re: #158 Cineaste

And yes, it’s speculative, but, if it is not wildly speculative. The true arbiter of whether I’m correct in my speculation would have been a vote. The only logical reason not to vote is that the leadership might not have gotten the result they wanted. Yes, that is drawing a conclusion, but the data at hand I think points to it not being a wildly unreasonable conclusion.

I don’t know - you haven’t provided anything specific about the nature of the vote and/or the likely position of the members that supports your conclusion. Maybe the leadership was so sure of their position that they felt it wasn’t necessary to put it to a vote.

But the larger conclusion that you draw - that the leadership of unions “often” vote against the interests of the membership seems counter-intuitive. If leadership “often” votes against the interests of the members, it would seem likely that they would get voted out of office.

Sure, I’d say that lower-income social conservatives “often” vote against their economic best interests because of demagoguing and demonizing of libz, issues like abortion, etc., but unless you can explain a similar parallel, it sure seems like in the absolute best case you’re overgeneralizing from one example.