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How do you know whether a union or corporation ever hurt or helped every person that walked into a voting booth last November. Your idiotic assumption about the entire working poulation of the united states is nothing but but insulting hyperbole with no basis in fact.
Coorporate America has enriched my life greatly, more than some corrupt union hack who wants to rob me and millions of others of 2.5 hours of our hard earned pay checks every month
Who has made millions of lives immeasurably better?
Bill Gates
Steven Jobs
Henry Ford
Andrew Carnegie
John Rockefeller
J.P. Morgan
The thousands of engineers that have designed cheaper and better goods for hundreds of years
or Jimmy Hoffa
The dozens of labor leaders the ended up in jail or dead because they were in the mafia?
or President George W Obama?
John Rockefeller and Henry Ford alone did more to alleviate poverty than all union leaders and government hacks combined. This is why union leaders and politicians vilify them.
Last edited by OhioRules; 06-18-2013 at 06:12 AM..
No damn it my lads are not lining up to ask for less pay and benefits, if they really cared about their jobs they would as well as kneeling and pulling their forelocks when I arrive at the yard. Maybe I need some of those American redneck workers who do not care what they get paid as long as they can preach about some deity, firearms and gays. It seems a lot of American workers are different, they would say goodbye to $15,000 a year as long as they are not in a wicked union which would cost them $800 per annum. Probably best if I do not mention the universal health care my lads get.
Well, there is a lot of support too in the US for our unions and working people; you're right about the 'god, guns and gays' crowd and heaven knows the 'Axis of Evil' NRA/ALEC/Chamber of Commerce propaganda has been effective on them. But we did re-elect President Obama and states like Minnesota and California have been successful in combating the axis.
I think most people on C-D who say they are anti-union really don't know why they are. They are just anti-things that don't affect them personally.
I suppose if I went to college for 6 years and had a nice income, I wouldn't like someone who makes as much or more than me with no college.
I've been a union person for 25 years. It's been great for me. I am thankful for all the sacrifices made by my union brothers 50 years ago to lay the groundwork for what we have today.
Being from Upper Michigan there are alot of paper mills and companies. I agree that not all unions are bad but the Teamsters local I was in for years was the worst. IMO some of the best unions were the paper workers who worked well with ownership during times of belt tightening and came back to the table to re negotiate at the end of the contract to recover their consessions and sometimes increase pay benefits safety etc.. The cycle usually went when the mill changed ownership the new owners were looking for consessions. As time gos on the new ownership stabilized their operating capital and were able to give back to the unions as well as take care of investors. New page, mead, and I think Plum or something a owner of forest acerage in the UP.
Other good union are railroad workers, boilermakers, op engs, plumbers pipefritters all seem to work with ownership rather than against. The UAW completely funked up domestic auto
Quote:
Originally Posted by tinman01
Depends upon how large the company is. A small company will fire a slacker in a hurry.
A large company or corporation has a very real fear of wrongful termination lawsuits. In America people will sue for anything and everything. Worse still the masses have that deep pocket mentality. That guy has 1.2 million in assets and he has insurance, he can afford to pay 200 g. The fact he may have done nothing wrong isn't part of the decision making process. There is a reason we have so many tort lawyers.
Unions do protect the less than ideal worker and do so with equal zeal. They reckon that the idiot will eventually screw up enough that even they won't be able to save him.
As I have posted earlier I have a strong respect for the trades Unions. They produce outstanding craftsmen and no sane person can deny that fact.
That said some pro Union types will say only Unions produce outstanding and skilled craftsmen. THat too is insane and flat out wrong.
What is also insane is the idea that anyone who prefers to not be in a Union must be ignorant or a redneck or some sort of human trash.
Many like myself work for a company whose entire history has been labor friendly. Why would I want a Union shop where I am treated well already? The Union has tried to enter our mill and failed 3 times since I have worked here. They admit that they can't get really do better for us than we already have. They want us to go Union to bolster their numbers and some how help them in that way.
