[knewter]

When I was learning to walk, my dad was installing conveyors for an automotive factory - he was vp of engineering (later robotics) for a large engineering firm that Siemens ultimately bought.

He was trying to get the job finished and get home to his family, so he was working late one night double checking the fit on all the nuts, bolts, anything he could check to ensure the job was successful. He did this all the time, I learned how to successfully deliver product from seeing him do it.

A gang of union guys came up to him and threatened to beat him if he continued to work because he was taking a union job away from "the pipe guy", call him Frank.

My dad says "that's fine, can frank come help?"

"Frank's out sick"

And that was that. He either stopped getting the job done or they would visit violence upon him.

I'll never side with people that think this is acceptable behaviour.

[TheCoelacanth]

With that criteria, you have ruled out siding with any form of organization that humans have ever created.

Businesses, governments, churches, sports teams and probably even Girl Scout troops all have a history of committing violence when it serves their aims.

[sershe]

For most organizations, this behavior is incidental to their incentives. For unions, it's a primary motivation. Throughout their history, unions would always be maximally exclusionary to the degree it wouldn't backfire in terms of PR (and sometimes beyond that, e.g. Cesar Chavez conducting anti-immigrant border raids), because that is their whole point.

[tshaddox]

That just sounds like humans committing assault. Really awful, but to me it doesn't indicate much about the concept of unions. I bet there was a firefighter once who murdered someone, but likewise that doesn't indicate much about the concept of firefighting.

[adamrezich]

> I bet there was a firefighter once who murdered someone, but likewise that doesn't indicate much about the concept of firefighting.

exceedingly terrible analogy, because the hypothetical firefighter hypothetically committing a hypothetical murder, wholly unrelated to firefighting, is a completely different situation than union guys threatening violence on a worker for union-related reasons, in the pursuit of union-related ideals.

[LindeBuzoGray]

So the union and company came to a legal agreement about work and your father chose to do work breaking that agreement.

What would happen if I began installing or moving pipes at my company that management and ownership told me not to? A "gang" of security guards or policemen would visit violence on me to stop.

You are aghast at the people actually doing the work and creating the wealth enforcing their rights, but make no mention of the heirs who own Siemens and their "gangs" working to expropriate surplus labor time and profit.

[throwawa14223]

> So the union and company came to a legal agreement about work and your father chose to do work breaking that agreement.

Adding value deserves to be met with threats. This is a stunning argument against unions you're making.

[pydry]

There's a long and storied history of anti union violence that is far, far worse than what your dad suffered:

For instance, when a company

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain

>By August 29 the battle was fully underway. Chafin's men, though outnumbered, had the advantage of higher positions and better weaponry. Private planes were hired to drop homemade bombs on the miners. A combination of poison gas and explosive bombs left over from World War I were dropped in several locations near the towns of Jeffery, Sharples and Blair. At least one did not explode and was recovered by the miners; it was used months later to great effect as evidence for the defense during treason and murder trials.

Or the anti union assassinations in Columbia:

https://prospect.org/features/coca-cola-killings/

>After the leader of their union was shot down at their plant gate in late 1996, Edgar Paéz and his co-workers at the Coca-Cola bottling factory in Carepa, Colombia, tried for more than four years to get their government to take action against the responsible parties. Instead, some of the workers themselves wound up behind bars, while the murderers went free.

>I'll never side with people that think this is acceptable behaviour.

It sounds like you are implying that you would never side with any union ever. Not even these.

Is that accurate?

[knewter]

Yeah I meant I wouldn't side with anyone that thinks it's acceptable to do what they did to my dad. I still mean that. Showing me some other examples does nothing, and modern unions largely think more of what happened to my dad should happen.