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comment by kleinbl00

You are correct and also inaccurate.

    A petition can be filed by any union, worker, or employer. Workers or a unionmay request an election if at least 30% of workers have signed a petition or authorization cards (i.e., cardsauthorizing a union to represent them).

If there are 500 grad students, 250 of them can say "we wanna organize" and poof they're in the union. Or, if there are 500 grad students, 150 of them can say "we wanna organize" and now there's a vote. The union and the "employer" get to fight about who's allowed to vote and when the vote happens and yeah - if only 40 vote, 21 "yes" votes means you're union. But if only 40 people voted and the employer has made it abundantly clear he'll fire anyone who voted "yes" if the union measure fails, then you can consider that to be 460 votes for "yes", 21 votes for "hell yes" and 19 votes for "I'm a toadie who was bought off."

When dealing with employment one cannot disregard coercion.





ButterflyEffect  ·  1629 days ago  ·  link  ·  

How am I inaccurate when we’re saying the same thing? You’re just going a little more in depth. Jesus Christ this is why I left Hubski the first time.

kleinbl00  ·  1629 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    The best part is if a secret ballot election happens, you have a pretty goddamn good chance of “winning”.

This is the way you say stuff when you've never had a producer threaten you with never working again, when you haven't had supervisors take you aside and tell you how the business will close if they have to pay union benefits, when you haven't had coworkers take you aside and inform you that unions are un-American and that they don't know how they'd continue to be civil to someone who voted to unionize.

You're acting like there's some massive difference between getting 30% to say "yes" and getting 50% to say "yes" as if when you get to that magic 30% line, everything's all happy. I watched a fistfight nearly break out when my union was voting over whether we should go from 300 hours to 400 hours in order to secure benefits - there was a big argument from everyone who had been in the union forever that people who couldn't get 12 solid weeks of union work every six months "weren't real filmmakers" and deserved to be denied healthcare and pensions. What's fuckin' awesome is a lot of them were in the advertising side of things and they're starving now and go down the roster calling up strangers and begging for work but you'll excuse me if I get my hackles up when you act like winning deserves to be in scare quotes.

ButterflyEffect  ·  1629 days ago  ·  link  ·  

You’re 100% misinterpreting my comment if you think I’m saying there’s no difference between the two. There’s a huge difference and I’m leaving this conversation at that. Also re-read this comment and hoooooooooly shit you're making a lot of assumptions about me. Carry on.