F#@% these union busters

The BBQ Pit
201

Well, your problem seems to be that you come at everything from a “me” point of view. It’s our collective problem.

And I tell you what, I support my local brick and mortar shops when times are tough and I make sure that I don’t short the food servers on the tip just because I have less disposable income.

And yes, I lay some of the blame at the feet of the capitalist because while their profits have gone up in general over the last n number of years, that did NOT get shared with most of the workers. The top quintile pocketed a nice increase in real income over the last couple of decades and business did quite well. The bottom 60% are worse off than they were 20 years ago.

It’s called being penny wise and pound foolish. Capital has squeezed every bit of reserve out of the pipeline and productivity out of labor and is now trying to persuade people that they should just suck it up because people are lining up in India to do their jobs.

We the People formed this society. It’s ours to decide what its purpose is and how it should be managed.

202

WRT grievances: It is my job as union local president to file any that are necessary. I can’t speak for every union everywhere, but the unions of which I have been a part have filed grievances for two, and only two, reasons.

  1. Management violated the contract.
  2. Mangement violated the law.
    That’s it. Even if we’d been goofy enough to try to file on some other basis, these are the only things that can be grieved.
    This thread is heavy on anti-union rhetoric that seems largely based on Ayn Rand’s nightmares. I’m in a charitable frame of mind, so I’ll chalk it up to you simply being ignorant of the realities of how unions function rather than you being lying greedheads who masturbate yourself to sleep every night with fantasies of when you are rich and powerful.
203

There it is. This is the snapshot of reality that illustrates why collective bargaining is necessary in a market economy. It’s almost tautological to say that markets serve the interests of both suppliers and consumers. The larger the supplier, and the more financially powerful the consumer group (or the more lucrative the product), the better those interests are served. When the suppliers of goods are large and organized, the market won’t equally serve the consumers of those goods unless there are installed safeguards against monopolies and intercompany collusion.

By the same token, when the consumers of labor are large, financially powerful and organized, safeguards are needed in order to protect the interests of the suppliers of that labor. This is currently achieved through minimum wage laws, health & safety regulation and by allowing groups of individual suppliers of specific types of labor and services to pool their influence by organizing. Labor unions are then empowered to negotiate the market value of that labor from a somewhat equal standing.

That rough parity between labor and ownership is something “we” as a society decided to achieve last century, and it’s sad that so many on the supply side of the labor market understand power structures so poorly. It’s equally sad that so many large consumers of labor understand long term market stability so poorly. Over a century ago, ‘big business’ interests realized that if they refused to negotiate with Gompers, they’d end up having to deal with Debs.* Seems to me that lesson is being rebooted to some degree in Wisconsin.

*(Figuratively speaking.)

204

A) Please don’t confuse “uninterested in the rat race” with “low income”. I’m already making quite more by myself than the average household in this country.
B) Given she’s three months old, unless you’ve recently invented a robot that can grab her toes and tell funny stories, there’s nothing money can buy that would interest her.
C) You’re a dick. :rolleyes:

205

A few years back when I worked for a newspaper there was a story of the police union filing a grievance over the city insisting that the officers (including the union president) shave their beards.
According to the contract the city was entitled to set facial hair grooming standards and the ban on beards was long-standing, but had been sporadically enforced.
Every level the union raised this grievance to flatly rejected it. And the fact of the matter was it was only grieved cause the union president looked ugly as sin without his beard and figured he had nothing to lose by grieving it.
So while I have no doubt your union is always on the side of the angels, it is most definitely not universal. The reality is the unions who do things like that do a substantial amount of harm to the reputations of all unions.

206

Hell, there’s a simpler market-oriented way to phrase it, and all you have to do is recall Henry Ford: the more money your employees have, the more products they can afford to buy, increasing everyone’s market and profits. While CEOs and such keeping a larger share of the profits than they can reasonably use is nice and all, in the long run too much of that strangles the market for goods and kills the economy just as sure as anything else.

Again I look at my dad–he has never paid himself, good years or bad, more than around 2.5x the salary he pays his entry-level cashiers. If profits improve, everyone gets a raise. As a result, not only does he get the best employees available, but they shop at his store AND buy the higher-margin items as luxuries, meaning everyone wins. He COULD double his own salary by holding everyone to minimum wage, but any fool can see the other store in town does that–and their employees don’t shop there because they resent it, and they don’t make as much money in the long run.

Someone wake me when the movers and shakers of the economy learn to plan on longer terms than “the next two quarters”.

207

There is also what is called “past practice.” Essentially, management cannot decide to exercise thier rights only when it is convenient for them or when they want to bust one off in somebody. If the facial hair clause in the contract had been consistently enforced, the ugly guy wouldn’t have had a leg to stand on. By your own admission, it was enforced “sporadically.” Was there some reason he should accept having to shave his beard when there were evidently other personnel sporting whiskers?

208

I hope I haven’t given you the impression that I think otherwise. I explicitly posted earlier in this thread that unions are a key part of any “free” market.

“We” did? Can you cite that?

Now, here’s the sort of thing that turns people against certain types of unions (ie, public employee unions). From today’s San Jose Merc:

Really? They are going to “look into” this idea? Mind boggling.

