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.
If you're just a clerk at a supermarket, your skills would not be hard to replace.
The workers out there with truly hard to replace skills: Your engineers, your CEO's, your IT people, your accountants, etc. are very rarely unionized.
Quite agree. In this country and in business, you are not paid on hard work alone, you are paid for your knowledge. If you possess both knowledge and a hard work ethic, you will be considered a valuable employee that is good for the company and worth the expense.
I employ IT workers, with highly specialized skills. I pay them very, very well. I do so because they add value, are difficult to replace, and have the knowledge necessary for the position. I have other administrative workers that are not as highly paid because their positions are not highly specialized and do not require specialized knowledge. If I were forced to pay the administrative staff as high as my specialized workers, I would have to cut staff and ultimately cut productivity, which would hurt my bottom line and ability to compete.
If I were forced to pay the administrative staff as high as my specialized workers, I would have to cut staff and ultimately cut productivity, which would hurt my bottom line and ability to compete.
Glad to hear this. I tell people all the time that companies can't just pass along new costs to the customer. So when we have increases in minimum wage laws or some expensive new regulation the result is slowed production and layoffs. Or relocate to avoid the new tax/regulation or go out of business. Those are the 4 options for most companies.
Unions do this too. They demand more than they are worth for. So a unionized company ends up hiring less people than they would otherwise. This creates an excess of workers for non-union competitiors. So the guy that couldn't get hired in the union shop ends up making less than he is actally worth in a truly free market. This is what unions do. They suppress wages. I'm talking highly-skilled union jobs.
Unions are not about the working man or high wages. They are about pitting one group of workers (union vs. non-union) against one another and keeping wages low.
Glad to hear this. I tell people all the time that companies can't just pass along new costs to the customer. So when we have increases in minimum wage laws or some expensive new regulation the result is slowed production and layoffs. Or relocate to avoid the new tax/regulation or go out of business. Those are the 4 options for most companies.
Unions do this too. They demand more than they are worth for. So a unionized company ends up hiring less people than they would otherwise. This creates an excess of workers for non-union competitiors. So the guy that couldn't get hired in the union shop ends up making less than he is actally worth in a truly free market. This is what unions do. They suppress wages. I'm talking highly-skilled union jobs.
Unions are not about the working man or high wages. They are about pitting one group of workers (union vs. non-union) against one another and keeping wages low.
I disagree with some of your points. For one, raising minimum wages doesn't have a negative impact on businesses, I don't believe. I live in Washington, and our minimum wage is pushing (I believe) about 9 dollars an hour at this point. Many other states are at 7.25. If businesses in this state do fine at 9 (and our cost of goods exempting fuel and cigarattes are on par or lower than the rest of the country) , then I'm getting mostly crocodile tears from states whining that theirs went up from 6 to 7.25. Any business model that's struggling with labor overhead then labor costs 7.25 is a bad business model, IMO.
And unions aren't about keeping wages low. Unions are about artificially inflating the wages of unskilled labor. Again, skill positions typically aren't unionized. Why? There's demand and limited supply. Unskilled industries typically are. Why? There's unlimited supply and limited demand. The whole point of unions in this day and age is to eliminate the opportunity for a company to engage in domestic free market strategies by finding equal skill for a better price, but to instead be forced to pay a ridiculously inflated price for a position that doesn't require much skill.
For one, raising minimum wages doesn't have a negative impact on businesses, I don't believe.
Really? So if your minimum wage goes from $7 to $9, you think it would have no impact? All those fast food restaurants would not need to raise prices???????
Really? So if your minimum wage goes from $7 to $9, you think it would have no impact? All those fast food restaurants would not need to raise prices???????
Forget the big chains..what about the small service business like lawn service. Raise the wage by $2/hour for each worker and the company can still get by with no price increase or cuts ?
Raise prices in one area and you'll have to either raise in another or cut to maintain what you had before. That's just plain logic at work here.
The power of unions: Average stagehand at Lincoln Center in NYC makes $290K a year | Washington Examiner (http://washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/beltway-confidential/2010/12/power-unions-average-stagehand-lincoln-center-nyc-makes-290k-year - broken link)
I don't even know what to say.. Really, I am totally lost for words.. Someone help me out on this one.
Way over paid! What kind of brains does it take? College? Max they should make is maybe $50K
A grocery chain unionizes (and yes, they do exist). The cashiers make 15 dollars an hour, the stockers make 12 dollars an hour, and the cleaning crew makes 10 dollars an hour.
