“How the workers are benefited”
Maybe a hundred to 75 years ago. Now it seems like the workers are held hostage or perhaps just fleeced. At least that’s my perception looking in from the outside.
Like the utopian Marxism or even the idyllic concept of Communism there is, and always has been one fatal flaw in both theory and institution that has, and continues to historically thwart any attempt to establish the theory of Marx and Engles (along with very serious theoretical shifts from Trotski, Lenin, Stalin, Mao... at el). And that plainly and simply boils down to (drum roll please)... humans are involved in high places and with that comes megalomania and tyrannical outcomes. Hence the absolute requirement of checks and balances and vigilant protection of the (a) Constitutional Republic. There has and will continue to be attempts to work around that system and turn it. But it must not be so. That said, there may be some fundamental changes that need to be reinstated in out society that have been deviously neutered. We live in interesting times indeed.
I think that even back then, the times were a changing.
The industries those people were in were already looking for better people to do the jobs, and if you were someone who could work harder or smarter than the next guy, your wage was going up. Other industries were already pulling the go-getters out of the fields and moving them up the ladder.
The unions were promising that if you were a sluggard, you would get the pay of the hard worker with out actually doing what he did. And if you were a really lousy sort, you could become a floor warden for the union and do NO work, but get paid like the rest.
And we end up with guys on a assembly line, making as much as a school teacher or policeman or a military person on deployment.
I remember the video I saw of a union floor meeting in Michigan where an individual stood up and says he deserved the same type of retirement and medical benefits as any soldier because he had stood his time on the assembly line just like the soldier had did his time. And the crowd cheered him on.