Where I work individual merit not seniority determines advancement and job opportunity. Seniority is used to pick vacation time or a tie breaker.
Even where I work one has to almost try to get fired. The company just doesn't fire people unless that person really screws up bad.
Actually I had no problem working in a union job shop as a machinist. It was funny watching the labor Dems gnash teeth as their 401s disappered and the intransigent union helped shut the shop down leaving 75 workers unemployed with their retirements paying pennies on the dollar. What was funnier is watching workers with much more senority than me walk out the door because I had worked myself into a position with the shops cash cow that made me irreplaceable. 25 year machine operators walking out the door because they are to lazy to learn a skill that kept me employed until they shut the doors.
In fact I had taken this little deburring operation into a cottage industry negotiating a side a deal with management to do this work at home at a piece rate that blew away any hourly the union had negotiated. So when me and the other two shifts pulled the parts off the machine we would box them up and I would take them home and clean them up in my basement for $1.50 a piece. I could complete a piece in 3.5 to 4 minutes, you do the math. I had freaking Allison Trans engineers in my basement inspecting my operation LOL
Ownership was actually lucky to have the union between myself and them because if i had negotiated my wages and benefits the way I did that piece work on the side i would have been ONE HELL OF ALOT BETTER OFF
Quote:
Originally Posted by PullMyFinger
I think most people on C-D who say they are anti-union really don't know why they are. They are just anti-things that don't affect them personally.
I suppose if I went to college for 6 years and had a nice income, I wouldn't like someone who makes as much or more than me with no college.
I've been a union person for 25 years. It's been great for me. I am thankful for all the sacrifices made by my union brothers 50 years ago to lay the groundwork for what we have today.
Guess again---the average wage for sales associates at Walmart is $8.81 per hour, so that with the 34-hour week that Walmart calls full-time, this results in a yearly income of $15,476. The average manager at Walmart makes about $11 to $11.50 an hour.
But a lot of Wal-Marts are in decaying small towns with few job opportunities ever offered. Making $8.81 an hour may sound like a decent amount of money to make in a small town, even if it's close to minimum wage.
I think most people on C-D who say they are anti-union really don't know why they are. They are just anti-things that don't affect them personally.
I suppose if I went to college for 6 years and had a nice income, I wouldn't like someone who makes as much or more than me with no college.
I've been a union person for 25 years. It's been great for me. I am thankful for all the sacrifices made by my union brothers 50 years ago to lay the groundwork for what we have today.
Those Europeans need to understand that many people in America, especially within the mid section, most value politicians who profess to be pro-God, anti-gay and pro-gun. Those three issues most matter to them. Other issues, such as economic ones matter considerably less.
Why do you think the GOP keeps them focused on issues like that?---to divert them from depressing economic realities and to prevent them from noticing that right now Congress is busy dismantling the financial industry regulations that were designed to prevent another financial crisis, in other words, things that actually MATTER. But oh let's focus instead on abortion and gay marriage and whether L'il Wayne stepped on the American flag instead.
So you're okay with a union stealing money from non-members and will use any "reason" to rationalize it.
Just so we got that straight.
Stillwater townie supports theft.
Once again, you adamantly refuse to grasp the fact that labor unions don't operate for free and must defend all workers, who complain about it, when the boss violates the labor contract, whether they're union members, or not.
The reason why most corporate interests, who are having to put up with well established unions, want right to work to come to their states, which don't have it, is in order to recruit freeloaders to bust the unions. When right to work comes, the boss can say to his unionized workers, "You want a raise already? I know how you can get your damned raise. Quit paying into the union and start enjoying a 5% raise in your paycheck, or whatever the union is taking out it." Isn't this the situation you really want?
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.
That is not a misprint. "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.
The pro-union types deal with this by ignoring it.
Ha, what if unions were banned 50 years ago and everybody was paid 25 to 50% less? You'd end up with a lot slower growing economy than how it turned out.
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