My union dues are about 800 a year, we’d be lucky to make only 10,000 less a year without the union, and have way less protections. Joining a union is one of the best investments you can make.
Remember, if your company is telling you how great something is, it is great for them, not you.
Right, if you ever see an poster or video anywhere, consider that the message was something someone felt was worth spending money on. And if it was a business, why would a business spend money unless it could somehow benefit its bottom line?
Exactly!
Haha my Union Dues… 240/yr.
Pay in the five years before the union…no increase. 20 years of union, pay up 100%.
These posters should be illegal.
It’s a nice reminder that one is in a capitalist hellhole. Like taken from a dystopian game.
is this poster real tho?
Seems low effort
The individual poster may or may not be real, but anti-union ‘training’ and propaganda are definitely real.
Apparently it’s real.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/delta-airlines-anti-union_n_5cd99d0de4b0615b08171d6a/amp
I saw it firsthand. I think it’s an older campaign though, that was a few years ago.
Is this dystopian game something I can afford with my savings from not paying union dues?
In a lot of countries it would be illegal.
In a lot of countries the unions became powerful enough to be governments, and implemented anti-union busting laws.
For some reason the United States seems to have skipped a bunch of the social development that went on in other countries. Unfortunately this is probably because of the American psyche and their obsession with the idea that rags to riches is possible, despite all the evidence. So nobody wants to limit their own potential wealth by giving away money to the workers, just in case one day they become the wealthy. The end result is that a bunch of people have to work for Amazon.
I’ve seen several from this campaign and they’re so dumb I feel like someone was maliciously compliant in making these so that Delta’s opposition to the union would actually encourage more people to vote to join. Like, management came to someone in marketing, but that person actually wanted to support the union effort.
We have a husk of a shell that we once called the Supreme Court that decided that corporations have a right to free speech.
Toe that with all the benefits of a corporate entity and we end up where corporation speech is more free than that of a person.
Lol companies in America literally set union organizers’ families on fire well before the modern supreme court.
The US government literally sent in their military to fight coal miners that were trying to unionize. They backed the coal mining companies. It’s not a new thing.
Yes but that was also before propaganda was a class in college. Now they don’t need to set things on fire, just convince a chunk of workers to vote against unions. The cost to suppress unions has never been cheaper.
While true, this shit was going on just as much back when they were “legitimate”. Anti-Union mind games are an American tradition.
Yes and now we have no tools to fight it. There were rules against anti-union activities; union workers died for those rights.
That’s all null and void and without a change at the highest levels, it will stay that way.
Dystopic shit.
Utterly hellish. In the UK, which is very far from being a Utopia, this would be almost unthinkable. Real Black Mirror stuff. Sure, the companies may not want you to join the union, but to actively advertise against it is breathtakingly shitty.
Classic misdirection: compare dues to a toy instead of the extra pay, healthcare, and protections.
This is why corporate America wants our population uneducated and tuned out and hooked on AI slop and distractions.
It should be illegal to put up stuff like this.
In the civilised world (Aka everywhere but the US), it is!
People who refer to anywhere but the US as civilized should be stuffed into a canon and shot into a brick wall.
Yeah, it should not in the “it would be nice” sense, but in the “it’s mental that it isn’t” sense.
Delta knows their audience. Many pilots lean Republican and see themselves as rugged individualists that have made their own path. Meanwhile, the only reason they’re flying in many cases are socially funded training programs. Many from the military.
Union fees are also 100% tax deductible in Australia, so it’s all a win-win.
Scumbags. What the hell is this 'murkin propaganda? It’s like the whole country is unironically trying to become the Sith.
There are always two. The sith and the vice sith. They also now have the palantir for some reason
Somehow real life Ready Player One is worse than the book.
I guess Delta thinks their employees are complete fucking morons.
Given Delta hired them and saw their education level, they’re probably right.
Well, most of them are Americans…
/flame, I jest
Two questions:
- Is this for real?
- Does it work?
I feel like a large company going to that kind of effort to explicitly tell me to not spend money on something would have the exact opposite effect. It’s not like they’re saying “unions are bad, actually” it just like “this thing you were going to spend money on, maybe don’t?”
Imagine a poster saying “Drugs are really expensive - you’ll get more value for money if you buy videogames” - would that work?
It’s not a perfect analogy because video games are better while on drugs
The constant anti-union propaganda has definitely worked in the US
That’s like one month of US health insurance next year. Way more than worth it over being at the whims of some fuckhead corporation
DENTAL PLAN
Lisa needs braces!
Dental plan…
Good one lenny. Now I lost my train of thought.
(I probably butchered the line…)
Bullseye!
This is a meme community, so it’s time to get serious!
This happened around 6 or 7 years ago. The company in question only has two work groups that are unionized – Pilots and Dispatchers. Mechanics, Flight Attendants, Ground Service, etc. are not unionized.
Flight Attendants have attempted to unionize many times, but the vote always fails.
