That would probably kill you in short order. Come to think of it, even coal miners in Tennessee didn’t work that much. Cite?
Agreed. Once you get in a union, NOBODY works.
http://www.powertech.no/anarchy/mayday.html
http://us.history.wisc.edu/hist102/lectures/lecture07.html
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/145/
16 hour days may not have been the norm. But they did occur. And the 8 hour day was considered radical and destructive to the work ethic.
I wonder when county and his axe handles will show up in this thread.
I’m almost certain that children not working had much more to do with the advent of child labor laws(anyone remember the act named?), than it had to do with the union.
Sam
Child Labor laws occured after the turn of last century.
http://www.boondocksnet.com/labor/cl_intro.html
It’s not reported there but I seem to recall that the unions in the 1890s began proposing an end to child labor in an effort to remove cheap competition.
I can see where they’re still useful in some cases–a factory-working friend, for example, gets some interesting benefits from his union membership. For example, if he needs the services of a real estate lawyer, his union will recommend one and pick up part of the lawyer’s tab.
But while they may do some good for the blue-collar folks, sometimes, they just don’t make sense when it comes to the white-collar people. Some years ago, I applied for a technical writing job in the IT department of a manufacturer. I was told that if I got the job, I’d have to join the union that everybody there–plant workers and office staff–belonged to. I replied that I had no problem with that. Then I was told that if I was hired, I’d be spending the first few years doing my writing job on the midnight-to-8:00 a.m. shift!
When I asked why, I was told, “Union rules. We run a 24-hour operation in our plant, and the union says that all workers–even professionals in the office–who have no seniority built up have to work the lousy shifts when they start here.”
When I pointed out that while technical writing theoretically can take place at any time of the day or night, it’s more traditional to do it in an office during regular daytime business hours. The interviewer just shrugged and replied, “Maybe that’s why we’re having such trouble filling this position.”
No, I didn’t take the job.
For an organization that’s supposedly exists to protect the jobs of their members, unions certainly seem to be doing a bang-up job of getting rid of those same jobs they’re supposed to be protecting. How come every industry that is majority unionized is and has been declining in the U.S. for many years now? The entire manufacturing industry, where I would suspect most of the union jobs are centered, has been moving jobs overseas by the boatload. Why? Unions have simply made the cost of doing business in the US too high for companies to remain competitive. I don’t have a cite, but I would suspect that in every single case, a non-union job/industry has much higher productivity than a union job/industry. What the hell kind of incentive is there for me to innovate and work hard and increase productivity if I’m going to get paid the same as some unqualified doofus that spends the majority of their time over at the snack machine? Unions now simply exist to protect the jobs of the incompetent, stupid, and lazy while fattening the wallets of the union leaders.
Unions are generally a force for the good, but…
Best example of the problems with unions is the domestic airline industry. Non-unionized Southwest: profitable. Unionized United: bankrupt.
The bigger the unions get, the less use they are. My suggestion is to ban nationwide unions altogether. Limit them to state-wide at best. Smaller is better.
Here’s how bad unions have become: even Michael Moore rails against unions in his new book, blasting them for getting into bed with big business and big government anyway, and complaining about their “racist” buy-American campaigns. The old “unions exist for the benefit of the union, not the workers” complaint.
He still thinks unions as an abstract are a good idea, and exempted two specific unions from his criticism, but still, coming from him, I think that says a lot.
I am most certainly NOT a union fan, but they are only partly to blame. The other part is iron-brained management who refused to sink profits back into the business to modernize production facilities.
Balle_M, you are certainly right. Unions are not the SOLE reason union jobs are being lost. But unions certainly are one of, if not THE, primary contributors to the loss of manufacturing and other jobs to other labor markets. In many cases, if management were to modernize production facilities, this would mean more productivity and less grunt labor needed. This modernization would cause the loss of SOME jobs, due to more mechanization and higher productivity per employee, requiring fewer overall jobs. Unions would fight these few job losses tooth and nail, until management would finally have enough and say “Screw you, we’ll just move ALL of our production facilities to China (or wherever).” Now the union has lost ALL of the jobs, while stubbornly resisting modernization in order to save the jobs of a few. Of course, if management simply refused to modernize for no good reason, then their idiots too.
What’s new about this? I believe Moore has been railing against unions for quite some time now, possibly as far back as Roger and Me.
Moore, despite some of his problems with sloppy research, is not as much of a one-trick pony as his detractors would say – in addition to unions, he’s also railed against the Democrats before, most notably for their continued willingness to be the submissive b*tch of the Republicans…
The problem is that unions have a lock on semi-skilled industrial jobs that already have sufficient pay & benefits, but they can’t seem to make it where they’re really needed. I live in a rural area, and Wal-Mart has long since eaten all the local small merchants, and even the other major grocery store chain. According to the NYTimes, a full-time Walmartian makes $14k/year versus 19k/year at a union grocery store.