Suddenly, they demand that the cashiers should make 25 dollars an hour, the stocks should make 20 dollars an hour, and the cleaning crew should make 16 dollars an hour. You can't just fire them all and replace them with people who will do the work for 15/12/10 because there's a union contract and all sorts of regulations. You have no choice but to raise the salaries for EVERYONE, whether they deserve it or not. You can't even lay people off to compensate for the added expense of labor costs because the bargaining agreement says you can't.
So what do you have to do? You have to raise prices on everything in the store. Which makes it cost more for all the customers. Who can't afford the cost increases. Who then go to your competitor, causing you to lose even more money. See where this is going?
Now, for the reality check: Supply and demand. There are a LOT more people who can do stagehand work than who can run a multi-billion dollar company (and spare me the rhetoric about a banker running the bank into the ground, it's anecdotal and specious). The free market dictates that whoever owns the theatre should be able to hire whoever is qualified that is willing to do the work for the lowest price. Think of it like gas stations across the street from one another. THey are free to get into price wars. Union rules, however, handcuff the owners and force them to negotiate with people holding their business hostage for ever-increasing cuts of the profits with no ability to simply replace them with workers who will do the job for the old rates, even if such workers exist. It's wrong. Meanwhile, there are a lot fewer people who can run the company, and a lot of companies who need talent like that, so they can negotiate prices UP because it's higher demand than supply.
Quote:
Originally Posted by gizmo980
I live in San Francisco, which is even more expensive than NYC (depending on where you draw city/county lines), and have no problem with CEOs making whatever they do... especially since my father was a CEO, hehe. And no, he made nowhere near 300 million!! In fact, he took a pretty large pay-cut from his Senior VP position with another corporation, in order to accept that CEO position. Besides, who on earth makes that kind of money, aside from the 4-5 CEOs of our very largest corporations? I don't know if my father used union workers for anything, so it might not be relevant to the discussion - just wanted to say that where you live has little bearing on what you believe, in terms of who deserves to earn what.
I do generally support unions, mostly because I was a union worker myself, as mentioned earlier. But at the same time, I don't begrudge anyone in a high-earning position. That's just petty and resentful, IMO, and ignoring how hard they worked to get there. My overall opinion on wages lean more towards government regulations, i.e. raising the minimum wage according to COL, and fairly enforcing labor laws... honestly, I'd like to see us in a place where we don't NEED unions at all. I'll admit a lack of in-depth knowledge on the whole situation, though, so my thoughts could change with further study.
Really? So if your minimum wage goes from $7 to $9, you think it would have no impact? All those fast food restaurants would not need to raise prices???????
A worker at a McDonald's here in Seattle makes 9 dollars an hour. Know what a Big Mac combo costs? The exact same amount as it does in Arkansas, where they're paid 7.25. Know how many have closed down as a result of their higher labor costs? None that I know of.
Paying a bunch of minimum wage workers an extra 2 dollars an hour should not be significant enough to impact your business in any sort of meaningful way. If it does, then there's a flaw with your business model. The argument here isn't about minimum wage workers, though. It's about people who do things any minimum wage drone could accomplish, but who go out and make between 60 and 100 thousand a year to do it.
Raising the minimum wage was indeed an idiotic and job-killing move by our totally clueless President; you'd think that in a country where the unemployment rate for black males under 25 is well over 20%, somebody in DC would tell him that he's killing job opportunities for those who need them the most and want to enter the job market.
Unions frequently aren't all they're cracked up to be; the CEO of whole Foods Market wrote an editorial in the WSJ earlier this year in which alluded to the fact that his non-unionized employees earn higher salaries than workers at the unionizied grocery chains here in Los Angeles, including Stater Bros., Vons, Ralphs & Albertsons.
Ditto for the airline industry; 2,000+ flight attendants from Northwest Airlines will be leaving their union to join their non-unionized counterparts at Delta when that merger closes, because the Delta FAs are also better paid.
The fact that 92% of workers in this country are not union members should tell us all that they're superb job-killing entities; look no farther than the rust belt.
Most of the new automobile plants opened in the US over the past decade didn't go anywhere near the Midwest, but set up shop in right-to-work states with substantially lower cost-of-living and other business related expenses.
Fedex is in much better shape financially than UPS is as it relates to profits & the bottom line, and being non-unionized certainly helps.
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.
