8 ms·
Unionbusters (1986)
- yesiamyourdad 2y ago"Hank Milam was a businessman with $20,000 in equipment and a firm faith in the rules of the game. He took on the union that had ruled the Houston docks for fifty years and beat it on its own turf."
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- mitchbob 2y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20240322140257/https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/unionbusters-ila-port-houston/ https://web.archive.org/web/20240322140257/https://www.texas...
- keybored 2y agoI love unions in American fictional media. The Wire seasons two is centered around the dockworkers who take bribes and are arguing about how corrupt they should be (I’m biased since it’s the most boring season by far). Ozark features a union on the periphery which is introduced by a man carjacking a truck and kneecaping the driver with a shotgun. Can’t wait to see what’s up next.
- readams 2y agoIt's not just fictional media. https://www.justice.gov/criminal/criminal-vcrs/infiltrated-labor-unions#:~:text=Historically%2C%20organized%20criminal%20groups%20such,threats%20and%20acts%20of%20violence https://www.justice.gov/criminal/criminal-vcrs/infiltrated-l....
- readyman 2y agoYeah, just ask the DOJ!?!?!? Is this supposed to be a joke? Unions in the US have been corrupt ever since the Taft Hartley act kneecapped them, but it's absurd to take the DOJ's word for any of this.
- mezeek 2y agoYou skipped right over Sopranos
- nimbius 2y ago[flagged]
- mistrial9 2y agohmm its not a "class" in the old social order sense.. aligned interests? what is allowed? maybe.. another angle is that govt is also shown as corrupt plenty of times in other places.. also lawyers .. also doctors.. just about all the professions.. Hollywood has to hook the viewer on the story, so yes they deal in stereotypes. Assigning "class" as a motivator is slightly dim, in the modern times IMHO
- triceratops 2y ago> I’m biased since it’s the most boring season by far Heresy!
- bryik 2y agoDon't forget the classic film On the Waterfront. Considered one of the greatest movies ever made and adapted from "Crime on the Waterfront," a 24-article series by the New York Sun's Malcolm Johnson that received the second prize ever awarded for Local Reporting, in 1949. > In a vocation where loss of limb (and even life) was not uncommon, prospective workers — in a field disproportionately comprised of working-class African-Americans and whites of Italian and Irish descent who did not benefit from the upward mobility of the G.I. Bill — were forced to offer kickbacks to syndicate representatives at the daily "shape-up," in which prospective workers were forced to compete against each other to secure work irrespective of union membership. At any time, workers could be virtually blacklisted from subsequent employment for arbitrary purposes in the union's "blue books," their jobs often requisitioned by members of the syndicate who were completing prison sentences. https://www.pulitzer.org/article/underworld-syndicate-malcolm-johnsons-waterfront-articles https://www.pulitzer.org/article/underworld-syndicate-malcol...
- kadoban 2y ago> I’m biased since it’s the most boring season by far That season has really grown on me over time and rewatches. It has a lot of great character work on Omar, Avon, Stringer, McNulty, Prezbo, Freeman, etc.; Ziggy, Nick, Sobotka is peak tragedy with a lot of fun along the way. You may be right that it's not as exciting as other seasons, but I personally would call it boring and it sets up and deepens _so_ much of what comes after.
- AtlasBarfed 2y agoWell, the kicker about how boring the season is so they kept redirecting to the drug gangs rather than the purported focus of the season
- kadoban 2y agoEvery season in The Wire is a mix of new and old groups of characters (except the first of course). Is s2 really notably extra focused on s1 characters? If it is I didn't notice, though I can't say I've counted either.
- dylan604 2y agoSeason 2 helps explain how the drugs come into the city. It shows how the cops get reassigned to hammer on which ever nail is currently sticking its head up once they've hammered the current one back down. It shows how nails can work their way free and pop their heads back up requiring the attention of the hammer again. If only the cops could figure out how to use screws instead.
