Another form of union busting is the practice of gender-based "inside unions" vs "outside unions".

Many public sector employers use this divide & conquer tactic.

Inside unions require higher education & experience levels, on average, for its members, mostly female, with a self-serving male supervisory elite that get the higher wages of exempt staff.

Outside unions are mostly blue collar white males who ensure that the 17 year old ..

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Together, they forced the first legitimate union elections in generations, and then the newly elected leaders ran historic strikes that won huge gains for workers (and killed the two-tier contract):

theintercept.com/2023/04/07/de…

Corrupt unions aren't the only life-destroying institutions that radicals have set their sights on this decade. Concentrated corporate power is the most dangerous force in the world (indeed, it's large, powerful corporations that corrupted those unions).

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The Teamsters and the UAW Gear Up for Struggle

Ryan Grim is joined by two DHL workers unionizing at CVG airport. Alex Press discusses developments with the United Auto Workers leadership.

^{TI Podcasts (The Intercept)}

Antitrust activists, environmental activists, consumer rights activists, privacy activists and labor activists have stepped up the global war on big business all through this decade. From new antitrust laws to antitrust lawsuits to strikes to boycotts to mass protests and direct action, this decade has marked a turning point in the global consciousness about the danger of corporate power and the need to fight it.

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But there's a big, important difference between bad corporations and bad unions: what we should do about them.

The answer to a powerful, corrupt corporation is to take action that strips it of its power: break the company up, whack it with fines, take away its corporate charter, strip its executives of their fortunes, even put them in prison.

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That's because corporations are foundationally undemocratic institutions, governed by "one share, one vote" (and the billionaires who benefit from corporate power are building a society that's "one dollar, one vote").

They fundamentally exist to consolidate power *at the expense* of workers, suppliers and customers, to extract wealth by imposing costs on the rest of us, from pollution to political corruption.

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When a corporation gets big enough to pose a risk to societal wellbeing, we need to smash that corporation, not reform it.

But the answer to a corrupt union is to fire the union bosses and replace them with better ones. The mission of a union is foundationally *pro-democratic*. A unionized workplace is a democratic workplace. As in any democracy, workplace democracies can be led by bad or incompetent people.

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But, as with any democracy, the way you fix this is by swapping out the bad leaders for good ones - not by abolishing democracy and replacing it with an atomized society in which it's every worker for themself, bargaining with a boss who will always win a one-on-one fight in the long run.

I raise this because a general strike is back on the table, likely for May Day 2028 (5/1/28):

labornotes.org/2025/12/maybe-g…

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Maybe a General Strike Isn’t So Impossible Now

[This article is part of a Labor Notes roundtable series: How Can Unions Defend Worker Power Against Trump 2.0? We will be publishing more contributions here and in our magazine in the months ahead. Click here to read the rest of the series.

^{Labor Notes}

Unions are an important check against fascism. That's why fascists always start by attacking organized labor: solidarity is the opposite of fascism.

To have unions that are fit for purpose in this existential battle for the future of the nation - and, quite possibly, the human race - we desperately need better leaders.

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