14k is below the technical poverty line if you have kids. Walmart has fought unions by every means, fair or foul. I agree there are crazy unions out there- up the road in Mattoon, the Blaw-Knox factory workers went on strike right after B-K was bought out, and all they did was get the plant shut down. But lots of folks out there could really use a union.
The last union job I had was as a loader at UPS. Believe me, there is no slack there. If any of you think union jobs are all coffee breaks and wall propping, try working at a UPS hub.
Wrong, Southwest Airlines employee are required to join a union Southwest Airlins Union
Rather,
United Airlines run by incompetent, greedy management clowns: unprofitable
Southwest Airlines run by management with a very good business model, that really cares about its employees: profitable.
That Wal-Mart issue–does it really require a union to correct? As I understand it, there are two demons the employees face: First is outright unlawful practices such as not paying correctly for overtime. Second is ‘shitty employer’ syndrome characterized by not promoting folks who blow some whistle on demon #1, low pay (but at or above minimum wage) and overall oppressive management.
The first demon can and should be dealt with legally (I recognize that the average minimum wage slave at Wal-Mart may not feel important enough/be insightful enough to take a good-sized legal bite out of the hand that feeds it, but that’s a whole 'nother Oprah.)
The second demon has to be accepted as part of life because, let’s face it, Management shouldn’t pay more in wages & benefits than it has to in order to remain competetive as an employer–that’s just not good business; and what exactly is it that these employees do that makes them more valuable than their wage? As an employer it is more cost-effective to pay minimum wage as long as I get applicants who are up to the job.
All a union would do in this case is destroy Wal-Mart’s competetive edge (clearly, most people prefer low prices with a massive selection over mom & pop stores with inflated prices and limited selection) by forcing product costs up (to accommodate higher wages & benefits) and limiting selections as the company loses its ability to buy in vast bulk because it is somewhat less solvent. And if we lose Wal-Mart NOW, we’re all screwed because who do they have left as competition? K-Mars-No? Target-Maybe?
For the record, the first union I was in (LIU) was rotten to the core, while the one I’m in now is pretty decent. I’ll be the last to argue that all unions are good.
However, it puzzles me when people say unions are too powerful compared with other times in history. You must mean in specific, small segments of the economy, like the Big Three auto manufacturers. Overall, unions are much less powerful than they used to be, what with membership at a 54-year low. Even in auto manufacturing, the Japanese plants and many suppliers are now non-union.
This is purely anecdotal so you are all free to ignore it if you wish. My experience growing up with a union father.
When one of the union contracts ended at the steel mill my father worked in, the union naturally had their list of demands for the new contract. They wanted a small raise, more health insurance coverage, and better pension benefits. The company decided that they were asking for fair things, but too much of those fair things, and wanted to give a smaller raise, the opportunity for HMO coverage (as opposed to solely Blue Cross/Blue Shield Major Medical) and would up their contribution to the pension fund if the employees in the union would also up theirs.
The union bosses didn’t think that this was a good deal, so they decided that the best course of action in the absence of a negotiated contract would be to strike. The union leadership also decided that the union would not be able to help the workers maintain any kind of income at all while on strike, nor temporary jobs while they were out of that mill.
Result was that catdad, under tremendous pressure to not be a ‘scab’ (He didn’t want threatened with bodily harm and bricks through his windows. Who can blame him?) went on strike with the union. This meant that familysix was without income for several months while the union was ‘on strike’ to stick it to the company that was still in business and going strong with replacement workers.
So momsix and dadsix were struggling to feed childrensix while the strike was going on, worrying about things like mortgage payments and bills, but of course the union leadership had none of those worries since the really high-ups in unions don’t have to worry about not having a job or an income while the lowly steelworker is standing next to a fire in a barrel carrying a sign in a run-down crack-infested neighborhood outside the gates to the place where he used to collect a paycheck.
The union finally settled for a contract, less than what they wanted to begin with, but they settled, so catdad did go back to work and have an income and medical insurance (under the new HMO option) and familysix was no longer worried about how to eat.
To this day, dadsix is bitter about unions. He believes the big unions exist to line the pockets of the ‘union bosses’, and that it is absolutely asinine to think that months without an income at all is better than getting a slightly smaller pay and benefit increase than you asked for.
I don’t know about the first part, because I have not met or seen these union leaders. I do know that I never want to live through being a ‘striking union worker’ or one of their dependents ever again.
FINALLY! Someone who doesn’t trot out the old canard “The Jungle was an expose of the unhealthiness of the meat packing industry!” Every time I hear someone summarize that book as that, I ask them “So, did you actually read the book?” The answer is almost always “no”.