Some thoughts on unions

by JeffT 343 Replies latest members politics

• 

  bohm

  You are missing an important point, Bohm. Namely, when a union decides they are going to demand higher wages, and better healthcare than average, they inherrently put a greater burden on the employer.

  The result is less workers are hired through the union, and more unemployed workers are displaced to non union outfits which creates a greater supply of workers which drives down wages. The company then becomes less profitable, as it must compete with non union companies. Many times this causes the union employer to go out of business.

  Like with BMW? look, it may be so. but the workers have rights, to, and if they deside to form unions they have that right. and i dont think you have made a very strong case unions automatically destroy companies.. quite the contrary. where i came from the conditions of workers were TERRIBLE before unions, i mean we had child labor and people died really young.

  and highly unionized workforces like nurses (all which MUST be in a union) still dont get a very good wager compare to equivalent jobs. actually they get paid more in the private not-so-unionized sector.
• 

  villabolo

  DaCheech: "when the union starts hitting the pocket of the farm, they'll import ALL food too"

  Such deep thinking! Take a look at what's happening to crops worldwide.

  • Russia lost 40% of it's wheat crop last year and put a ban on exports.
  • China, which neither exports nor wants to import, now has a massive failure of its wheat crop. It is going to be forced to import huge amounts of grain.
  • Australia, a major exporter of wheat, suffered heavy damage to its crop due to massive flooding throughout an area the size of Texas.
  • Canada, another wheat exporter also suffered damage due to intense rains.

  I'm not going to bother listing the other countries affected because the message should be clear. We aren't going to be importing any food!

  Get real, DaCheech! Learn something about the world around you.

  Villabolo
• 

  DaCheech

  you want to know how many BMW and mercedes parts are made in china?

  A mojor amount
• 

  drewcoul

  thats your hypothesis. it seem quite easy to test, because in that case all union workers should basically be out of job. but they are not, so your hypothesis seem to be wrong.

  Bohm, In the United States, only 7.3% of private sector employees are union. However, 37.6% of Government employees are union. 51% of union workers in the U.S. are government employees.

  The case can hardly be made that the unions have protected jobs from being displaced to non union shops, or even to other countries. The interesting thing is that government employee union membership has been going up while private employee union membership has been declining. The unions understand that their growth depends on government workers joining their unions. Make no mistake about it, union leadership is as determined to wield power and influence and is as greedy as any crooked politician or big business leader. The difference is the business leader has many times taken financial risks to pursue their business interests. The union leaders only have to work their members into a tizzy and rouse up discontent with their current situations. Why else would the AFL-CIO be the largest political donor in the country. And their money overwhelmingly goes to democrats. When it comes to public unions, that means tax dollars go to pay salaries, part of the salary goes to pay union dues, and part of the union dues go to democrat politicians. The long and short of it is that taxpayers are donating to democrat politicians and somehow they have made this legal.
• 

  bohm

  SW, im from scandinavia and its not what i am referring to. i am simply saying that your DD might get the idea to start a union, and i can make a strong historical case that for lot of unskilled sectors unions have helped TREMENDEOUSLY the past 100 years, at least where i live.

  can we agree on this: its the workers right to form unions?
• 

  bohm

  DC,ofcourse i think the money-donation thing is wrong, but i think the underlying problem is that the american political donation system is nuts. and you could benefit from more than two parties. thats my take on it.

  but i dont think a good argument can be made why government workers should not be allowed to form unions.
• 

  FlyingHighNow

  I highly respect how things are done in Sweden. Unions protect workers. Taxes are used to buy real, valuable benefits for citizens. I also love the music.
• 

  Sam Whiskey

  Bohm - We can agree, surely.

  It is their right, but it may prevent them from being competitive on a global or even a local scale.

  But yes, we can agree it is their right.
• 

  moshe

  Union workers were demanding outlandish salaries

  I worked in a foundry- many, many times I was called upon to make a repair right next to the molten iron holding furnace- just a few feet away from a mould full of 2500 degree iron that could blow out the mould seam and incinerate me- or replace a burned switch under the moulds- a blow out and I'm toast. Climb up a 40 foot extension ladder to replace a burned out HID ballast that weights 25lbs., go up on the roof at 2am in the middle of the winter to fix a burned out 100hp fan motor- it weights 500 lbs. The only thing that kept me on the job was my future pension plan and retiree medical, otherwise I would have told my boss to screw it a long time ago. In some cases the boys at Toyota were actually making more per week than I was making. They paid me those wages, because I could keep the production line going and make repairs using substitute parts or reprogam the PLC computer to bypass the broken parts until real repairs could be made on the down shift. The company was the one making outlandish profits, IMO. My last job was at the Chrysler transmission plant- I found out that those $2500 minivan transmissions only cost the company $250 to make, so my wages were nothing to them. Autoworkers could work for free and they would only knock a measly $1000 off the cost of their cars- Union labor makes up that small a percentage of the cost of their cars.

  added- the cost of the bad management decisons is never publicly discussed, either- and they keep getting their outlandish salaries. In 2002 Chrysler announced they would have a hybrid SUV in 2004, the German bosses at Daimler who controlled Chrysler decided the Americans couldn't have a hybrid before they did, so after hundreds of millions was spent on a hybrid, they ordered us to begin work on a fuel cell car. Never mind that there were no hydrogen refueling stations being built for a hydrogen powered car. Then in early 2007 it became apparent a hybrid was necessary, so they had Chrysler do a joint venture with GM on, guess what?- a hybrid SUV! Finally in late 2008 (new private hedge fund owners- Cerebus capital) the first of a couple thousand hybrid Chrysler SUV's were built at the Newark Deleware assembly plant- just before they decided to close it down. Chrysler went bankrupt a few months later and it was bad management that killed it not the workers. We workers, are only soldiers who do what we are told to do and make what we are told to make, even if the products are poorly designed and engineered and marketed by non-union salaried workers.
• 

  drewcoul

  Workers have rights. No question. They also have the right to unionize. No question. There was a time when in the United States, unions were absolutely needed, and when you look at how greedy and evil business leaders like Andrew Carnegie there can be no doubt that they needed to be reigned in. On the other hand, the pendulum has sort of swung the other way. Richard Trumka, the president of the AFL-CIO Here's what he said to the AP:

  "When you strike a match and you put your finger in it, you're likely to get burned." He also said, "That doesn't mean I'm threatening to burn you. That just means if you strike the match, and you put your finger in it, common sense will tell you it'll burn your finger. Common sense will tell you that in these strikes, that when you inject scabs, a number of things happen. And a confrontation is one of the potentials that can happen. Do I want it to happen? Absolutely not. Do I think it can happen? Yes, I think it can happen."

  He was obviously inciting his union workers to get violent. He then told a group of miners who were on strike to "Kick the shit out of every last one of them!" He was talking about scab workers.

  He's truly a class act.