Maybe the union rules prevent employers from imposing harsh and even dangerous quotas on the employees, and removing safety procedures that might slow down output?
Without unions, a lot of employers would be paying workers on a piecework basis in locked shops. That’s not hyperbole – history proves it.
Or OSHA still exists and all the safety rules are being followed everywhere. Instead the union guys are taking a 15 minute smoke break every 2 hours and an hour for lunch and can’t be fired so they don’t work very hard during the limited time they do work.
Would you bet your next mortgage payment (or, if you were a working person, let’s say three fingers and your ability to breathe) on OSHA still existing in twenty years?
Do you not think if we’d gotten another four years of Trump, followed by four or eight years of [Cruz/Pence/Gaetz/whoever], OSHA wouldn’t be on the chopping block?
This is the biggest issue with unions, on a societal level. They promote inefficiency and idleness.
My wife used to work in an office which was attached to a warehouse. One of the other women in the office had a BF in the warehouse. This guy did very little work, and spent most of the day wandering around with his coffee, speaking to this guy and then that guy. The company had enough of it and let him go. His GF reported later that he had found the perfect job for a guy like him - a union job with a highway repair crew. There were very rigid rules about who was allowed to what job - e.g. the crew who actually worked with a piece of machinery wasn’t allowed to move it from one side of the road to the other, and the like - with the result that the crew spent most of the day lounging around waiting for other people to do things.
I once met a different guy with a union job in NYC. (I forget exactly, but it had something to do with repairing the tires on vehicles for various city agencies.) This guy told me he could only be fired for drug offences (and even that only after he was given X number of chances) and nothing else. Including doing very little work. He said his manager asked him to do something and he said flat out that he’s not interested. “There are plenty of guys around here you can ask and who might do it, so ask them”. The manager told him he had the wrong attitude and he responded “no, I have the right attitude and you have the wrong attitude. I’ve been here a long time and I know my rights”. I only met this guy once, so I don’t know how his subsequent career went, but he was pretty triumphant about it at the time.
All that said, there’s no doubt that management has zero concern about their employees and everything they say to the contrary is bogus PR. Management is only concerned with squeezing every last bit of work out of the employees for the minimum amount of cost, and if the workers all drop dead they could care less if it doesn’t hurt morale and bottom line. [Note: this means collectively. IME in employee benefits, HR people tend to argue in favor of keeping better benefits, but tend to be overruled by finance people who want to cut costs.]
So there needs to be some sort of balance.
Sure. Has there ever been a system anywhere, at any time, that hasn’t been gamed? Exploited?
No, of course not.
So what?
They promote safety and decent working conditions. They give the worker the ability to negotiate with employers from a position of at least some strength.
They promote the idea that workers are actual human beings, rather than just another variable in the calculation of how to produce the most stuff at the lowest cost in an environment where human dignity and physical well-being are about as important as, say, a minor mechanical failure in the factory (warehouse, fulfillment center, whatever) machinery.
Is the bit about “before any other” spoilered somewhere?
My company works with one of the most powerful unions in the country. The President and VPs all note that the union leaders are “businessmen” who understand the complexities of our business. They aren’t going to shoot the business in the foot, make them hilariously uncompetitive AND drive lower compensation for their members for dimwitted nonsensical reasons.
Sometimes union rules are stupid, and do stupid things. Sometimes they’re just not willing to trade higher productivity and pay for their members for a few lost fingers in an “accident” that gets blamed on the worker.
Exactly. Any company’s dependency on their workers is one where the company can tell every individual worker to fuck off without a problem, but the workers can’t quit their jobs without giving themselves major problems. The power rests with the company. What companies can’t do is tell ALL of their workers to fuck off.
Collectively, workers are important, individually, they are disposable.
Oh.
Whose purpose is it to provide those things?
From this post I can conclude that you have no real life experience with unions.
The OP was not advocating that multiple businesses be boycotted. It was pointed out that it wasn’t practical to boycott all businesses that don’t treat all of their employees fairly (as unfortunate as that might be). If you are singling out a particular business to boycott, as this thread is doing, then it is sensible to explain why that business warrants it above others. Hence the discussion about other businesses and how they treat their employees in comparison to Amazon.
