“That letter destroyed my life. And it was worth it.”

January 20, 2018 2:03 PM

Talia Jane (previously) reflects on the backlash & aftermath of the open letter she wrote two years ago about the low wages she was paid as a customer service employee at Yelp.
posted by The Gooch (55 comments total)

Ironic that the people dragging her down called her entitled.
posted by Greg_Ace at 2:38 PM on January 20, 2018 [31 favorites]

"Entitled" is the word people use when they mean "daring to suggest humans deserve better than being worked to death by their corporate masters". It comes from the mouths of the wealthy and those who have convinced themselves that one day they will be.
posted by tocts at 3:04 PM on January 20, 2018 [106 favorites]

"One year after I wrote my post, Stefanie Williams announced on Medium that she had finally sold a TV show after writing an “article [she] wrote about millennials and work ethic . . . That article, I believed, was my golden ticket,” she wrote."

It's called "Punching Down: The American Way to Success Through Shitting On The Less Fortunate"
posted by Karaage at 3:15 PM on January 20, 2018 [40 favorites]

Just, wow. That isn't right. At all.
posted by Samizdata at 3:26 PM on January 20, 2018 [3 favorites]

Uh, the villain here is not Stefanie Williams -- it's Yelp,for not paying a living wage.
posted by mrmurbles at 3:39 PM on January 20, 2018 [6 favorites]

It can be both.
posted by the agents of KAOS at 3:42 PM on January 20, 2018 [86 favorites]

Yeah --- while to some extent one should hate the game not the player, there are some players who clearly take such joy in the game and in reinforcing it that it's correct to hate them too: because the game wouldn't exist in the first place without those players.
posted by PMdixon at 4:07 PM on January 20, 2018 [9 favorites]

Stefanie Williams was still tending bar when she got a development deal which she wrote about in July. She’s not Lena Dunham nor the cause of Talia’s plight.
posted by Ideefixe at 4:34 PM on January 20, 2018 [3 favorites]

No she’s just a person who got a deal by throwing someone under the bus. I agree she’s not evil, but I do not wish her particularly well.
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 4:37 PM on January 20, 2018 [33 favorites]

I remember very clearly that Metafilter was not on her side either in the original thread or the MeTa that followed. I couldn't believe what I was reading.

Her update is depressing but she has such a good attitude. She deserves so much better and would clearly be an asset at any company. I hope someone sees that at some point. Nothing makes any sense in this world.
posted by bleep at 4:45 PM on January 20, 2018 [23 favorites]

> mrmurbles:
"Uh, the villain here is not Stefanie Williams -- it's Yelp,for not paying a living wage."

I am adding in all the haters terrorizing her because she called a company out for insufficient wages. That was largely the point of my earlier comment.
posted by Samizdata at 4:54 PM on January 20, 2018 [9 favorites]

She’s not Lena Dunham nor the cause of Talia’s plight.

Yelp caused the injury; Williams and the other writers in the piece took care of the adding insult.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 5:17 PM on January 20, 2018 [23 favorites]

Stefanie Williams was still tending bar when she got a development deal which she wrote about in July. She’s not Lena Dunham nor the cause of Talia’s plight.

She profited from that plight intentionally and appears to believe that that was the correct thing to do in multiple senses of correct. I personally think that's vile behavior. YMMV
posted by PMdixon at 5:24 PM on January 20, 2018 [27 favorites]

The real snowflake is a CEO who can't take honest criticism and has to fire anybody who speaks up.

I have an urge to shove this article into the face of the CEO and his enablers in the media in the same way that the faces of kittens were shoved in their own shit in the bad old days in order to teach them where not to poo. Bad CEO! Bad pundits!

But I guess she didn't express herself in exactly the right way the first time around, therefore her complaints were invalid.
posted by clawsoon at 5:40 PM on January 20, 2018 [10 favorites]

I thought that Stefanie Williams thing was dogshit, but the reason that it went viral is that a lot of people, including a fair number of people here, shared her dogshit opinions and assumptions. This isn't about that one young woman, as fun as it is to bash young women. It's about terrible attitudes that afflict American culture.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 5:45 PM on January 20, 2018 [12 favorites]

Minimum wage in San Francisco as of 7/1/2017 is $14 per hour and is increasing to $15 per hour on 7/1/2018.

