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You're showing your ignorance, because it's been a fact ever since the 1940s that it's against the law to first be required to join a labor union as a condition for securing a job.
Jeez... Where did I offend you to the point that you feel the need to insult me? Secondly, try working for a company as an electrician in Chicago and not be forced to join the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.
This mindset, and the numerous posts by the anti-union crowd, is what is responsible for the mindset of blaming the victims in the American workforce. Union members, in order to keep their jobs, must accept slave wages and pitiful benefits OR they can see their jobs go to some Central American or Asian sweatshop where workers are paid pennies on the hour, and if they lose their arm in an industrial accident, they are fired, not to be heard from again.
What no one else is mentioning is how well corporate America is doing these days, how profits have all been funneled upward and into the pockets of management and white collar America whilst their blue collar workers are paid less and less every year, and under the constant threat of job loss.
Not one union basher has ever even broached the topic of white color salaries going through the roof and corporations hoarding their profits. Someone even mentioned Hostess, but predictably lost on the FOX News demonization of the Hostess union was the wholesale looting of the company piggybank by top executives before locking the doors and fleeing to their vacation homes. This represents what much of corporate America is concerned with: More profits. Best way to keep this spiraling upward is to take away from your workforce.
What Wall Street did to America during the Bush years, ultimately requiring a government handout to balance their ledger sheet, is no different than what much of corporate America is doing to the hourly worker. That legions of poor white trash will line up and denigrate the blue collar union worker while carrying the water for millionaires and billionaires is no longer even surprising.
The damage that unions have inflicted on the economy in recent American history is actually far greater than anyone might guess. In a study published jointly in late 2002 by the National Legal and Policy Center and the John M. Olin Institute for Employment Practice and Policy, economists Richard Vedder and Lowell Gallaway of Ohio University calculated that labor unions have cost the American economy a whopping $50 trillion over the past 50 years alone.
$50 TRILLION. "The deadweight economic losses are not one-shot impacts on the economy," the study explains. "What our simulations reveal is the powerful effect of the compounding over more than half a century of what appears at first to be small annual effects."
Not surprisingly, the study did find that unionized labor earned wages 15 percent higher than those of their nonunion counterparts, but it also found that wages in general suffered dramatically as a result of an economy that is 30 to 40 percent smaller than it would have been in the absence of labor unionism.
Labor unions have dealt with this study by ignoring it. Though I think the UAW put some lame refutation on their website once that was full of union talking points. lols.
Lack of education and short memories amongst some. My union is accomplishing great things for working people; we are in a 'blue' state, which helps.
Correction:
Your union is accomplishing things for it's employees.
It aint doing nothing for anyone non-members.
Don't believe me? Go on strike and see how your union treats strike-busters, you know, people that would work if the union didn't violate their rights and prevent them from trading their own labor for a paycheck.
Last edited by OhioRules; 06-16-2013 at 11:32 AM..
Why the hatred of non-union workers by union people?
And unions have done nothing to win rights for workers.
If they cared about workers they wouldn't have a problem with strike-busters. Instead they commit violence against them, call them "scabs" and do everything they can to deny them work. This alone proves unions do nothing for workers. Unions are for some workers and against others.
Bruce “Utah” Phillips:
Quote:
"Kids don’t have a little brother working in the coal mine, they don’t have a little sister coughing her lungs out in the looms of the big mill towns of the Northeast. Why? Because we organized; we broke the back of the sweatshops in this country; we have child labor laws. Those were not benevolent gifts from enlightened management. They were fought for, they were bled for, they were died for by working people, by people like us. Kids ought to know that. That’s why I sing these songs. That’s why I tell these stories, dammit. No root, no fruit!"
Census data proves child labor was a thing of the past by the time unions and the feds did anything about it.
Unions always say stuff like this. They also claim they invented the weekend and other nonsense. They never ever show any proof. Because it doesn't exist. They just make outrageous claims and dupes believe them.
Any impartial look at what was happening in the workforce prior to unionization shows that the unions have done next to nothing for anyone except union leadership.
If unions are so 'lovable' -- why do they maintain (survive only with) forced membership?
Some of the trade unions may persist via apprenticeship programs, etc, but I work at a university (in CA) and recently the post-doctoral scholars were unionized by the UAW - United Auto Workers!! (What? Yes, really!) University of California Human Resources and Benefits - At Your Service
Why the hatred of unions in the USA ? unions fought for and won all the rights that people take for granted at work. I employed an American in Australia for my post stressing team, but there is no way he wanted to join a union so I ended up doing his contract myself. But here is the kicker, I told him no union no profit share, would the average American give up income not to join a union ? But the hypocrisy is this, he was happy to take the six weeks of holiday time that had been won by the union.
Most Americans have been brainwashed into thinking that the interests of a corporation, short-term profit at any price, are in their own interests, when clearly it is not.
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Where did I offend you to the point that you feel the need to insult me? Secondly, try working for a company as an electrician in Chicago and not be forced to join the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.
(What? Yes, really!) 
