Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Not! Hotel workers as a whole are paid crappy wages in Hawaii. Do you have any idea what many of them are paid? I do. My SIL has been a housekeeper in Waikiki for more than 25 years. She has a position where she not only cleans all day but oversees the work of others. Guess what she makes? Less than 30K a year. All that hard work for slave wages.
The slaves are expected to give up pay and bennies when times are rough. You can be rest assured that upper management and CEOs will never cut their pay and bennies during rough times. After all, they provide jobs...albeit jobs that don't pay a living wage. Imagine where we, the workers, would be if we didn't have collective bargaining. Perhaps,my SIL would be doing the same amount of work for say 20K a year. Keep banging on the unions why don't you.
Yes, exactly. You can pay regular workers a living wage without raising prices; by taking out the inflated, greedy profits that the owners/upper management/ceos extract from the company. And this works, people do it in many parts of the world. Personally, more than unions I think we need democratic workers cooperatives where everyone makes an equal, living wage; everyone has a stake in the company and making sure it stays afloat, everyone has a say in the decisions made and in the hard work, with no golden parachutes. Unions exist here in Hawaii, but they are very much so beaten back, on the defensive, as they are elsewhere in the US.
Desiring to (or, indeed, having to as in the case of Oahu) live mainland style is indeed the problem; refusing to eat a diet of foods that can sustainably grow here on the islands, wanting a big mcmansion with air conditioning and an unedible, useless grass lawn saturated with pesticides, big cars and cell towers and mainland political systems.
Yes, it does include tips. Actually, she moved from a non-union housekeeping job to a union one. Doing that improved her pay. She also had a second job assisting a nurse who ran a care home, but the pay was even worse. She's getting old and she's practically worn out. It's very difficult to reinvent yourself when you have been working as long and as hard as she has. The point I'm trying to make is $15 an hour before taxes is not much in Hawaii, and the Hawaii state income tax nails everyone.
Yes, exactly. You can pay regular workers a living wage without raising prices; by taking out the inflated, greedy profits that the owners/upper management/ceos extract from the company. And this works, people do it in many parts of the world. Personally, more than unions I think we need democratic workers cooperatives where everyone makes an equal, living wage; everyone has a stake in the company and making sure it stays afloat, everyone has a say in the decisions made and in the hard work, with no golden parachutes. Unions exist here in Hawaii, but they are very much so beaten back, on the defensive, as they are elsewhere in the US.
Desiring to (or, indeed, having to as in the case of Oahu) live mainland style is indeed the problem; refusing to eat a diet of foods that can sustainably grow here on the islands, wanting a big mcmansion with air conditioning and an unedible, useless grass lawn saturated with pesticides, big cars and cell towers and mainland political systems.
I have to say i think your on the right track about the company's and the socalled greed that they seam to want to make in the time and day
Hawaii is a strongly pro-union state, but only certain jobs are unionized. The history of the unionization of sugar and pineapple workers is required reading for anyone interested in living in Hawaii. It was a long, ugly struggle. Before, they were paid appallingly low wages. After, they were the highest paid agricultural workers in the world, able to send their children to college, so they wouldn't have to work in the fields.
Hawaii is a strongly pro-union state, but only certain jobs are unionized. The history of the unionization of sugar and pineapple workers is required reading for anyone interested in living in Hawaii. It was a long, ugly struggle. Before, they were paid appallingly low wages. After, they were the highest paid agricultural workers in the world, able to send their children to college, so they wouldn't have to work in the fields.
Yes, exactly. You can pay regular workers a living wage without raising prices; by taking out the inflated, greedy profits that the owners/upper management/ceos extract from the company. And this works, people do it in many parts of the world. Personally, more than unions I think we need democratic workers cooperatives where everyone makes an equal, living wage; everyone has a stake in the company and making sure it stays afloat, everyone has a say in the decisions made and in the hard work, with no golden parachutes. Unions exist here in Hawaii, but they are very much so beaten back, on the defensive, as they are elsewhere in the US.
