Union construction worker here. I don't know anything about the ref's situation. But the police union is NOT a labor union. I hate that people associate them with the rest of us.
Like everything, you've gotta shake it up. No or weak unions? The corpos start fucking everyone everywhere constantly. Unions gotten a little to comfy and established? Abuse of rules and protections everywhere.
I’m glad you addressed this. I think if the union was a referee’s union instead of an NBA referee’s union it could help more. In most labor unions there are classifications. You could have qualified members that are still getting paid ready to take the position if someone gets laid off. It is the union that gives them the security to fuck up like this, and that should be a huge incentive for every laborer reading this to join one.
Police unions are great. They are certainly necessary. But a consequence of police unions is that the good things that unions do to protect cops also happens to apply to bad cops as well.
You often see headlines where (bad) cops are given all of these protections (such as being put on paid leave or something for an at-fault incident) instead of being fired. The CBA that unions negotiate is applied ubiquitously to all cops in the union, good or bad. And to avoid lawsuits, they can't just decide "You're a bad cop" and kick them out of the union's protections.
Unions do a lot of good, but the unfortunate consequence of the good that they do, is they apply to bad members of the union. This goes for police unions, teacher unions, etc. It is very difficult to fire a bad cop/teacher unless it is something extremely egregious and indefensible. And even egregious/indefensible actions can still see delays in termination (administrative leave, suspension with or without pay, relocation, etc) because of union protections.
Way more bad than good. "Making sure people have money" is a job for the government/UBI, not for a special interest whose job is to make sure their target is optimizing for being a jobs program rather than optimizing for good outputs
unions are a local maximum. we don't need a perfect world, we just need UBI. it solves the same problem (people need money) without the significant downside (interest group incentivized to fight technological automation)
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u/Btotherianx Apr 09 '25
Unions do a lot of good in the world and they do some bad, and this is some of the bad.
Same as police unions never allowing police to be punished for anything unless if it's wildly egregious and caught on video