I’m not sure why this needs to be spelled out.
By the way, I’ve worked in a capacity similar to the described “megacycle”. I had a job where I was on call 24 hours a day for a week at a time every couple of months and would be woken up at the dead of the night multiple times during that week, so I know how it feels to have to work at that time of night. Also, we had customers on the other side of the world and at times I had to go into the office for support late at night/early in the morning to accommodate their time zone. This was a job that had a 1.75 hour commute each way for me (by foot, ferry, and bus) on top of everything.
It sucked. It was dehumanizing. I had little time for my family. I think it really hurt my marriage at the time. I sympathize with anyone who has to work anything close to that. It has to be a nightmare for those people.
Let me get this straight you’re willing to believe that Trump et al will be willing to gut OSHA but you think they’ll still let you have unions? That seem to be a large rock you’re smoking.
Also my distaste for unions doesn’t mean I didn’t vote for Biden it just means I dislike Unions and do agree with the guys I voted for 100%.
I don’t believe for a second that Trump, et al., wouldn’t do everything in their power to break every union in the nation. And not just Trump and his ilk, but the Republican Party as a whole. That shit started even before Reagan.
And I think the Democratic Party, as it is today, are captive to a bunch of neoliberals who will tut-tut and talk, well, not an especially good game, but will say vague things about being pro-labor, but at the end of the day will be on the side of Wall Street.
And that sucks.
Efficiency and busy-ness are not societal imperatives.
That said, the anecdotes you share absolutely describe disfunction.
I’m not sure I’d want to live in that world.
Even if the owner does genuinely act the way you describe, I don’t like the paternalism of this system. People shouldn’t receive fair treatment as a gift due to the giver’s benevolence.
We should have a system where people are able to receive a fair return for their work because they’ve earned it. They should be receiving this due to their efforts not due to the benevolence of their boss.
You’re reducing people to the level of children getting gifts from Santa. Even if Santa is real, adults shouldn’t live that way.
Here’s one of those “anecdotes.”
Let’s look at that from a different perspective.
FP says some dude he only met once (whose story FP apparently accepts as 100% true) told him that he could only be fired for drug offenses. I’d like to see that union contract. Assuming that’s true (which I don’t), I really gotta admire that union for getting the employers to sign a contract that no employer in their right mind would sign.
The dude told FP that “his manager asked him to do something and he said flat out that he’s not interested.” Well, sure. Management asks employees all the time to do stuff that’s not part of their job. Unionized employees can say no. “Voluntary” overtime and “voluntary” extra work are things that non-unionized employees have to put up with all the time. If employers could get away with it (and sometimes they can), they’d have, say, machinists (or secretaries, or forklift operators, whatever) scrubbing out the rest rooms on their own time. You know that’s true.
Then FP tells us that
The manager told him he had the wrong attitude and he responded “no, I have the right attitude and you have the wrong attitude. I’ve been here a long time and I know my rights”.
Good for the worker. I’m glad that he had a union to protect him when he stood up for himself. I wish every worker (including me!) had that.
And, finally -
I only met this guy once, so I don’t know how his subsequent career went, but he was pretty triumphant about it at the time.
Really, perhaps a story from some dude you only met once is not the most solid foundation upon which to base your opinion of organized labor.
Not sure that’s what Banquet Bear meant (I read his post a different way), but yes, in general, there are plenty who believe that.
“Conservatives” and their allies believe that we should all be fucking grateful to the benevolent “job creators” who throw us a bone or two while they transfer our wealth to themselves (and then lend it back to us at interest).
Conservatives like that are just outright lying. They want a system of helpless workers so they can exploit those workers. That’s obviously wrong.
But I would have a problem even with a system that is genuinely benevolent; a system where the employers really do give their employees everything they want. Because I believe that people are better off when they earn their rewards rather than receive gifts. I feel that empowerment is itself a valuable reward.
I believe exactly the same thing. And I believe that the ability to negotiate from a strong position for just rewards for labor, and conditions for labor, is essential to that.
That said, benevolent paternalism would still be a step up from what we have now.
