alt Hacker News> Your bosses are political, they shape politics to mold the environment around you. Unions form the bedrock of worker power, and workers should advocate for a more democratic society against the oligarchs. We are some of the best positioned in society to do so because we control the means of production.
I should clarify: I totally agree with being "political" in that area. The stuff I'm thinking about are things like Gaza, BLM, etc. They may be very worthy causes, but there's controversy about them too, and they don't really seem to be in-scope for a union.
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That's fine and all until the company hires black people or Palestinian refugees and then suddenly the union has[0] to care.
OK, that's a contrived scenario. But even outside of that scenario, social oppression is downstream of worker oppression. Cops aren't shooting black people because it's their kink, they're doing it to enforce the same social order that keeps your workers down. The next time the union strikes, those same cops are going to be there to break the picket line. Police are always the enemy of labor, and thus keeping the police in check is in-scope to a union's political activities.
[0] Ala https://xkcd.com/545/
Here's what I'll say. Every union is a democracy and has to decide what is right for it, but unions are the fighting organizations of the working class and we are the rightful rulers of this society by virtue of actually making it run and being the literal majority in a classic liberal sense.
U.S. and western unions generally have been very conservative and "business unions" since the anti-communist counterattacks after WW2. This is because there has been a constant counterinsurgency tactic against our leadership involving cooptation, sidelining, and even assassination. The wealthy want to rule unopposed and for you to just vote for one of their pre-selected candidates in elections.
Since you mentioned Gaza, an issue dear to my heart (not that BLM isn't, but for brevity I'll talk about the movement that is highlighted right now), let me give an example that illustrates how essential unions are. Tech companies like Google and Microsoft are supplying information technology and AI systems to the occupation and are making bank doing it. Who is going to stop them? The people best positioned to do so are their workers.
The most essential way to help Gaza is to enforce sanctions, halting economic activity with Israeli companies, and most importantly stopping the transfer of all military materials to Israel, even so called "defensive" weapons like Iron Dome that allow the occupation to perform the genocide without repercussions. In Italy, huge strikes and protests forced the openly fascist PM that praised Mussolini to send a warship to aid the Global Samud Flotilla which aimed to break the siege on Gaza. Dock workers in Italy refused to service ships bound for Israel with weapons, and got the (again openly fascist) PM to enforce a weapons embargo.
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/italy-general-strike...
Assert your right to rule this global society in the interests of humanity in concert with your brothers and sister workers around the world.