The poster included in this post was for Ramp workers – the people who load baggage, marshal the planes into the gate, fill the potable water, etc. That vote ultimately failed, but these posters were only a small reason why. In my opinion, the biggest reason that other work groups don’t want to unionize (they absolutely can, nothing is stopping them) is profit sharing.
Years ago the pilot union negotiated an extremely excellent profit sharing agreement, and it was negotiated for pilots only. Depending on the amount of profit for the year, employees can expect 10%-%20 of their yearly income paid in a lump sum. The company in question is typically very profitable (I can already see the “profit should be illegal” type of comments coming, but please spare me. I’m just trying to explain how it works).
Over time, other work groups started to catch wind of how much profit sharing pilots were getting. Naturally this sparked talk of unionizing in other work groups, so in order to calm things down the company extended the same profit sharing to all workers, not just the pilots.
This sort of reversed the desire to unionize for a lot of people (I disagree with them, but this is their thinking)… Now if the ramp personnel do unionize, they’d have to negotiate their own profit sharing as they would be excluded from the company wide payout. That’s not to say they couldn’t negotiate to keep the profit sharing, but the fear is real and people don’t want to lose the big fat checks that come almost every year.
In summary, the workers aren’t unionized but the company pays a lot of money to them to keep it that way. Would they be better off long term if they unionized? Yes, of course. But this poster, as ridiculous as it is, is not the only reason that work groups aren’t voting in unions.
Here’s a link to the AFA page talking about it a little bit https://deltaafa.org/news/profit-sharing-2025
Its crazy to me how short term so many people think.
I mean basic logic dictates that the companies clearly know the union is the better option for you and worse option for them when they’re willing to give up concessions, and it should be similarly obvious that inherently, the concessions will never be equivalent to what you are losing in increased wages and protections from if you had made a union.
There’s also no accountability for companies and it has been like that for way too long. Look at Starbucks… some stores unionized so they just closed the stores and fired everyone. Completely illegal, but no consequences for the company. They succeeded in scaring the rest of the baristas, though, so mission accomplished.
We are so far from this when people choose to vote in a literal pedo fascist over boring neoliberal.
There isn’t a chance in hell you get a pro workers president any time soon when the general population can’t tell the difference above, and somehow think the only rational choice is a “”““far left””“” socialist such as famously very socialist former DA Harris.
It cost them 700, not you. You will gain from an Union
It costs you 700 now and it costs them an unknown amount in the future. They just don’t like it because they suspect it’ll be quite a lot more than the 700 that you’re paying to join. They’re right too.
But union dues are annoying in the moment, because when it happens all you see is a reduction in your pay and initially no change in working conditions. That’s why they have posters like that up, because even though intellectually people understand that being in a union will long-term result in better pay, in the short term it does effectively result in a temporary pay cut, which can be hard if you’re already not really very well paid.
If you’re joining an established union sometimes they will be smart and not charge members until they’ve renegotiated their salaries. But that only happens if you’re joining a already formed union.
Lots of jobs that need unions are jobs that people don’t want to be working in a few years, because they’re terrible jobs with minimal benefits and shit pay. Those people can’t see that the reason the job is so shitty is because there isn’t a union. There’s a good chance that they’d actually want to stay with the job once the union transforms the working conditions and compensation.
Lots of people would be satisfied with a career in a “lesser” job like retail if the job didn’t suck. There’s nothing wrong with being a cashier, cook, custodian, phone attendant, etc for your whole working life if that’s what you want to do, and we should compensate people in those jobs accordingly.
No it’ll cost you, it comes out of your after tax wage. But it’s an investment into you and your colleagues futures for better wages, stronger protections and benefits.
In my country you can get union dues back as a tax deduction.
What do you mean, “get them back”? Do you mean, “pay less tax by listing them as an expense”? Because you still have to pay for them, just not as much.
Yes you pay less tax up to a yearly cap. The yearly cap for 2025 and 2026 is 1100 dollars. So if I was in the Union listed in the image here and had to pay 700 dollars then I would list it on my tax form and pay 700 dollars less on my taxes that year.
I think it’s word choice that caused confusion here. In the US at least, “deduction” means you don’t have to pay taxes on it, not that you get back the full amount that you paid. What you’re talking about would be called a tax credit.
I didn’t know that. That feels like something this administration will cancel on a random Thursday…
what is this utopia?
The protections are key here. I’d take a slightly lower wage for a healthy work environment any day, and I know that most people agree.
Also if the company refuses and hires scabs you can always put the money towards hiring union enforcers. Mind you we aren’t quite there again but I don’t we’re too far off either, showing up to a scabs home at 2AM to have a nice talk or ambushing the boss on his way home. The glory days may be long gone but I hope to see new glory forged.
What really works is when unions start being powerful enough to dictate governmental policy. That’s when things really improve. Of course the millionaires and billionaires will complain about interference, because it’s only good when they do it.
It comes out of their pocket because unions tend to negotiate for better pay
Your choice of articles makes me think you pronounce union like onion
Not to mention that you’ll likely get pay rises worth more than what is paid in dues.