I don't see the raise given by Yelp as any kind of win for the cs reps. It's the damn law.
posted by janey47 at 5:50 PM on January 20, 2018 [8 favorites]

Stefanie Williams pushed Talia in the mud, then tried to use that "triumph" to profit off it.

It's possible to see Yelp as a horrible company and see Stefanie as a horrible backstabbing person and hate this patriarchal aristocratic society rewarding a woman for punching down while having no shame for a company that knowingly underpays their employees.
posted by dw at 5:56 PM on January 20, 2018 [40 favorites]

If Yelp really gave a fuck they'd give Jane a formal apology and backpay from the day she was fired to the day they raised minimum. But that would be heart-full.
posted by fritillary at 6:00 PM on January 20, 2018 [9 favorites]

Mod note: Stefanie Williams is not actually the focus of this post and we've probably covered all the points about her, so let's move on.
posted by Eyebrows McGee (staff) at 6:12 PM on January 20, 2018 [3 favorites]

If Yelp really gave a fuck they'd give Jane a formal apology and backpay from the day she was fired to the day they raised minimum.

Oh, but they need to keep her fired as a cautionary tale to anyone who thinks about rocking the boat. Otherwise, other people might get ideas about discussing their own terrible pay and working conditions. In order to give concessions, they also need to create an example of someone, so other employees remember that there would be personal consequences if they spoke up.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 6:16 PM on January 20, 2018 [10 favorites]

The fact that she's still struggling to get employed even after going viral AND catalysing change is exactly the sort of thing that makes me grumpy about people who are all "exposure will get you rich and famous!" or "put yourself out there and you'll be rewarded!". People will appreciate your *work*, sure - they just won't do anything for the people that made it.
posted by divabat at 6:20 PM on January 20, 2018 [45 favorites]

People will appreciate your *work*, sure - they just won't do anything for the people that made it.

There's a reason that "you can die from exposure" is a "ha ha only serious" joke among the creative set.
posted by NoxAeternum at 6:45 PM on January 20, 2018 [18 favorites]

ugh, wow. I look at that previous thread from just last year and think yeah, there's a really deep sickness in our society and it's not just Trump and Nazis, it's coming from inside the house.
posted by stagewhisper at 7:57 PM on January 20, 2018 [27 favorites]

And you can also see its lurking shadows in a few threads currently on the front page…
posted by Pinback at 10:24 PM on January 20, 2018 [5 favorites]

You know, of all the parts of the story that I find the most blackly hilarious, maybe this is the standout:

“So, unfortunately, your post isn’t in keeping with Yelp, so we feel it’s best to part ways,” my manager said.

Right. Having someone write and post a critical review of business goings-on is just so very mismatched with the concept of Yelp, right?

If something along the lines of "isn't in keeping with Yelp" was really the language that was used, the attempt at a smooth veneer of professionalism is pretty much the insult to injury. It isn't just that some chain of managers within Yelp treated the kind of public complaint which is the entire currency of their business as an affront to their status rather than a conversation to engage in. It's that they couldn't even tell others and maybe even themselves the truth about what that was: retaliation. And it looks a lot like thin-skinned cowardly retaliation at that.
posted by wildblueyonder at 11:34 PM on January 20, 2018 [29 favorites]

Whistleblowers are treated like poison. She will struggle to find work for the rest of her life, because no employer is going to hire somebody with a record of writing exposes on their employers.
posted by at by at 6:46 AM on January 21, 2018 [6 favorites]

Punching Down, i.e. stepping on someone's neck to get ahead.
posted by DJZouke at 6:49 AM on January 21, 2018 [3 favorites]

Comrade Talia!
posted by oceanjesse at 8:24 AM on January 21, 2018 [1 favorite]

One thing I do find really interesting, now, looking back at it, is that what called her was an open letter online, and not, like, trying to form a union, which still might have gotten her fired but at least sort of offers meager protection. I wonder if unions have been successfully poisoned as an option to the most recent generation, and that’s why?

