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Mary and Jane work next to each other on an assembly line. Mary has been there 5 years longer than Jane and earns $2 more an hour than Jane. Jane is a superior worker. Where is Jane's economic freedom under union rules?
Taking your second point first, why aren't "unions needed these days?" Have employers become more enlightened or altruistic? Have they suddenly started to care about their worker's well being instead of their shareholders? We have current real-life examples of corporations raiding the worker's pension systems. Bain Capital is a prime example of how corporations don't care about employees.
Unions are indeed still needed to prevent the slide back (which has already happened.)
In your first paragraph you refer to "the government steps in and places ridiculous constraints on the employer." What specific constraints can you name?
There used to be clauses that stated if an employee died on the job, the company could withhold any pay due to the family. Those are the times when we needed unions. We do not need them today. Having a good, quality work environment is a competitive advantage today to the point where unions are not needed.
And what do you mean Bain Capital doesn't care about employees? Hundreds of thousands of people have jobs now who would be otherwise unemployed because of Bain. Here is a short list of companies that would have gone out of business if Bain Capital didn't exist.
I think you need a bit more respect for unions, who helped build a middle-class and gave us the weekend. During the middle portion of the 20th Century, strong unions gave middle-class workers wages high enough to own their own homes and send their children to college. They were a major force that controlled inequality.
To call the generation that won World War II and built the nation that you now enjoy "worthless parasites" is more than insulting.
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Originally Posted by MTAtech
Those laws that unions helped pass include child labor laws, the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and occupational safety legislation. Requiring that your workers shouldn't be subjected to dangerous chemicals is hardly an unacceptable constraints on business. Without vigilant unions we can see how business lobbyists will water down legislation.
What we find is that when unions were strong, wages tracked productivity gains. Since the decline of unions, wages remain stagnant regardless of productivity gains, which flow to the owner class.
Unions are still needed.
unions do have their place, and unions did many good things for the country, that said however, unions have become corrupt organizations that tend to wield power like a drunken congressman. they make ridiculous demands for work rules, excessively high wages, and benefits, etc. and all to often they take an extremely hard line to the point where they kill businesses. what we need to do is kill the public sector unions, they are the worst offenders, and reign in the power of the private sector unions, including no more donating union funds to political campaigns. if the union bosses want to work for the campaigns that fine, but union money should NEVER be used as donations to campaigns, that money is supposed to be set aside for union related items, not political contributions.
Why shouldn't workers have the right to band together and protect their interests? How does that violate any principle of economic freedom?
Employee unions are fine, if they are open and honest.
A good union works with the employees and management to ensure the concerns and priorities for all parties are represented fairly. When unions cross the line, and turn into greedy thugs who engage in extortion and blackmail, they end up destroying a company, and that is when then they are despised by most Americans.
The problem with too many on the left, is they cannot conceive of a union crossing that line, in fact they encourage unions to become thugs and extortionists.
Why? Because they don't really believe in freedom. Well, only as far as it benefits them personally.
No. Many of the big unions are corrupt, they become leeches and drain a company dry, because they forgot the purpose of what a union was supposed to be.
While unions do indeed inflate the cost of labor, the nature of an organized corporate management deflates the cost of labor. Thus, there is an imbalance of power between the individual employee and the corporation. If the worker doesn't like the corporation's pay offer, the worker has no ability to negotiate. The union equalizes the power between an unified corporation and the workers.
What we learned from history is that without labor being organized, the company will exploit the workers. Those were the conditions that were the catalyst of the early labor movement.
Look, we do not live in Communist China where workers are locked into sweat shops, and housed on the company property. If a worker/s feel "exploited", they are free to leave and get another job.
Now if you are talking about the old days where safety was not a concern for business, then I would agree that unions were helpful in turning the tide. However in todays economy, unions can be the death knell to American companies.
For all the lip service to hard work, responsibility and patriotism libertarians and conservatives really seem to have disdain for American workers. Their loyalty isn't to America or humanity, it's to Exxon and Apple.
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