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Unions destroy jobs because they support the lazy and incompetent. If unions weren't opposed to good and rational business practices, I would have no problem supporting them.
Ditto. The folks in the sit down strike would be ASHAMED at what unions were protecting just a few decades later. Unions killed themselves, by viewing the employer as the enemy. It PAID them, not the steward.
You paint with too broad a brush, some stay here and become safer. In any event I won't buy the argument that my best interests are served by my being a hat in hand lackey. It goes against my grain.
You paint with too broad a brush, some stay here and become safer. .
You are kidding, right? LOL! Leopards (aka rogues) do not change their spots. They can be driven out of business in one locale, but they reopen the same way in a new locale.
People do not need someone else to do their thinking and bargaining for them.
That's for people to decide for themselves. In fact many are better off with collective bargaining whether you approve or not. Any player in the economy has one interest---his own. It's as natural for workers to want more money as it is for bosses to want more profit. Yet somehow in this topsy-turvy world many workers have become convinced that the boss wanting more is reasonable and the workers (themselves!) wanting more isn't.
You might as well say that people shouldn't combine their money in corporations, that if people want to be in business they should go it alone.
I'll tell you what, I was in a union and had collective bargaining. I made far more money than people doing the same work non union and retired at 55 with a lucrative (and fully funded) pension. Now if you can convince me that wasn't in my interest I'll call you Aristotle.
Last edited by Irishtom29; 05-12-2012 at 06:53 PM..
Except that it was the union wages that initiated the migration of jobs overseas to begin with. The days of unions are over.
I would agree that unions chased away much of the unskilled labor job opportunities. And not every union was guilty of this. The union representing UPS workers has a starting wage of $9/hr. These are what many would consider unskilled labor positions, and the wages are structured as such. Nobody complains about it, including the union.
Now, I did see a union representing hotel cleaners picketing just this year outside Chicago. I'm afraid their fight is futile at this point. The fight for $20/hr floor sweepers at auto plants was equally futile, and destine to fail. At the same time, those who were not satisfied with the wages had plenty of opportunities to seek other opportunities in the past. In my honest opinion, those other opportunities are not present today in the volume they were 20-30 years ago relative to the size of the potential available labor market. Back to my original argument, it's when people are locked into positions of extremely limited upward potential and there are very few opportunities elsewhere that things will become interesting. Like an animal being cornered, workers may begin to lash out.
Following history, unions from their creation were on a decline until the great depression. It was then that union labor really started to gain steam once again. It was times of extreme desperation and adversity that fueled the growth of organized labor.
You are kidding, right? LOL! Leopards (aka rogues) do not change their spots. They can be driven out of business in one locale, but they reopen the same way in a new locale.
Are you saying that all the contractors I worked for were an illusion? Bechtel, Chicago Bridge, Flour, B&W, ABB, Nooter----they don't exist?
I would agree that unions chased away much of the unskilled labor job opportunities. And not every union was guilty of this. The union representing UPS workers has a starting wage of $9/hr. These are what many would consider unskilled labor positions, and the wages are structured as such. Nobody complains about it, including the union.
Note too that non union jobs are going to low wage nations, not just union ones. The furniture business moved from Grand Rapids to the Carolinas to get away from unions and high wagess and has now moved to Asia. The same with textiles which moved from New England to the south and then on to Asia. It seems no American, union or not, can work cheap enough for many businessmen. And the now the white collar guys, who traditionally thought themselves insulated from this are having their jobs shipped off.
Ditto. The folks in the sit down strike would be ASHAMED at what unions were protecting just a few decades later. Unions killed themselves, by viewing the employer as the enemy. It PAID them, not the steward.
It's not necessarily the business that was the enemy historically. It was often the labor market rates for the given positions. When the labor organized en mass, it raised the labor market rates across the board to something that could support a family. It was when union representation declined, and shops started popping up that could get away with paying less for the given positions that the labor market rates started to either tumble or stagnate. In my experience, non union shop owners pay what they can without going broke. Unfortunately, for many of the workers, that pay is often not substantial enough to live on.
Personally, I do not belong to a union. I can earn more money in the private sector in a non union shop than I could working in a union shop. As I have mentioned, it was in a union shop that I learned the skills necessary to later earn a decent and livable income in a non union environment. I see the benefit in them because I am evidence of such. Those opportunities to actually learn the skills simply are not available to most people. The non union employers can not bid high enough on work to afford to train people to do what I do. This is undoubtedly going to lead to America loosing the capacity to handle a lot of high value work in my line of work, and that is the shameful part. This short sighted thinking is going to further weaken our competitive advantage on the global scale. These problems do not exist in countries that have strong labor unions such as Germany and the like.
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