But that’s super shitty that she has been essentially blackballed.
posted by corb at 8:41 AM on January 21, 2018 [1 favorite]

I’ll out myself as someone who was one of the “Well, what did she expect taking a low paying job in an expensive area”-types in the initial post a couple years ago, something I look back at with some embarrassment now. I think in my mind I saw some of myself in Talia, since my first job out of college had been a similar low-paying CSR job in the Bay Area where I eventually did “bootstrap” my way up to a most prestigious, higher paying role.

Like some of Talia Jane’s critics, my error was making the assumption that all aspects of my experience were her experience. I was able to make a similar situation work because I had a strong support network, namely, I lived rent free at my parents house for a year since my CSR salary wasn’t enough to comfortably live on my own in the high priced San Francisco area, an option that it is evident now was not available to Talia Jane.

She risked her already tenuous employment situation to try to make things better for everyone. And it worked (sadly, just not for her)! I noticed this article get a good amount of traction yesterday, hopefully this leads to a more substantial employment situation for her.
posted by The Gooch at 9:22 AM on January 21, 2018 [6 favorites]

We talk about emotional labor a lot here on Metafilter and I think it takes some emotional labor to actually listen to what someone is saying instead of being so distracted by your own experience that you only hear yourself talking but you think it's the other person. The people who criticized Talia chose not to hear that she wasn't asking for a handout, just sanity. A normal paycheck instead of free snacks.. Which is ironic because those ppl who criticized her apparently only made it work due to receiving handouts of their own.
posted by bleep at 10:14 AM on January 21, 2018 [12 favorites]

Like some of Talia Jane’s critics, my error was making the assumption that all aspects of my experience were her experience. I was able to make a similar situation work because I had a strong support network, namely, I lived rent free at my parents house for a year since my CSR salary wasn’t enough to comfortably live on my own in the high priced San Francisco area, an option that it is evident now was not available to Talia Jane.

Right, and it's not available to a lot of people, often for reasons that are a lot less dramatic than hers. Maybe they don't have parents who live in the Bay Area. Maybe their parents live in the Bay Area but don't have space for them to move back in. Maybe they can't live with their parents because of disagreements about religion or their sexual orientation or something like that. Maybe they were going to live with their parents no matter what, but their parents need help paying the rent, so they need to earn enough to contribute to household expenses even if they move back home. If the entry points to tech careers are only available to people who can live rent-free, then a lot of people are going to be excluded from tech careers.

And also, working-class people need to be able to live in the Bay Area, because no region can function without people who do blue-collar jobs. Some of those people are not just starting out: they are going to spend their entire careers doing those jobs. They also need to be able to afford rent. That's another reason that companies like Yelp need to pay everyone a living wage.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 10:24 AM on January 21, 2018 [17 favorites]

I wonder if unions have been successfully poisoned as an option to the most recent generation, and that’s why?

I doubt a whole lot of folks in her situation would be aware of how to do that. Also unions aren't all that powerful these days.
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:40 AM on January 21, 2018 [2 favorites]

And also, working-class people need to be able to live in the Bay Area, because no region can function without people who do blue-collar jobs. Some of those people are not just starting out: they are going to spend their entire careers doing those jobs.

I think one of the things that has been kind of hard when evaluating this stuff is specifically your last sentence. I think there's a lot of us who want kind of - tiered work, essentially? - to be available. Like, we want lower-paid jobs to exist for teenagers and people first starting out, and for those people to start out living with parents and later with friends, and learning to be roommates with people, and then getting better jobs and making families. I think the idea that people can go straight into work without having to follow that trajectory burns some of us. Like - I know I was definitely one of those people who was like "why should she be able to afford an apartment all by herself? She's in her twenties, that's roommate time!"

But also, I came of age in my twenties having very different cultural expectations of support systems and how necessary they were - I had grown up hearing my family for my entire life talk about the value of support systems, so I put in a lot of work into developing them. When I was in my twenties it was easy to find roommates if I wanted them, or to fall back on family and later in life offer support to family. The same is not always true from people who lead more individualized lives, as America kind of tells you to do.

