my union deduct 10 dolars from my payment every month to cover union costs. It does it with thousands. Is it too much? Yes. But everyone got 10% payment increase this year plus some benefit increases too. i’m not going to complain
$120 a year is too much to justify a 10% raise?
That’s some bad cost benefit analysis.
Maybe the pay is so low to begin with that a ten percent raise is less than the 10 dollars in union dues a paycheck.
$520 a year isn’t much though, if your first 20 minutes of work for the pay period pays your dues then you have another 39.66 hours of money that is for you and your creditors.
Edit: did bad math. Look further down comment for adjustments
What math are you using?
They said $10 per month. You use pay period. Then you switch to weekly pay.
This highlights another reason for unionization, using people who understand accounting to determine what is a good deal for the workers.
I’m using “I’ve been up for 20 hours because I’m packing my house up to move somewhere affordable” math. I meant 79.66 hours of your own money. I read their post wrong and thought it must be 10 a paycheck because it seems so small. When I was a Teamster many years ago it was nearly 800 a year so thirty dollars a paycheck.
<.<
Firstly, they said $10/month which would mean an hourly rate of ~$0.60 using that logic.
Secondly, even if they said per paycheck and get paid weekly, they would have to be making less than $2.50 an hour for that to make sense.
I highly doubt you’d fine a place that allows for wages that low, which also has a system in place to protect unions and workers.
I’m not American either, and I have no idea how much I pay my union. They’ve made sure I had several increases in salary in addition for the yearly rise, and I get several insurances for a better price than if I were to buy them for my self.
Last year the collective raise wasn’t that high, but they made sure my colleagues with lower salary than me got it instead, and I expect the same thing will happen this year.
I’m totally fine with that because that is what I voted for to happen. My salary is good enough for now, and I want to make sure others are taken care of.
Totally, my union got us bonuses in our last negotiations. The lower your salary the higher your bonus. The only way to have it be fair at all as I see it.
Man, have you seen the prices of a Sega Genesis lately?
Would you rather have no money and three video games or no video games and three money?
Perfectly put 👍
Lisa needs braces.
DENTAL PLAN
counterpoint, union dues are like real life video game cheat codes!
I’ve just looked it up and I’ve paid ~300€ last year. But only because I neglected to tell them, that I’ve started training for a new job so my dues would actually be much lower. I’ve just changed it and this year I will pay maybe 30€ or so
Edit: My math was way off ^^’ it’s actually more like 150€/year right now.
Though they do take a percentage of income before taxes, so I think it’s still very fair.
30€ for the entire year’s worth of union dues?
No, I was stupid. Fixed it
The only thing a little ironic is that delta FAs are the best-paid of any US airline.
Their deal is literally better than all the union deals - and the unions were scrambling to match.
because those workers didn’t buy into that corporate anti-union nonsense.
I don’t understand what you mean.
deleted by creator
Delta flight attendants are non-union. They’ve also had industry leading pay for… forever. Delta pilots are union and also have industry leading pay.
…because delta knows that if they didn’t have that pay then they would unionize and probably be able to negotiate something as good if not better (edit: better than what they want to offer down the road. They beat the union rates so they can point at it and say “I told you so!”, discouraging a would-be unionized workforce now so they don’t have to negotiate with a union later and can get away with the sort of underhanded shit that a strong union would be able to stand up against, including but not limited to lower wages and poor working conditions.)
Just because there isn’t currently a union doesn’t mean a corporation like that isn’t kept in check by both the realized and potential presence of unions in their industry…
Unions aren’t the ones who decide salaries outright, they negotiate with the employer. Wages go up under unions, not that all union workers are paid better than all non union workers. A Delta Union would almost definitely make their deal even better.
“Explain.”
The grocery/retail worker Union in my city sucks for newbs. Takes a large chunk of your paycheck every two weeks until you gain seniority after 24 months, then you can be a lazy bastard as much as you want.
Unions are great, some suck.
I should’ve been a teamster, so lazy and surly…
two years seems like a really long time when you’re in the middle of it.
But two years really is a long time to have huge chunk of already low paycheck taken out. 🫤 How do people survive those first two years?
Mooching off of samples, I’d guess.