Desiring to (or, indeed, having to as in the case of Oahu) live mainland style is indeed the problem; refusing to eat a diet of foods that can sustainably grow here on the islands, wanting a big mcmansion with air conditioning and an unedible, useless grass lawn saturated with pesticides, big cars and cell towers and mainland political systems.
So it is up to who exactly, to decide how much a company is allowed to make in profits? Are you the "profit czar"?
That part in BOLD; we seem to have seen that route happen before.
I believe it was called Communism. The problem when everyone makes the same is that the incentive to better one's self goes away. Half the people quit working or trying and the other half, that were working hard, give up.
Huh? Don't they still grow pineapples in Hawaii? I seriously doubt the farmers just gave up and let the land return to forest just because the workers won the right to fair pay for a fair days work. Or did they? If so, maybe the land is better off being forest, as it's just not justifiable to have people toiling all day in the broiling sun for menial wages.
Anyone that suggests that people should have to work jobs like that for low wages should have to spend a month out on the fields, just to see how they like it. It might even lead to a change of opinion.
Sigh, I just get so disgusted sometimes at the American "conservative" point of view...no wonder why our economy is in the tank, and shows no signs of getting any better. And now the Repubs want to take away Medicare for those 55 and under?? Gimme a break!
At the rate this country is going, it's almost enough to make me wanna learn French and move over to the real Promised Land. Oh France, how do I love youuuu. Or maybe I can just move to Canada, at least they've got free medical care there.
When i was in high school, I worked at an up-scale restaurant on Maui as a dishwasher. The chefs at this wonderful restaurant were paid terrible, $9/hour prep and line cooks made $13/hour. All the chefs/cooks wanted an across the board raise. The owner flipped out, fired them all, shut down the restaurant for a week and replaced them all. That is one example of why people don't get paid more here. This wasn't a union, i don't actually agree with unions, but this particular case was a matter of greed and poor leadership on the management side.
No, pineapple is no longer mass-harvested in Hawaii. I used to pick pineapples during summers in high school (2001-2005), and it was sad seeing the ag industry slowly die. They harvest "fresh fruit" in Pulehu and Omaopio on Maui, but for the most part Maui Land and Pineapple company isn't active. Hawaii Commercial and Sugar Co. (HC&S) is the only large ag company in Hawaii as well as the last sugar cane company in the state (also on Maui). As for the pineapple land, it's mostly being overgrown by weeds, the company is probably going to try and re-zone it to make some $$$
When i was in high school, I worked at an up-scale restaurant on Maui as a dishwasher. The chefs at this wonderful restaurant were paid terrible, $9/hour prep and line cooks made $13/hour. All the chefs/cooks wanted an across the board raise. The owner flipped out, fired them all, shut down the restaurant for a week and replaced them all. That is one example of why people don't get paid more here. This wasn't a union, i don't actually agree with unions, but this particular case was a matter of greed and poor leadership on the management side.
It's stuff like this that really gets me steamed Do biz people not recognize how important their employees are to their bottom line? If Mr Scrooge doesn't wanna pay the monies, then he can do the frickin' work himself.
As for the pineapple industry dying out, I don't find that sad at all, considering the history of the land barons - good gosh, those people were just brutal. You can read about it in this link I've dug up here: The ILWU Story - Hawaii .
It seems the problem in Hawaii isn't that they need fewer unions, they need more of them, and they need to control even more of the economy than they do now. I tell you, one of these days, the proletariat of the world (not just in Hawaii, but everywhere), is just going to walk away from their jobs, never to return again. How will the greedy CEO's make their millions then? Answer, they won't. And that'd be a very good thing indeed.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Do biz people not recognize how important their employees are to their bottom line? If Mr Scrooge doesn't wanna pay the monies, then he can do the frickin' work himself. 