And most particularly, the way employment is kind of going these days - and especially with the way that automated systems are working for resume evaluation - it seems to be really hard to rise on that trajectory. Instead of starting out doing one thing, establishing yourself as a hard worker, then doing a new and different thing where companies expect they'll have to train you, now companies are expecting that you will arrive at their business new-formed by the gods prepared to start work Day 1 ready to go. So what you have done is what they will hire you to do. And so people who start out doing 12$ an hour jobs aren't necessarily raising so by their thirties they are making 18$ an hour (adjusted). They are often doing 12$ an hour (unadjusted, or adjusted only for minimum wage increases). Companies have found they're able to treat workers as much more like cogs, which seems to me as a huge part of the real problem.
posted by corb at 10:55 AM on January 21, 2018 [7 favorites]

Companies have found they're able to treat workers as much more like cogs, which seems to me as a huge part of the real problem.

Yes.

And the problem is allowed to persist because one of the two major political parties in this country has successfully gutted private sector unions and is almost done with public sector, besides making the idea of paying union dues tantamount to being sent to the gulag.

I forget which party though.
posted by PMdixon at 11:10 AM on January 21, 2018 [5 favorites]

Eh - like, I totally get what you're saying, but Dems haven't exactly been on the side of actual union power either. They're in favor of unions having more money given that that money generally funnels to Democratic candidates, but having Republicans be largely anti-union has meant that Democrats haven't actually had to take a real pro-union stance, they've just had to be slightly-less-against-them.

I mean, if the Democrats start arguing that sympathy, wildcat, and general industrial strikes should be made legal again, or that waiving the right to strike is illegal, I will be all fucking ears, but as it stands, unions in this country are neutered not just because of 'one party's action' but because both parties have zero interest in allowing worker sympathies to take precedence over profit.
posted by corb at 11:53 AM on January 21, 2018 [5 favorites]

I think in my mind I saw some of myself in Talia, since my first job out of college

you're probably aware, but as she says, she was only out of college in the sense that she wasn't in it anymore -- she left because she couldn't afford to stay; she didn't graduate. [1] Getting hired on somewhere in a low-level capacity, or even an unpaid internship, and expecting to stick it out until you get promoted up is a fine strategy, even today in a lot of places, if you have a degree.

if you don't have a degree, it might seem like an even better strategy to start at the bottom (not like there's another choice but): they'll see the caliber of your work, your intelligence, and your willingness to learn! all those things you can't prove with a resume!

but that doesn't work for any employer who lies about the reason they require a degree for the well-paid jobs, as most of them do. the idea of requiring a degree for any decent job, just any kind of degree in anything, is supposed to be mostly a tool to cut down slightly on the flood of applications and is then justified as a reasonable requirement on the grounds that it is proof you can finish what you start, delay gratification, apply yourself to a years-long project and see it all the way through, etc. etc. that justification is what would make a non-degreed person think that getting a foot in the door is all it takes; you don't have a degree to show that you have worth, so you'll just show them by demonstrating your worth through your work. and that would work, if the reason for the degree requirement weren't a lie. but it, of course, usually is.

[1] she gives the strong impression in her original letter that she did graduate -- it's artful and I imagine deliberate. when I was training people on how to write up background reports on people, incidental to more serious research stuff, I swear I spent half my time yelling re: education that them saying "College X 1990-94" DOES NOT MEAN they graduated in 1994, you have to check that, and the other half of the time yelling that if you verify they didn't graduate in 1994, THAT DOES NOT THEREFORE MEAN THEY MADE A FALSE CLAIM. you see a claim of attendance and you assume graduation, that is your own stupid college-boy bias filling in the blanks, not a lie you so cleverly caught them in.
posted by queenofbithynia at 12:21 PM on January 21, 2018 [11 favorites]

So infuriating to see both-sides-do-it pop up. It might be hard to square Republican affiliation with pro-union sympathies but doing so by pretending Democrats are not different is intellectual dishonesty.
posted by the agents of KAOS at 12:27 PM on January 21, 2018 [10 favorites]

an open letter online, and not, like, trying to form a union, which still might have gotten her fired but at least sort of offers meager protection

How do you form a union? Get half a dozen of your coworkers to agree that the working conditions suck and they should be better? Two dozen coworkers? Three? (Working the overnight shift in a call center, how many coworkers do you think she directly speaks with?)

