ms-demeanor: If you go look at old Mad Magazines sometimes you can see comics where Aggressive Extre
ms-demeanor: If you go look at old Mad Magazines sometimes you can see comics where Aggressive Extreme Union Workers are protesting outsourced manufacturing and it’s the union workers who are presented as conservative boors preventing progress and wanting people to buy shoddy American products out of a misplaced sense of nationalism. Unfortunately I’ve gotten rid of my collection of Mad Magazines from the 70s so I don’t have any examples on hand but they always seemed to look like this: And the message was always “union laborers are racist dinosaurs who are holding back progress” and I think about that framing a lot. I’m sure there were a lot of people who opposed Chinese manufacturing because they were racist. I’m sure a lot of people who opposed outsourcing to manufacturing to China were MUCH more concerned that, due to inequality and lower labor costs in China, American manufacturing couldn’t compete with the costs of Chinese manufactured goods and that was going to lead to a tremendous loss of manufacturing jobs in the US. (Mad also featured at least a few jokes about teamster’s unions and how they’d done their five minutes of work and were now on their union-mandated 55 minute break and. You know what. This is more discussion of unions than I got in my 12 years of US schooling. My American History classes didn’t cover massacres as strikebreaking techniques or union emphasis on worker safety. Pinkerton was a Weezer album, not the name of a company that would rent you people to brutalize your workers. The place I read about unions first was in a gross-out kids humor magazine when I was 8, and that was the most I learned about it until I was out of high school. I think about that a lot too.) -- source link