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It seems only sports professionals (and maybe United Auto Workers) have strong enough unions to go on strike there. So that's the only experience a lot of Americans will have with unions.
...and they detest the lockouts. The only reason I know the NHL have ended their lockout is because people are saying they're through with hockey, they'll never watch it again, they'll never give it any more money. And that's a respectable decision, but I'm dismayed that I'm hearing what I always heard since the first such thing I was aware of, the baseball strike in 1994: oh it's all just greedy greeding greed.
And yes it's easy (especially In This Economic Climate) to look at players earning orders of magnitude more than nurses or teachers, quibbling about anything really, and see it as monstrously greedy. But I can't help but think that the hockey players can have the same problem as most other workers: their work is making other people rich. Work sucks. Most employers will give you as litlte as they can get away with while making things as good as possible for themselves. Yes the players get a lot of money, but if they're getting only what other people are happy to give them, the other people must be keeping much bigger mountains of money for themselves.
In This Economic Climate is exactly when American workerss could benefit from thinking "just because a lot of unemployed people would be happy with my job is no reason for me to be happy with shitty wages/conditions, and there are more people in predicaments like mine than there are hockey players..."
I know I'm sounding like an unhinged Marxist (I blame the history of 20th century Britain, Hope and Glory by Stuart Maconie, that I'm reading, with its depictions of the General Strike and the Jarrow March; even the Kinder trespass demonstrates the power of a sufficiently large group of ordinary people) and I know that no such epiphany is going to befall my fellow Americans, but I'm still allowed to think it's a damn shame.
...and they detest the lockouts. The only reason I know the NHL have ended their lockout is because people are saying they're through with hockey, they'll never watch it again, they'll never give it any more money. And that's a respectable decision, but I'm dismayed that I'm hearing what I always heard since the first such thing I was aware of, the baseball strike in 1994: oh it's all just greedy greeding greed.
And yes it's easy (especially In This Economic Climate) to look at players earning orders of magnitude more than nurses or teachers, quibbling about anything really, and see it as monstrously greedy. But I can't help but think that the hockey players can have the same problem as most other workers: their work is making other people rich. Work sucks. Most employers will give you as litlte as they can get away with while making things as good as possible for themselves. Yes the players get a lot of money, but if they're getting only what other people are happy to give them, the other people must be keeping much bigger mountains of money for themselves.
In This Economic Climate is exactly when American workerss could benefit from thinking "just because a lot of unemployed people would be happy with my job is no reason for me to be happy with shitty wages/conditions, and there are more people in predicaments like mine than there are hockey players..."
I know I'm sounding like an unhinged Marxist (I blame the history of 20th century Britain, Hope and Glory by Stuart Maconie, that I'm reading, with its depictions of the General Strike and the Jarrow March; even the Kinder trespass demonstrates the power of a sufficiently large group of ordinary people) and I know that no such epiphany is going to befall my fellow Americans, but I'm still allowed to think it's a damn shame.
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Amen, sister!
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And thanks for inadvertently catching my bizarre typo there!