Once they've agreed that Working Here Sucks and It Should Be Better... then what? "We'll... declare ourselves a union and go on strike?"

I am strongly pro-union, and I have no idea how one goes about starting one, or finding one to join, if that's possible. I have the vague idea that any two-digit number of would-be union people is useless, that any company would happily just fire them all. (At-will employment; "we've decided you're not a good cultural fit for the company" and yeah, there's grounds for a lawsuit, but how many minimum-wage workers have the resources and know-how to find the right lawyer for that?)
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 1:27 PM on January 21, 2018 [6 favorites]

...but their parents need help paying the rent, so they need to earn enough to contribute to household expenses even if they move back home.

This was me in college. Half the reason I lived at home and commuted was because the family needed my paycheck (I worked 30 hours a week while carrying a full course load and an internship and wondered why I was sick all the time).
posted by The Underpants Monster at 1:39 PM on January 21, 2018 [1 favorite]

So I looked it up: 4 Steps to Form a Union. This is from the AFL-CIO; I figured they'd have good union advice.

Step 1: Talk with coworkers. Okay, good, yes, we all know that's legal and how you being.
Step 2: Talk with a union organizer...

Um. So, step two is... find someone, not part of the people you know and work with, who knows "union stuff?"

2, cont'd: ...in order to strategize and to learn the next steps.

So... the AFL-CIO doesn't even have advice for what "next steps" mean for an outsider. If you want to know how to make a union, go find someone who's already in one; we're not going to tell you how to do it from scratch.

Step 3: More talk with co-workers. Drum up union interest, now that you've figured out you want one.
Step 4: Get majority of workers to vote for a union.

FUCK NO this will not happen. Modern corporations work their asses off to avoid contact between departments, in part for exactly this reason: They don't want a majority of employees to be able to set up a union. (Is that "majority in this building," or "majority everywhere?" How the hell would you organize a majority of Yelp employees? Of Google employees?)

Factory and mine workers could push for unions because they worked together. A lot of modern corporations keep their workers scattered and separated. My actual "employer" is on the other side of the continent, and their staff people who contact me for payroll info and such seem to be in India, judging by the timestamps on their emails. But even at my workplace - PG&E employees are all over the state.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 1:42 PM on January 21, 2018 [7 favorites]

Factory and mine workers could push for unions because they worked together. A lot of modern corporations keep their workers scattered and separated.

Ding ding ding ding.

corb, you know as well as I do which party is pushing ALEC-authored anti union legislation, and which party combined with the southern white supremacist faction to pass Taft-Hartley. Don't be disingenuous.
posted by PMdixon at 3:45 PM on January 21, 2018 [3 favorites]

> FUCK NO this will not happen.

It makes it much harder, but not impossible. What makes it impossible is not even trying because people go "this will not happen."

> PG&E employees are all over the state.

They are represented by three different unions.
posted by rtha at 4:21 PM on January 21, 2018

> PG&E employees are all over the state.
They are represented by three different unions.

Wow. Sorry. Of course they are. (I work at PG&E, but not for PG&E; I get SF's mandated 3 days of sick leave a year, no other PTO, and no holiday pay.) I didn't know they had union employees, because it's definitely not mentioned in the office - I'm not sure if office workers are covered by the SEIU or not.

What makes it impossible is not even trying because people go "this will not happen."

I work for "Rose International." PG&E's contractor arrangement is with "Agile 1," which I gather has some arrangement with Rose and other staffing companies. I cannot name a single coworker who's got the same actual employer as me.

