Originally Posted by
Endus
Then people have no idea what they're talking about, and I'm really not interested in entertaining people's ignorance as a valid counter-point.
Unions form within a capitalist system so that collective power can offset the inherent advantages employers have over employees in labor negotiations. In nearly all socialist systems this would be superfluous, as the means of production wouldn't be owned by some independent owner in the first place. Even in cases where a socialist system uses the same word, "union", to describe a worker collective, it's not anything like what we're talking about when we describe "unions" in common parlance; it's a word applied to a form of worker co-operative, where the union itself owns the shop its members work at, and thus they share in its profits as a result.
Any framing where a "union" is a worker's group meant to negotiate with ownership over compensation and working conditions and such, that's explicitly capitalist in origin, not socialist. You've defined the concept in relation to the economic system of capitalism, and while it's working to offset the power of the capitalist class, it's still fundamentally rooted in capitalist theory.
Like, words mean things. The reason we keep having these arguments is because we let bad people misuse the terminology so egregiously, in the first place.
I've put in bold the phrase that should explain pretty darned clearly why it's not a socialist attitude.
Again; "Capitalism" means "private ownership of the means of production". "Socialism" means "collective ownership of the means of production". Everything else is flavor text about which variety of each we're talking about.
If someone describes a company as "their (single ownership) business", that's pretty much definitively capitalism. Pretty much the sole exception is businesses that are so structurally small they're essentially only that individual working in it; an independent freelance writer is the sole worker in "their business", for instance.
I'm not gonna try and gatekeep socialism by saying stuff "isn't true socialism" just because it's a flavor I don't like, or something. But there's a pretty simple and obvious demarcation between "socialism" and "capitalism", and that's the ownership of the means of production. Stalinism is socialism, and hippie communes are socialism, and market socialism is socialism, but private ownership is always capitalism.