- dylan604 2y agoI love that season. The most boring season to me is the 5th season where they jumped the shark and the stupid journo. I really like the "Greek" and his crew, especially Vandos. His line about "why can't they just kick the ball with their feet" cracks me up with his confusion over basketball. But why do you seem to have this thing that union members are above committing crimes like those depicted you've called out? We know that unions are heavily influenced by organized crime. Why do you think that even if the union isn't controlled by OC, why would you think individual members wouldn't be susceptible to working side hustles?
- keybored 2y agoI don’t think that unions or union members are above that. I think it’s funny that they are consistently portrayed that way in the media.
- dylan604 2y agoand why might that be? because your normal day to day person that pays their dues, goes to work, gets paid is a boring story. there's no news there. there's no there there. union member gets caught committing a crime while using their position in the union or with the protection of the union is news and plenty of people find that interesting. nobody cares about some start up, but tell the story of how the startup became a rocketship to the moon because their founder created a bro culture that rewarded shady practices of using the information they collect on their users to try to make those reporting on the shady practices look bad, then you have a much more interesting story. There's never been a biopic made about the founders of Lyft, like for Uber. Never was a biopic made about Tom and MySpace like there was about the Zuck.
- keybored 2y agoOkay fine. I was naive about the influence of organized crime on unions in America. And if you’re gonna make a union a central thing in a crime series (The Wire) then it doesn’t make sense for it to be “legit”.
- changoplatanero 2y agoI'm definitely in favor of breaking up the dockworkers/longshormans unions. I don't see why we should let a small group of people hold the whole economy hostage just to enrich themselves.
- missedthecue 2y agoYou mean to tell me having the world's least efficient ports (worse than even Tanzania), is a bad thing? https://www.reuters.com/world/us/california-ports-key-us-supply-chain-among-worlds-least-efficient-2021-10-20/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/california-ports-key-us-sup...
- jordanb 2y agoThis isn't due to the dockworkers. This is due to everything after the cargo is offloaded. LA and Longbeach are a disaster because the rail network is incredibly mismanaged. Union Pacific has decided that they will only run unit trains out of the inland empire to a few destinations north and east. In order to get cargo from LA and Longbeach to those inland terminals thousands of truck movements have to occur across LA's congested freeway network every day. And if the container's not going to one of the preselected locations (Chicago, St Louis, DFW, a few others) it has to go the whole way by truck. Recall the "solution" to the blockage during the pandemic was to stack containers even higher. This is because the problem wasn't with offloading the containers, it was the trucking (drayage) getting them out of the port and to either the railheads ("intermodal ports") in the inland empire, or to their destination.
- harimau777 2y agoIf we don't want a small group of people to hold the economy hostage to enrich themselves, then we should be looking at corporations and the ultra-wealthy.
- toomuchtodo 2y agoI am always shocked by the mental model that despises labor power but is okay with the bug in our socioeconomic system where ultra wealthy people and corporations are allowed to wield such unelected power. Humans are strange.
- 48864w6ui 2y agoI love how Reagan openly busted US unions with one hand while secretly funding Polish unions with the other.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jhbadger 2y agoAnd before he was California's governor (and later POTUS), he was head of SAG-AFTRA (the actors' union) and even led them on strike in 1960 to protest how movie actors weren't getting any money when old movies were shown on TV (similar to how in the recent strike the issue was about actors not getting money from streaming). His views on unions were pretty hypocritical to say the least.
- jordanb 2y agoHe was head of SAG it hadn't yet merged with AFTRA. As leader of SAG he helped break the CSU strike and served as a friendly witness for the House Committee on Unamerican Activities.
- euroderf 2y agoPlease ignore the calculating cynic behind the curtain.
- aerostable_slug 2y agoIf you imagine trade unions are innately destructive to their host, then that's perfectly consistent. Of course, I imagine even Reagan saw a bit more nuance to things.