I'm aware that unions aren't impossible and that saying they are, doesn't help them get made - but "hey if your job sucks, have you tried to unionize?" is also not helpful in most cases.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 6:16 PM on January 21, 2018 [4 favorites]

I think one of the things that has been kind of hard when evaluating this stuff is specifically your last sentence. I think there's a lot of us who want kind of - tiered work, essentially? - to be available. Like, we want lower-paid jobs to exist for teenagers and people first starting out, and for those people to start out living with parents and later with friends, and learning to be roommates with people, and then getting better jobs and making families. I think the idea that people can go straight into work without having to follow that trajectory burns some of us. Like - I know I was definitely one of those people who was like "why should she be able to afford an apartment all by herself? She's in her twenties, that's roommate time!" (Emphasis mine)

You get that this is not the way the world works for most folks without college degrees, and even for a lot of people with with college degrees, yes? There's no job fairy who descends from the heavens when you turn 29, magic wand out and prepared to bump you from $11 to $20 an hour so you can start making babies? Whatever conditions you define as acceptable for "teenagers and and people first starting out" is what you sentence the lower class to for the entirety of their lives.
posted by Mayor West at 5:53 AM on January 22, 2018 [20 favorites]

the idea that we should socially engineer young adults, which is what late teens are, into "learning to be roommates" as though it is the right and proper job of an employer, backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government, to pay you just badly enough that you have to live in a disgusting group house with strangers who may assault you, harass your cat, steal your stuff, keep you awake all night, or if they do none of that, just be strangers in your home, because you must be artificially held back by circumstance from living like a person lest you enjoy too much happiness before the age of 33, sickens me to my core

I went to a college that stuck me in a room with a stranger my first two years. I hated it and it was good for me. that's ok. you want the enhanced class benefits and higher earning power that come with a higher education, you deserve to suffer for it a little bit. but when you're a working person? no. that is not acceptable. if we really believe that nobody deserves dignity or privacy until they are middle aged, parents or senior VPs, whichever comes first, the answer is not to pay shit wages for shit work and pretend we're doing Youth a favor by building their character; it is to institute a universal public service draft, where everybody has to serve in the armed forces for a few years, or be a nursing home aide if they won't do that, or be the most miserable kind of retail worker if they won't do that. put em in the government hazing dorms for the duration of their service and then let them out. and if they don't plan to go to college, they're exempt.

but no, young people can have roommates if they want, because lots of people do like human company and help around the house, don't ask me to explain it. but nobody should have to. no matter how young they are or how old and youth-resenting I get.
posted by queenofbithynia at 7:50 AM on January 22, 2018 [10 favorites]

Along those lines, I've often seen that same line of thinking as justification against raising minimum wage - "the minimum wage is supposed to be for teenagers and starter jobs, not to be living wages"

Great, tell that to the non teenagers trying to survive on three of these part time minimum wage jobs.
posted by Karaage at 7:52 AM on January 22, 2018 [8 favorites]

there actually are tiered minimum wage levels for minors, aren't there? or there used to be? I had a job or two when I was 14-15, whatever age it is when you're legally allowed to work, but only certain hours and only if your parent or guardian signs off on a paper to acknowledge that exploiting you is ok with them.

If I am wrong or things have changed, it is still OK to pay young teens less than workers over 16, because there is either a set of parents or foster parents or the government who is obliged to provide food and shelter to them. that is when it is ok to pay starter wages for a starter job: when a worker is so young they aren't even allowed to live independently, and so they genuinely don't need to afford to.

but after that, if you think it's ok to pay 18 year olds less than 40 year olds doing the same shitty job, because it's fine for 18 year olds to live in piles together like rats in a warren and/or come on, you know their parents are supporting them anyway, then it's ok to pay women less than men because come on, you know they can get a boyfriend or husband to pay the bills, only heads of households need real wages. as indeed it did used to be ok to say and to do.
posted by queenofbithynia at 7:57 AM on January 22, 2018 [3 favorites]

Child labor law is complicated, but according to this pdf from the California dept. of labor, employees under age 20 who are participating in Work Experience Education programs may be paid less than those over that age, but only during their first 90 days of employment. Employment outside those programs must be compensated at the adult minimum wage.
posted by rtha at 10:49 AM on January 22, 2018 [1 favorite]

I think there are serious ethical problems with saying that it's okay to pay one person less than another for doing the same work because they "need it less". It's not possible to know, based on somebody's age (or gender, or marital status, or…) what their needs are.

