Comments by "Nicholas Conder" (@nicholasconder4703) on "“But Hitler Crushed the Trade Unions!”" video.

  1. I agree with you on this. The biggest problem with trade unions is that once basic demands are met, the leadership then has to figure out what to do. Without a "cause" to justify their existence, the leadership loses its reason for being there. "Activists" end up replacing those who are there for altruistic reasons. Thus, most trade unionists go from being champions of "worker's rights" to rabble rousers who use any minor issue to justify what they are doing. Mind you, in many cases, people in management help stoke this by mule-headedly sticking with shortsighted or snap decisions (e.g., deciding on courses of action without reviewing worker's contracts), so it is a two-way street. Both union leadership and management are often equally to blame for labor issues, but for different reasons.
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  2. TIK, Hitler and the Nazis did, in a sense, crush the trade unions. What the Nazis did was destroy/abolish the individual unions and roll them into a single, government run and controlled union. It made them a single entity that the Nazis could control. They did this for the sake of control industry and prevent strikes, making the workers an arm of the government by granting them power. Making the workers part of the government also allowed the Nazis to control some aspects of the way companies worked (upset the union, and you upset the Nazis). I suspect that all the union leadership were Nazis or had the ear of Nazi officials. So they could use fear of the Nazis to push the union's demands. In this way the Nazis enslaved both the worker and industrialists.
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