Can't disagree with a lot of what you've said but regarding the bolded bit, you need to understand that a lot of workers don't have access to the leverage that the RMT or other unions have. It's great that the RMT can organise themselves in such a way and Mike Lynch is doing a cracking job in telling it like it is and tearing all these dickhead politicians/presenters/pundits to shreds.
However, many of us in the private sector would never get away with going on strike in a million years. The company I work for has less than 10 employees. If we decided to strike over pay and conditions, our customers would all just fuck off elsewhere to another supplier as we would no longer be able to offer a service and that would inevitably lead to us going out of business. As it happens, it's a great place to work at but our pay rise this year has been on the low side as we're trying to build the business back up to where it was pre-Covid.
And it may surprise you that I never worked for a company that was Unionised. The main companies I worked for treated me fairly, paid generous pension contributions, which is the main reason I could retire early, had a progressive attitude towards holidays so that I could take 30 days off plus bank holidays, paid me well, and didn't expect me to work longer than 40 hours a week. One owner of a company I worked for expected us to leave at 5pm, and forget about the place until we returned the following morning.
I didn't belong to a Union, not because I was against the idea, but I thought the employment legislation we had as members of the EU was sufficient to protect me, and as the companies I worked for were in, I can't remember the name now, was it 'fair employer' scheme, it never crossed my, and my colleagues heads to go on strke because there was no need to. We were looked after, and when I went down with shingles I took five weeks off work on full pay.
What I don't understand, and never will, is the reaction against the lefty wokes trying to protect the interests of normal working folk whilst they themselves enjoy the benefits socialism has given them.
Many die hard tories can't understand it is socialism that has given them the opportunity to rise above serfdom, and while they clap like seals and nod their heads like donkeys when a tory politician wanders off with their demonstrable lies about everything, their hip rplacement surgery provided by the NHS was opposed by the political party they support, but provided by the political party they detest.
In the interest of balance, I now pay £14 a month to a Union, because all of us owe a gratitude of debt to the struggles our forfathers went through so we could live in a civilsed country, and which is now cynically being swept away.
We need to protect ourselves, and this government is giving millions of people a wake up call through their incompetence and sheer dishonesty.
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