"If they're doing the same work, they deserve the same pay" seems fairly fundamental.
posted by Lexica at 11:28 AM on January 22, 2018 [9 favorites]

We should have a corporation that says, "we expect to pay single men less than everyone else, because they probably have the most free time to have another part-time job, and they do less labor at home so they have the energy for that. This is allowed even with the newer anti-discrimination laws because we have statistics that prove that single men, especially single white men, are less productive than other workers."
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 12:20 PM on January 22, 2018 [4 favorites]

One thing that has happened in the last decade or so is that many unions have stopped investing in new organizing - ie, helping people organize new unions. This is actually something that lots of people in the union world know but is not really talked about outside of it. It's not entirely the unions' fault - the (yes, Republican-led) restrictions on union organizing have become so onerous that it's really resource-intensive for a union to properly support a unionizing effort, especially given that there's a decent chance that drive will fail.

And on top of that, you have the fact that many unions' memberships are dwindling, so they have less resources to begin with. The most logical thing to do would be then to invest in organizing, but their first responsibility is to current members, so they devote those dwindling resources to their, well, dwindling membership bases, rather than take a risk on building new memberships. It's a classic Catch-22 - they need to invest in new membership drives to ensure their long-term health (not to mention the long-term health of the labor movement, and the short-term well-being of workers in general) but they also have an obligation to serve their current membership, and either they don't have the resources to do both, or they're consciously sacrificing long-term sustainability for short-term demands.

To be fair, not all unions are doing this. But a lot are. I am super, super, super pro-union (come from a long line of union organizers and stewards, my dad recently retired from his job in senior leadership of a union, I've worked for a union myself, been in a union, etc etc etc) but I am increasingly less-certain that the labor movement, as its being led right now, is up to the challenge of fighting income inequality as it works in our current era. It definitely needs some changes (and resources, and a friendlier regulatory environment).
posted by lunasol at 12:46 PM on January 22, 2018 [8 favorites]

if you think it's ok to pay 18 year olds less than 40 year olds doing the same shitty job, because it's fine for 18 year olds to live in piles together like rats in a warren and/or come on, you know their parents are supporting them anyway, then it's ok to pay women less than men

What I'm trying to say is that it is reasonable to have different tiers of wages for people who have less experience/skills and those who have more experience/skills - I mean, that was what the definition of an "entry level" job used to mean, was that this was a job you could take knowing not much more than how to show up and dress appropriately, and you would be trained and evaluated and be able to move up in skill and responsibilities. That's not paying 18 year olds less than 40 year olds, that's paying people new to the job market less than people who have been working for ten years. This is something even solid unions generally support - see, for example, the different scales between apprentice and journeyman wages in the trades, etc.

As far as unions - honestly, the AFL-CIO has come pretty far from its roots and even its roots were shitty and corporate. I wouldn't trust them in organizing new unions because they don't have an interest in unions for the collective power of bargaining, but rather for how they fit into their structure.

If anyone is looking to organize a union in their shitty workplace, I suggest reaching out to your local IWW - they will organize anyone, anywhere, regardless of what your organizational structure looks like or how your boss feels about it (solidarity unionism FTW)- and they refuse, on principle, to sign no-strike clauses.
posted by corb at 1:36 PM on January 22, 2018 [5 favorites]

That's not paying 18 year olds less than 40 year olds, that's paying people new to the job market less than people who have been working for ten years.

If the person new to the job is capable, after a training period, of performing the job competently, how do you justify paying them less simply because someone else has been working longer? If two people are performing the same job at acceptable levels, they should be paid the same.

Sure, if someone started as a Widgetizer Level 1 ten years ago and has worked their way up to Widgetizer Level 8, it's reasonable to pay them more than someone starting new as a Widgetizer 1. But if someone new demonstrates that they've got the ability to perform at Widgetizer 8 levels it's not reasonable to pay them less just because they're younger, or more recently out of school, or live with their parents, or anything like that.
posted by Lexica at 3:42 PM on January 22, 2018 [1 favorite]

But if someone new demonstrates that they've got the ability to perform at Widgetizer 8 levels it's not reasonable to pay them less just because they're younger, or more recently out of school, or live with their parents, or anything like that.

There's this fucked up but widely held concept of "paying your dues" that says otherwise.
posted by PMdixon at 8:38 PM on January 23, 2018