Escapist Calls For Industry Unionization 100
amitlu writes "In the Friday edition of the Escapist, Joe Blancato challenges the industry to compare itself to skilled labor of the past, and says it's time to organize. From the article: 'If we continue at the rate we're going, we're either going to be worrying about a bunch of college-aged kids with computer science degrees working at McDonald's, too disillusioned to continue in their chosen field or worse, the position they previously held was moved overseas to a more bottom line-friendly locale. For the sake of trying to save money on production costs, why not ship off art production to Romania? Or customer service to India? But to paraphrase the old cliché: First they came for the artists, and I said nothing...'"
Re:Yea (Score:3, Informative)
You first get a whole group of similar laborers together to stand together against employers.
Then, when the employers threaten to not hire them, the union goes to the politicians and tells them that their union has enough votes to make or break their election. At this point the union muscles the politician into creating laws prohibiting the outsourcing of this type of labor, or the hiring of non-union labor.
If the union does not have enough votes to change the election itself, it generally does have enough resources to campaign against said politican and create a real problem. How would you like to be labeled as a politician that did nothing to prevent the outsourcing of jobs, and could be argued was pro-outsourcing? Thats all it would take.
For the employer, non-union labor is almost always more attractive, but they can't use them. Check out construction workers and Taxi drivers in New York. Or perhaps you should take a look at Bell South.
Re:What about the political donations (Score:3, Informative)
Joining a union is pretty much pledging a portion of your salary to the DNC. I don't need that mess
Sigh. I agree, the use of dues for political contributions is a big problem. But we are seeing more often states passing laws that prohibit unions from using member's dues in this manner without their written consent. I hope to see this continue - simply because they are union members does not mean they are all behind any particular party, and therefore their money should be used to fund causes they don't believe in.