One argument against the union that several people have advanced is a statement I have not been able to decipher. Can anybody help? People are saying:
I’m a professional, so it’s wrong / impossible / unethical for me to be in a union.
I don’t get what they are saying. Do they mean that they are more professional than those of us who want to unionize? Or that their work is qualitatively different from what school teachers and hospitality workers do?
Clarissa's Blog 
This is just some weird anti-collective bargaining propaganda that is widely believed. There are people who argue this every time a faculty talks of unionizing. I first heard it when I was in elementary school in the 1950’s when public school teachers were talking to union organizers.
I recognize it, but I do not understand it either. There are unions for many professions.
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“I recognize it, but I do not understand it either. There are unions for many professions.”
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You can make the valid argument that people in certain professions (doctors, lawyers, etc.) don’t need a union because in most cases they’re self-employed, so they don’t need protection from potentially abusive overloads.
Such professions have voluntary “associations” like the AMA that it may be to their advantage to join, but those associations are basically peer-support groups that refer patients / clients to each other and lobby government legislatures.
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We are not self-employed, though. What we do can’t be turned into self-employment by its very nature.
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Actors are mostly self-employed and take contract jobs with theatre companies. But they have a union, Actors’ Equity.
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I suspect it’s some weird class thing. I.e., unions are “really” for people in blue collar trades, not us cultured and educated folk. Pointing out that many professional orchestras are unionized seems to help people get over this objection. Go figure.
It was also kind of cool when my kid’s unionized bassoon teacher offered her solidarity when our NTT union was on strike.
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“I suspect it’s some weird class thing. I.e., unions are “really” for people in blue collar trades, not us cultured and educated folk.”
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Professional orchestra musicians aren’t self-employed and have limited options if the conductor / orchestra owner wants to abuse their work conditions, so they have a logical reason to unionize.
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It means, “My personal identity is of one in the professional class. Union membership is a marker of the working class. If I join a union, it will damage that part of my identity.”
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“It means, “My personal identity is of one in the professional class. Union membership is a marker of the working class. If I join a union, it will damage that part of my identity.””
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Yes and yes.
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It is true, though. Also, they imagine that they are part of management. Which in a certain way you are or were, if you had tenure … but again, not really.
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Unbelievable. People would deprive themselves of bargaining rights because they desperately need to believe they are superior to hotel maids and truck drivers. This is nuts.
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It is nuts, but it is very American. We who are supposed to be a classless society, I know, I know…
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This is all about class and identity.
Our teaching assistants are unionized. I think this is a good thing, the TA union has worked to improve the TA health insurance, get a fairer system for allocating tuition waivers, and get graduate students exempted from some of the many fees that are charged on top of tuition. I think having TAs who can afford to feed themselves and get to go to the doctor when they are sick probably helps us to recruit students to our graduate programs, though our pay isn’t as high as some places. The TAs have never gone on strike and the most the union ever does is the occasional small protest.
Nevertheless, I know of more than a few faculty who regard the TA union as a scourge on the face of the university and speak of it in the same tone they might use for an unfortunate situation like an alcoholic uncle or a messy and public divorce. These are people who identify as leftist, got excited about Bernie Sanders, and often vote for the Democrats wIth a little reluctance, wishing they had a better choice. It makes no sense, but it’s a thing.
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Our part-timers are unionized, and it works really great for them. The union is very effective. But as you say, some people are acting like the union has poisoned their grandma. Utterly ridiculous.
We all win if our part-timers have good working conditions.
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I don’t get it either. At the Uni I just left (got a new job!) the grad students were in the process of unionizing, and very few of the students in my department supported it. Most of them were just apathetic because our department treated them rather well so it wasn’t going to change much for them. Some people didn’t like it because their previous experience with blue collar unions that were fairly corrupt turned them off of the idea entirely. I tried to argue it wasn’t just about them, it was about supporting other students (like seriously? do you not care at all about other’s suffering?). Also, I argued that it’s sort of like health insurance – 99% of the time you don’t need it, but if you hit that 1%, you’ll be really really glad you had it. My arguments mostly fell on deaf ears until one of the students in the department got trapped in health insurance gap that forced him to forgo treatment and was really dangerous… and would have totally been something a union would have fought for and taken care of. sigh
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Even rich, highly sought-after professionals need unions.
Because this is what happens if they don’t:
In the beginning it was limited to just google and apple, but this practice quickly spread to dozens of other big names silicon valley companies. Apple and google got sued over it, and lost their case.
https://pando.com/2014/01/23/the-techtopus-how-silicon-valleys-most-celebrated-ceos-conspired-to-drive-down-100000-tech-engineers-wages/
“In early 2005, as demand for Silicon Valley engineers began booming, Apple’s Steve Jobs sealed a secret and illegal pact with Google’s Eric Schmidt to artificially push their workers wages lower by agreeing not to recruit each other’s employees, sharing wage scale information, and punishing violators. On February 27, 2005, Bill Campbell, a member of Apple’s board of directors and senior advisor to Google, emailed Jobs to confirm that Eric Schmidt “got directly involved and firmly stopped all efforts to recruit anyone from Apple.”
Later that year, Schmidt instructed his Sr VP for Business Operation Shona Brown to keep the pact a secret and only share information “verbally, since I don’t want to create a paper trail over which we can be sued later?””
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Man, I loved my old avatar. Why did it have to change?!
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Experience shows that it is likely to go back to the old version soon. Let’s wait and see!
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“Even rich, highly sought-after professionals need unions.”
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“I’m a professional.”
I’m not even sure what this means. Anyone who receives money to do things is a professional. I haven’t met any amateur, ‘hobbyist’ plumbers or construction workers.
“This tells me that the individual in question never tried negotiating for anything yet.”
Nor do they ever plan to. There is literally no way other than unions to get any sort of leverage against large institutions with deep pockets who’d bankrupt you in court proceedings if you ever tried to go against them individually.
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That’s why I was surprised to keep hearing this argument. How am I more or less professional than a truck driver? There is nothing inherently superior about any profession. And I think the need to feel superior comes from a place of weakness and insecurity.
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I suspect that most people do not subscribe to Walter Mosely’s definition of the middle class
By that measure, very few educated professionals are middle class.
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This kind of people is a tiny minority. They can’t be the middle.
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Of course it’s a tiny minority of people. It’s just as absurd to place someone making $50,000 a year in the same class as someone making $250,000 or $20,000 — and that’s before you get into debt levels and generational wealth.
But literally all of these people will self-label as “middle class”.
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The people Walter Mosley describes aren’t “middle class” — they’re just plain rich. They may not be millionaires, but financially they’re well above the vast majority of Americans.
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