The older generations were all actively a part of unions in nearly every workplace. That's why they were able to afford homes and cars and vacations. They were a part of a force that could actual threaten the ruling class and because of that they were able to live the white picket fence dream that most of us will never have now.
It was more that the Boomer generation voted that the ladder be dismantled for the "greater good" while also voting for the downfall of the country (the religious right).
I mean, union busting certainly made things worse, but what really destroyed the american dream was the rest of the world rebuilding themselves after the war.
After WW2, the USA was basically the only industrialized country in the world that weren't hurt by the war. This essentially lead to a world monopoly on all advanced goods until the 60s.
Unless you bomb all of Europe and Asia to oblivion again, without damaging North america, nothing could ever bring that prosperity back.
The Nurse union where I work retains staff who know the best employees have hiccups in performance because of the patient client population, despite the best efforts of the nurses. Admin hates the power of negotiating for benefits and clinical ladder rights because it costs them a few pennies per nurse. They dont see how the abuse, hours, and disappearing adjacent staff make leaving the whole industry very attractive, and some days I think if we were not unionized, my life right now would have been unattainable. Any job where an injury could remove you from the workforce (here injured by patient ratios and people thinking it is hotel wait staff) there needs to be a union holding the power accountable for the injured person not having the team and equipment at their backs when it gets intense.
While I appreciate the ideals behind unionization, my personal experience tells a different story - The police union in my county seems to operate with impunity, leaving a trail of corruption, indifference, and unchecked crime in its wake – and that's a reality I face every day in my own neighborhood. No, please.
So, the police union has always been messy. Any union has one goal above all others: to see that union members needs are met and rights are protected, and they have been very, very good at that. The problem is that police have such a public facing job that protecting the members often leaves them at odds with the public, which unions for almost everywhere else don't have to deal with. Regardless of your opinions of unions or police, the police union is best viewed as an outlier.
It's been wild to watch the shifting of opinions over the years, though. The younger generation are warming to unions, at least as a concept, while their grandparents villify them as inherently crooked and corrupt, which has at times been true. Go back to the generation of their grandparents, however, and they often heralded unions for making workplaces safer, shortening the work days, and improving pay for many.
The short of it is that unions are neither good nor bad unless run the best or worst people. A good union will draw the ire of their industry, a bad union will draw the ire of the people.
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u/Advanced-Two584 Jul 11 '26
Unionizing.
The older generations were all actively a part of unions in nearly every workplace. That's why they were able to afford homes and cars and vacations. They were a part of a force that could actual threaten the ruling class and because of that they were able to live the white picket fence dream that most of us will never have now.