As anyone who has worked blue-collar jobs knows corporations and management are often rabidly anti-union. In my experience I have worked in jobs where even saying the ‘u’ word can get you in serious trouble. The neanderthals in management openly expressed their hatred and animosity for unions and often spouted completely illogical and misinformed arguments against organized labor. The AFL-CIO website is good for countering this sort of attitude as it presents rebuttals to all the standard slogans and arguments. From a section of the AFL-CIO website, Working America: Setting the Record Straight:
- Myth:
We have lower unionization in the United States than in other countries, but those other countries, especially in Europe, have a lot higher unemployment.
Fact:
Our unemployment rate looks good because of the way we measure unemployment.
We don’t count people working part-time who want full-time jobs. We, also, don’t count people who cannot take jobs because they lack child care or transportation to get to jobs. If we include those people our rate is 9.6%, which is about the European average. Don’t forget, in the United States you are counted as employed if you work as little as one hour in a week for wages.