- wilg 2y agoIt seems very likely that in 1986 this headline was a Ghostbusters joke?
- ProllyInfamous 2y agoBackground: I completed my union IBEW apprenticeship in Texas. Comment on article: I read books more than I work (often!), and this article was wayyyyyyy tooooooo longgggggggggg. The point of effective communication is to be just concise enough to still retain your readership (I stopped reading a little less than half way). Comment on unions: I am currently supporting UAW's current push to unionize Chattanooga's Volkswagon Plant; my posit to neighbors is "if unions actually rewarded blue collar employees worse, why would the corporate executives be rallying so hard with propaganda against organized labor?!"
- Nifty3929 2y ago"if unions actually rewarded blue collar employees worse, why would the corporate executives be rallying so hard with propaganda against organized labor?!" Because the world isn't a war between workers and employers. It's not a zero-sum game. Businesses create value by turning less-valuable inputs from society (fundamentally, labor) into more-valuable outputs to society (cars, haircuts, etc). It's a positive-sum game. Unions add a lot of friction to this process, causing everybody to be worse off overall. Business leaders care about creating more outputs to society. Unions work against that goal. Some of the best, highest-paying companies aren't unionized, even within a specific industry, unless legally required. Unions succeed by suppressing change, which works well enough in government and stodgy old industries which often amount to arms of the government anyway: education, healthcare, automotive, transportation, etc. Businesses fight against unions because they don't want the light to go out.
- MrJohz 2y agoYou've got a couple of statements here that belie assumptions that aren't very accurate. > Business leaders care about creating more outputs to society. This is untrue. The reason markets work at all is arguably that it's untrue. Business leaders care about generating rewards for themselves. Markets are a mechanism that ensure that it is profitable to create more outputs to society. This is a really important concept. Amazon doesn't exist because Jeff Bezos is a selfless individual who cares deeply about making sure every American has free next-day shipping. It exists because Jeff Bezos wants to make money, and the market demonstrates that selling products with free next-day shipping is a desire that other people have, and therefore it will be profitable for him to fulfil that need. Markets are about assigning value to desires, and using that value to ensure that goods and services are traded efficiently and flexibly across the whole market without someone needing to coordinate things from the top. This is (mostly) a good thing - efficient distribution of services across a market is why we like markets and tend to use them a lot across our economy. But we need to be honest about how and why they with, and it's not because business leaders are trying to be selfless to society. On the other hand, > Unions work against that goal. This is also untrue. From a market perspective, unions are a collective bargaining tool used by workers selling their work. In the same way that it's easier for a handful of truck drivers to collect together and form a business, rather than each independently set their own price for their labour, so is it often easier and more efficient for a group of workers to collect together to form a union. But like with any market, while people can haggle over the best price, the item must be sold at some point in order for all parties to get their rewards. If you've got a melon that you want to sell for $100, but no-one will buy it at that price, then all you'll have at the end of the day is a mouldy melon. Similarly, workers in a union want to sell their labour, because if they don't and the business collapses, they're all out of a job. In that regard, a union is a tool used by people selling their labour in the market in order to achieve the best price for them (in this regard, they are just like the business owners from before, where the market uses their personal desires to generate value across the whole market). In fairness, this is a very simple model, and so it doesn't tell the whole story. Markets have failure modes such as monopolies where the simple analysis of market efficiency tends to break down. On the other hand, if a worker cannot sell their labour, then they cannot eat and cannot access housing, which in practice puts a lot more power in the hands of the person buying labour then the person selling it. It's important to remember that the market model is just one tool that we have for managing resources, and in practice most successful countries use a mix of markets and government intervention to provide efficient access to goods and services across the economy while also preventing common failure modes. Rules to protect workers and unions are part of that mix. But, despite its simplicity, the market model still helps explain the interactions between businesses and workers better than the naive approach that says that unions are bad and want businesses to die, and business owners are good and want to freely distribute value to the economy. I hope this comment demonstrates that a bit.