Dr. John Wust does not come off as a labor agitator. A longtime obstetrician-gynecologist from Louisiana with a penchant for bow ties, Dr. Wust spent the first 15 years of his career as a partner in a small business — that is, running his own practice with colleagues.
Long after he took a position at Allina Health, a large nonprofit health care system based in Minnesota, in 2009, he did not see himself as the kind of employee who might benefit from collective bargaining.
But that changed in the months leading up to March, when his group of more than 100 doctors at an Allina hospital near Minneapolis voted to unionize. Dr. Wust, who has spoken with colleagues about the potential benefits of a union, said doctors were at a loss on how to ease their unsustainable workload because they had less input at the hospital than ever before.
“The way the system is going, I didn’t see any other solution legally available to us,” Dr. Wust said.
My cousin is an electrician. His boss and his union rep pretty regularly attack his wife for being a trans woman and his options are to sit there and smile or to be fired and never get work again. The (whatever the term is for) apprenticeship system is pretty much built around systemic racism and nepotism and there are a LOT of sexual abuse “scandals” that never see the light of day.
A union, by definition, is about giving power to the people. But if the people are shitbags too, it doesn’t change a lot. Its the exact same problem that companies like Activision-Blizzard had where it is a culture of abuse where the c-suite and the middle managers and even the co-workers are doing “cube crawls” and the like. You can give more bargaining power to the workers but that doesn’t help when the workers themselves are abusive.
I am generally pro union but they do not solve anywhere near as many problems as The Internet likes to pretend they do. And I can very much see a case where a lot of the leadership in the medical community have the “Everyone needs to go through a crucible” mentality. Hell, my aunt is a doctor and has even bragged about how many days straight she could work when she was in her residency and so forth.
Currently, union power is at low ebb. Yes, unions can be and have been terrible engines of corruption when their power grows. I don’t know what the answer is, but I do know people who control millions of dollars are better than those who control billions, if only by degree. We need to tackle wealth disparity.
I am not convinced that there is a significant difference in shitty behavior between millionaires and billionaires. The consequences ship has already long since sailed by the time you are at a couple million. But tell that to the people being sexually harassed and assaulted by their managers and sometimes even union reps. Tell them that they don’t matter right now and what matters is “wealth inequality”.
Hell, you might as well tell them that you are going to give their abusers even more power since the union leadership generally comes from the “popular” low level managers and workers.
Like I said, I think unions are, generally, a net good. But it aggravates me to no end when people ignore the problems they can and can’t solve.
Social Stockholm Syndrome, venerating their suffering as if ones capacity to suffer is something that should be respected and strengthened like a muscle.
…all while disregarding the dystopic culture that fostered the “growth”.
I got in an argument with a pair of my brothers over student loan relief. All 3 of us have paid our student loans back the same way, by living an austere life with 2 jobs for at least a decade. My older brother, the most conservative “progress is a slow march” brother, was absolutely against it. He paid his off, others can too, or at least he should get his money back then, if everyone’s just being let off the hook. I disagreed with him, as I usually do but I approach problems different than he does. He looks at the immediate, how it affects him and figures what’s fair - and there’s nothing wrong with that per se.
I look at the solution and try to identify the markers, or steps, necessary to get there. Then I weigh the steps against the desired solution to determine what is viable. I work backwards from the solution.
My younger brother and I share the same mind on student loans; forgive them, every outstanding balance and end the paygating of knowledge in general - because those holding the keys to the gates didn’t come up with the contents theyre guarding, they themselves are stewards, not owners.
I don’t care that I was able to pay off my loans, it’s more important that we move past the paygating - which is really power projection - than any benefit I myself might be able to gain.
Moving ahead, either personally or socially will at times require looking ahead more than looking at now or the path preceding. I think this kind of insight is crucial to any leadership, large or small, union or otherwise.
I’m if the opinion that if we must make a choice to act together in a group, then let’s figure out and establish our best practices, ensure the appropriate smart people are involved and do whatever with the soft (not-monetized) values we want fostered, ie with compassion, patience, understanding, offering respect and integrity, not demanding obedience before giving them. A society that doesn’t work from those values will lose those values. And that’s pervasive, from your HOA meetings to town hall, from loading dock smoke breaks to union halls. All the way to fancy granite buildings.