Too unreasonable and yet now the issues warned against by labour movements for decades are coming to pass.

You have fallen for capitalist propaganda. Time to re-evaluate.

I'm very socialist actually. I just think that with a good socialist government, unions are not needed as such because the national law already protects workers' rights. I find it a bit 'off' that each class of labour has to fight for their own rights separately. That shouldn't be needed (and really isn't, where I live). It also causes a lot of uproar, see France for example where a strike is just tuesday. Employee rights are strong, but the public is heavily impacted all the time. Better to just handle this on the government side. This is why I was a member of the socialist party but not of the union in my workplace (I'm no longer a member because I moved countries and can't vote where I live).

Note: I'm not living in the US obviously :)

I do say a balance because of course we're not living in a communist state. So even with a socialist government there is still capitalism. Just not unrestrictedly so as it is in the US.

I'm not sure how it works in the US but in our company the union is many bitching about stupid stuff like breastfeeding rooms (when there are no women who bring their babies to work anyway - they just work from home after their 6 months maternity leave). All our basic rights are already sorted. We can't work too many hours, we have unlimited sick leave (though of course validated by a doctor for long absences), we're entitled to a lot of money when fired etc. But this is all national law level stuff. Not industry level.

> I'm very socialist actually. I just think that with a good socialist government, unions are not needed as such because the national law already protects workers' rights.

Having strong and independent unions is how you keep a good socialist government. Almost anytime you hear “With a good government, you don’t need <whatever>”, you are hearing a recipe for guaranteeing that good government is an exceptional, transitory state. If your society isn't prepared for bad government, it will have one sooner than you’d like, and it will be difficult to dislodge it.

> I'm not sure how it works in the US but in our company the union is many bitching about stupid stuff like breastfeeding rooms (when there are no women who bring their babies to work anyway - they just work from home after their 6 months maternity leave)

A true committed exclusionary socialist.

No really, we had such a room built and it is literally never used. Because there is nobody who brings their baby to work (which would be exceptionally impractical anyway - who'd want to be sitting on a phone call beside a crying baby??).

The bad thing is they converted the welfare room for this which was used all the time :(

Breastfeeding rooms are used for expression and I wonder how you'd know if they're used or not.

I was told by building services when I complained about the removal of the wellness/meditation room. They have presence sensors. They also told me that nobody actually asked for it besides the union idiots who are not even in our city. They're just ticking boxes.

I really needed that place because of the move to hotdesking so I'm constantly sitting besides blabby sales people. Formerly we had an IT floor where people knew concentration is sometimes needed. So I'd go there to sit in silence and de-stress for a while.

But I have to say the company is good otherwise, I told them about my difficulty and the H&S people let me work from home much more than others.

I hate the way companies are going back from full remote to hybrid hotdesking though because that is the worst of both worlds.

I can imagine why the breastfeeding rooms were empty if your comments are indicative of your attitude in work.

Nothing about your example is an overreach of unions. In fact, it is a perfect example of the value of organised labour.

In honour of recent comments by dang, I won't be as direct as I'd historically be and instead invite you to think about - in the grand scheme of things - how accessibility, including expressing mothers, may be a societal and absolute good.

As a secondary exercise, maybe it's worth thinking about the ethics of presence sensors.

This comment reeks of liberalism and illustrates why liberalism doesn’t work.

You claim you’re trying to balance individualism and collectivism but don’t actually support things that make collectivism work so you end up de facto supporting individualism.

Its a way to support individualism while allowing people to feel extra good about themselves for supporting collectivist ideas, on paper.

I'm very socialist, and anti-liberal (at least, in the economic sense of liberalism).

But where I live we just have strong labour rights from the government so individual unions fighting for each type of labour's rights are not needed as much. Sometimes they are, when there are specific risks like chemicals that they work with. But for overall "not get taken advantage of" stuff, it's just not needed so much.

I’m glad the people in your country allow good things to happen. That’s definitely not the case in all countries and you need collective power to get nice things for workers.