I will never understand why American labour organisers kneecap themselves so hard by insisting on company-specific mini unions rather than industry-wide ones (or even, get this, national or global ones).
Why would you want to multiply the efforts needed to found an entire union, come up with legal statutes, representatives, a name and graphic design, a website, a structure, organisational budgets, membership fees, and so on, redundantly, starting from zero for every company? That's incredibly inefficient and super demotivating.
Why would you artificially amplify the hurdles needed to unionise a workplace, by having to get a majority of your company workers on board first? In Germany I can just join a union even if I'm the only one in my company. Because, you know, I am in a unionised sector.
Why would you not strike and coordinate with everyone else in the industry? The entire point of unionising is to be able to put pressure on capital. This completely disables the potential for political strikes or anything larger than local labour disputes.
Why would you create a super easy single target per company?? If your employer doesn't like your unionisation efforts, they can just find a reason to get rid of you. Or get one of their own to be elected as the head of the union through various means. And so on. Without the backing of a bigger union, they're super corruptible and prone to sabotage and unionbusting.
I can't even celebrate these recent unionisation efforts of, like, Blizzard, or Rockstar, Wikimedia, Microsoft, or any of those other tech companies, because it's all so fundamentally pointless.
Why is there not a Tech Workers of America, or better yet, just one big American Workers' Union, that could actually bring about meaningful change?
But no, instead everyone employed at every Backwater Systems Inc. throughout the country needs to gather funds and energy to found its own whole-ass union over multiple years only for its 20 people to be unionised. How exciting.