209

Where I’m a steward, we always tell people, we can’t stop the company from disiplining you if you are truly wrong. What we CAN do is stop them from selectively enforcing rules and making the managers, you know, do their job and document things and protect your rights. But on more than one occasion, when the management has done their jobs and documented the offenses, the person isn’t able to be saved, and we don’t really WANT to save someone who is a chronic problem. We’re able to demand our compensation be what it is because we provide superiour work, and with slackers, we lose that high ground.

The facial hair discussion sounds like a “divide and conquer” technique. The management now gets to come around and say “look, the union is making you shave, not us”. And in a way, they’re right, because while they haven’t enforced the contract, the union hasn’t followed it either.

210

I’d agree with you if he was the only one that was being told to shave. All officers were being told to shave, so it was not a case of targeting that particular officer.
Don’t believe I made that clear in my original comment.

211

Exactly right. The greedhead trope of unions “protecting the incompetent” irritates for exactly that reason.

212

I saw that earlier post and agreed with it. As I said, I think you gave a good snapshot of reality.

It’s a conclusion based on the history of labor unions in 19th and 20th century US, so I can’t cite it directly. You are free, as always, to disagree with the conclusion, but I offer as evidence the rise of the AFL, the wide acceptance of Woodrow Wilson’s WWI labor policies, the New Deal policies of FDR, the National Labor Relations Act and finally, the adjustment of the NLRA by the Taft-Hartley Act. -The latter act reduced and restricted the power of unions in order to -arguably- better balance the relative power of labor and ownership.

Are you sure that many people are resistant to the idea of “last hired first fired”? I think protection of seniority exists in union contracts because it’s a pretty popular idea.

213

OK.

By “parity”, you are talking about negotiating power, not actual wages. I misread your original post, thinking you were talking about wages. That makes a little more sense.

Oh, I’m sure unions love it. But it’s a stupid way to run a business, and as the article mentions, the citizens of the city, who pay those folks’ salaries, are largely against the idea.

214

Then management in many companies must be stupid, since they sign off on it in so many contracts.

215

Yes, that’s what I meant. No worries.
Regarding public opinion on using layoffs to trim ‘dead weight’, I think you’ll get different answers depending on how the questions are posed. For instance, the same people who think job performance should be used as a criteria for layoffs might also respond “yes” to the question “Do you think time spent doing your job increases your value to your employer?” and “no” to the question “Should your employer reduce costs in a recession by firing longer term employees?”

And I’ve also observed that if you question people about those leeches sucking at the public teat, they’re liable to answer differently than if you ask about themselves and their salt-of-the-earth coworkers.

None of this is to reject the idea of a performance based factor in layoff decisions. I just wanted to point out that seniority isn’t a popularly reviled criteria on its own…

216

Simply out of curiosity. Were you working for Zeller’s at the time?

217

Its like Godwin, but not connected to Nazis. I’m tempted to call it the “kumbaya” law: whenever we get into a discussion like this, some righty, sooner or later, is going to posture as a stern, hard-headed realist, and say something patently stupid, patronizing, and insulting.

“Well, I suppose you want us to pay everybody $15/hr to play hacky-sack?”

“Well, of course, we all want a free pony, but the real world doesn’t work like that.”

Thankfully, tighty rightys don’t start doing that until they start to lose the argument. Unfortunately, that’s usually about page one. I have met a number of utter cynics in my life. I have yet to meet one who didn’t think of himself as a hard-headed realist.

(I remember Kurt Vonneguts story (No not Harrison Bergeron, the other one…) about ethical suicide parlors next to Howard Johnson’s. A client is selecting his exit strategy from those offered, and asks the attendant, plaintively, “What are people for, anyway?”.)

The labor movement is simply another of the struggles between property rights and human rights, as there are some among us who think property rights are the essence, the other rights are merely grace notes set to embellish the true gem, property. We were not founded by revolutionaries, the Founding Fuckups used such as Tom Paine to their ends, and discarded his revolutionary idealism at their first opportunity. They were not struggling to make men free, they were landowners and businessmen, anxious only to replace the class above themselves with themselves.

Because they did not trust each other, they built all manner of safeguards into their governance, and almost inadvertently, accidentally, created the foundation for the greatest experiment in human liberty yet born.

But seriously…voting rights for men without property? I suppose you’ll be wanting a pony next, and we’ll all sit around singing “Kumbaya”.

218

If someone is dead weight, they shouldn’t have been there anyway. Managers who do their jobs will document that the person isn’t pulling their weight, and the person should be gone anyway. Dead weight employees will destroy morale, and make a managers department look poor, reflecting badly on him or her. If a manager doesn’t want to work at a union facility, they should chose to go elsewhere, where they aren’t expected to uphold the contract that they company willingly signed. A contract that certainly allows for employees to be disiplined, up to and including termination, should they not do their job.

219

QFT. This bears repetition as it is a point that anti-union people consistently ignore. Management willingly signs these contracts. They found it acceptable when they signed it and I see no reason why they should not be held to the terms to which they agreed. They agree to the “overpaid” payscales. They agree to seniority. They agree to everything in the contract or they wouldn’t sign it. If management is falling down on the job and negotiating unfavorable contracts, then the Board of Directors and stockholders should be looking at replacing management.

220

I only offered that as an example of why some people don’t have sympathy for those unions. The idea that job performance has ZERO weight in decisions concerning layoffs is crazy, from an economic standpoint. This isn’t about eliminating seniority as one factor, just making it not the only factor.