Jim:
> Do you know why they make you pay the Union dues
> even if you're not a member? Because everyone in the shop
> benefited from the ones who got up off their asses to fight
> the good fight.
> Finnegan
This is the argument for the Closed Shop, and in some ways it's a good one.
... but ...
There are two arguments against it.
One is purely practical, in that Closed Shops give the Right a lovely stick
to beat the unions with.
The other is equally practical in a different sense.
For most of my working life, in the phones or in various areas of education,
the union membership, though neither were technically closed shop, ran to
something like 95%.
If you need to *legislate* for union membership, you have a failed union.
So 5% got the benefits without paying any dues, and at the worst would cross
picket-lines, but hey, we could live with this -- if it ain't broke, don't
fix it.
A third reason, and I suspect this was a factor in the high union membership
in both the phones and education, was that if you were a member of the
Union, you had someone to cover your back if management tried to get you.
All it needs for a strong Union is a level field, and this was the case in
the UK before the Hag of Grantham decided to rip the heart out of the
unions.
... at the end of the seventies, about the only unions to survive relatively
intact were the academic unions.
I'm not sure what this suggests, other than that academics have a strong
sense of self-preservation.
Another factor -- and I think this was most marked in the higher education
unions -- was that everyone from an adjunct teacher to a Professor was in
the same union. You had to leave if you were appointed as a
Vice-Chancellor, but hey, there weren't many of *them*.
Whatever, it worked -- the Hag managed to smash the miners, but she never
even dented the AUT.
It simply made sense to stick to the Union.
Robin
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