This is exactly what happened to a neighbor of mine who had put in decades of service to a company, only to get forced out with cut hours, weird hours, abusive treatment on the job, etc. to the point that he had to retire earlier than he had wanted.
I also have a friend who is trying to find a job other than the paralegal one she has now, working for attorneys who don’t give a shit about any of their paralegals, throwing work at them at the last minute and expecting them to work hour after hour without so much as a snack or a bathroom break, sometimes till 1am. Sure, they could quit–but that’s not such a good idea unless there’s already another job lined up. There is an administrator of sorts that the paralegals have gone to with their concerns, but nothing has changed. The lawyers don’t care. If someone leaves, they’ll find someone else to chew up and spit out after a while.
Don’t say it, Bo! It’s a trap! He’s looking to outsmart you!
LOL
as if
Just lookin’ out for you, son. He’s kind of a sharpy, might try to pull a slow one on you.
There is no such thing as “justice”. It has no principles to undermine. It does not now and has not ever existed. Undermine it? Fuck that, burn it down, if it can’t do any better than this!
You don’t do that very good. Its like you’ve memorized the lyrics but can’t sing the tune.
My dad doesn’t have demand problems, he’s in the grocery business in a poor town, so “luxury” consumption pretty much didn’t change. He hasn’t had to cut anyone’s salaries.
Truth be told his only problem is demographic–he can’t find anyone to hire who’s competent enough to rate the job, because those that are bail on the town as soon as humanly possible–can’t expect much less with a 215-person village in the Alleghenys.
Me, I stay working for my company because when we had problems last year, the word came down from management: people below 100k/yr took a ten percent pay cut, and people above 100k/yr (the management tier) took a variable cut down to 90k–I know because I am one of the administrative team that meant the CEO and two owners took a 50% pay cut. Wouldn’t you know, no one quit, no one was laid off except for our two part-time employees who weren’t particularly put out about it, and it happens that in December we’d turned profits back up (largely, and perversely given that half the discussion started because of discussing government waste, on the strength of a DHS/DoD contract) to pay back all the cut income so that our cumulative yearly income was the same.
There are some larger companies and state governments who wouldn’t have a shred of issue from their unions if their management had THAT combo of balls and brains.
And sympathy? Please, I was just bragging about my daughter. You’re still a dick. 
In point of fact, the places I see with the most union problems are places where the upper management is NOT willing to share in the losses, but wants to cut only from the lower tiers. See also the school board my brother’s fighting, who want to cut teacher pay by around 5%, raise health care contributions by 40%, and implicitly cut it by $5000 more (that’s the “expected personal contribution to classroom supplies” that they’re seriously kicking around). In a school district that showed a surplus from property taxes (to the tune of $5mil+ in the last five years, so says the state arbitrator) throughout the entire decade including the last three years, that has gone to the state championships of everything from quiz bowl to basketball. Because a few of them want to cut property taxes to personally benefit, or to hold on to being a big fish in a tiny rural pond, or to have the thrill of dicking around some hard-working teachers who aren’t even liberal–we’re talking rural Pennsylvania here.
I hear about situations like that, where attacks on unions are based SOLELY on desire for power/cash, far more often than I hear about places where the unions are oh so demanding and unflexible. Hell, the unions in Wisconsin already agreed to every cut except the gutting of their best tool–if it was about fiscal realities and not about political power, that’d be goddamn well enough.
It sucks to have your own ignorance shoved in your face, doesn’t it?
Do they kick puppies and rape nuns too? Damn those unions!
Or you could just make yourself an invaluable employee. No union needed.
I do. Now that the laws are on the books, fines and lawsuits can do the jobs you think unions need to do.
It’s not.
At the same time, as said upthread–we keep a military around sufficient to deal with another superpower even when there’s no particular threat of war with another superpower. Unions, having been necessary previously, ought to be allowed to remain around so that the idea of same doesn’t disappear and the skills involved atrophy.
Not all jobs allow for that kind of individual ability, though. You can increase your value, sure, but there comes a point where you hit the ceiling of what it’s value to you is. So long as a company’s value threshold is lower than a person’s required value threshold, you’re incapable of increasing your worth.
So you’re claiming most companies around here who pay shit wages are on the edge of bankruptcy?
Because you’re last line is total strawman otherwise. If a company can afford to pay their employees a living wage, but instead opts to make their employees suffer than the people running that company are greedy jackasses. The kind history will piss on the graves of.
Let’s define a living wage as food shelter, medical care access, transportation costs, and necessary incidentals.
Here’s the deal, if you’re making your employees rely on social safety nets, then that job is being subsidized by the tax payer. You are externalizing your costs on the taxpayer.
If their aren’t social safety nets and your job leaves your employees doing without vitals then you’re really a jackass exploiting vulnerable people in a bad situation.
Is that so? All that time I spent outside in line waiting to get into the facility? Fiction? Did I dream it? The airports shut down because baggage handlers are on strike, fiction? Walking to work because of a transit strike, fiction? Walking past
You also avoided my question: If management is entering the agreement freely, what’s stopping the individual employee? As you said, no one is forced to work. If someone wants to work for less than minimum wage, why do we stop them? If they choose to work for less than a living wage, they do so freely. No one is forced to work in unsafe conditions, or for unpaid overtime.
Under your premise, I don’t see why unions would be needed.
I’d also like to point out how easily you went through my list and pointed out what was “illegal” as if that means it doesn’t happen. Yet earlier it was declared without unions corporations would disregard wage laws and safety laws.
In summary: management is able to enter into contracts freely, without coercion, but employees aren’t. Unions will obey the law, but corporations won’t.
Pick a theme and go with it or I’m going to have to get **Bricker **in here to nit-pick you to death. Any more waffling and I’ll need you to provide butter and syrup.
Now, if **Snowboarder Bo ** had any integrity, he’d point out to you that we have laws against child labour, etc, and that violating them would be illegal.
Then he’d tell you that you “got nothin’. You have bogeymen: fictions meant to cause fear; nothing more.”
Not sure why he didn’t, must be busy.
The trouble with the “unions sabotaging” the company myth is that it is most frequently simply an apocryphal story. For example, way back in post #39 in this thread, where it was shown that a story of a “local paper mill (that) ceased operations as a result of an unyielding union” … Actually turned out to be a mill that closed due to an “unprecedented decline” in newsprint consumption in North America. "
Yet the story is out there that the union shut the operation down.
Unions are the boogeyman du jour, and there is a lot of untrue crap thrown around about them.
It’s my understanding that public safety workers (police, fire, etc) are not permitted to strike. Ditto hospital workers. Basically anyone whose grievances cause more than an inconvenience.
Don’t have anything to say about my many examples of companies and governments foisting all the blame on the unions while not dropping the salaries and bennies of the top management by any appreciable amount? Probably because you’re just as cognizant as the rest of us that such behavior is unconscionable and wish it’d go away if you ignore it.
The problem with this idea, with respect to teachers, is that there is no contact between the employees and the people who set their salaries – between the teachers and the politicians. So one could be the best teacher in the world and the politicians would never know that she was invaluable. If the budget for teachers is cut, her salary would be cut along with all other teachers.