Who Pickets the Picket Pitters?
In other words, you are a complete dumbass and unafraid to admit it. Thanks for coming out of the closet so you may be easily ignored.
[full disclosure] I am a proud Union-man, a shop steward and the Vice-President of my local.
I’m not holding out much hope that this will change your opinion - nor is anything you say likely to change mine but here goes 
[/full disclosure]
The company has all of the power in almost every area. Unless they violate the contract directly all that a union can really do is made a request - with varying degrees of force depending on both how important the issue is and how strong the local is. Even if they do violate the contract directly they can, and do, force grievances to arbitration time and time again in order to bankrupt the local and tie up the Officers etc.
The one area where the Workers can assert themselves is the labour itself. No matter how brilliant the management is they can do nothing with no one to do the work. Strikes hit profit and that gives Labour the one arena in which they can fight on equal terms.
scabs unbalance the equation by removing Labour’s one real lever.
I get that it is hard to immediately sympathize during tough times when you hear that people are not willing to accept a 10% (purely arbitrary number) wage cut in order to keep their jobs when so many people have lost theirs but when you go from $20,000 take home to $18000 it hurts a lot.
It likely took two contracts to get it from $18000 to $20000 in the first place and the company is NOT going to immediately bump wages back to pre-recession levels just because the tough times are over so it will likely take another two contracts to get it back. That’s anywhere from a minimum four years to quite possibly 10 years lost.
Inflation always outruns wages and to go back to, say, 2004’s wage would hurt bad if it stayed there for a year or two; but to have little hope of 2009’s paycheque until 2013 would be cripling at best.
I know scabs have families to take care of and that I get but Labour have families too and scabs prolong strikes and help to insure that when the strike is over - and their temporary job vanishes - my family will have suffered both immediately and long term. Not just mine but my 200 or so Brother’s and Sister’s familes as well.
Sorry for being long-winded.
If your family suffers because you go on strike, it’s your fault, not the scab’s. Quit trying to pass the blame.
Well, y’know, it really bites to have to face up to the reality: that the pay and conditions that aren’t good enough for you are plenty good enough for hundreds of other Joes. It’s the working man’s right to withdraw his labour, after all, and the natural and logical extension of this is to do all you can to make sure that no-one steps in with his labour, otherwise where would you be?
And so it goes (and we used to see this in the UK pre-Thatcher): it goes from “I’m not digging any more coal” to “And I’ll use whatever means necessary to stop anyone else from digging coal in my place either” to “And the customer mustn’t buy coal from anywhere else either” to “And no-one must use anything else in place of coal” - otherwise the power of Labour to withdraw its labour is compromised, and that’s the one great evil above all. Or something.
That’s a problem that’s easily solved by firing you when you go on strike, Then the job won’t vanish.
Stop crying, dear, and Daddy will try to explain.
See, Daddy makes $50,000 a year doing a job that any reasonably bright chimpanzee can do. But the mean old company owners want to get rid of the rule that says only a member of the electrician’s union can change a light bulb. And on top of that, they want a $15 co-pay every time we go to see the doctor!
So that’s why Daddy can’t go back to work. And if we play our cards right, we can force the company to hand over everything we want, for now, and then relocate to Bangladesh in a few years.
Then Daddy won’t have to work at all.
Regards,
Shodan
As I’m sure you know, health care in Canada is a whole different matter, because here it is socialized in any event. If these folks were facing losing actual meaningful health care benefits for those sick or injured, I’d be orders of magnitude more sympathetic for the strikers.
Here, it’s the opposite - you only get these benefits (of banked sick days) if you are not sick or injured. The city plan is to replace this perk with actual extra benefits for those who are sick or injured, and this is exactly what the union is fighting against.
Riiiiight… because I’m sure you don’t come down on the side of management every time. 
I’ll wear that as a badge of honor when it comes from you, tool.
I don’t believe you’re a dumbass, but I do think your point of view is outdated at best.
At least here in the US, labor unions were created to protect workers from brutal, often dangerous conditions and ridiculously long hours for meager pay. And this was a good thing.
But the balance of power has shifted too far in the other direction, and today it is more like Shodan describes above. Sympathy is really thin these days for anyone who would walk out of a job that others would literally line up around the block for a chance at. And to then label those people “scabs” smacks of the worst kind of childish petulance.
What our libertardian ‘friend’ fails to comprehend is that not every determination is made through a rational process. If I walk into a bar and see my father in a brawl with someone, my first instinct is to jump in on his side. I’m not sitting there wondering which party is right and which is wrong - that’s my Dad there.
Now, if I later find out that Dad had been touching up the guy’s girl friend and spitting in his beer, I might consider that I made the wrong decision, that it was Dad’s own fault he got in the fight, and really, the other guy was more in the right. But it doesn’t alter the immediate gut feeling you have to back up your family, or indeed your friends.
That’s the feeling I get when I see a picket line, and why my immediate thought is to support the strike. Strikes and unions aren’t always right; the dockers striking to support Enoch Powell were wrong. But RandRover is definitely an idiot.
With all due respect, bollocks. Workers still work in brutal, dangerous conditions, for ridiculously long hours, for meager pay. The balance of power shifted to an extent towards labor for a while, but has swung totally back. Haven’t seen the numbers recently, but the percentage of business revenues paid to labor has not significantly shifted over time. Labor has been fighting to maintain its share.
Also in full disclosure, I was a long-time union member and shop steward before taking a management role, so I have the unique perspective of both sides. I will say that I negotiated a tasty contract with the employer who was severely undercompensating laborers, but I could have done that with or without the worthless Teamsters. I tried in another place to unionize and by the time it came down to signing, I was fired and the union could do nothing. I believe in unionization, but I also believe the unions are just as corrupt as some employers
That’s the way it should be. If not for the company, the union would have no purpose. Both sides agree to a contract and both sides follow the law and the contract. That’s it. All the other things speak to the strength of your union as opposed to the struggle between labor and management. Interest arbitration, depending on the area, goes 60/40 to employees, so going to arbitration is not a bad thing, most often.
Yep, and when the widget maker can’t sell widgets, he tanks, gets a gov’t bailout to pay his creditors, fills his coffers back up and walks away while the workers starve. Or he declares bankrputcy and does the same thing. Either way, strikes are bad business.
**It’s not hard to sympathize at all, I get it’s hard to do, but what’s better, hurting at 18,000 or starving at 0? **
All the while people continue to work, feed their families, tend to their sick children and put gas in their cars. Don’t get me wrong here, there are times management is complete shit, but let’s be real here, the unions are all about keeping their people (meaning the ones who work for them) paid and paid well. The local that I was a part of paid the ‘business agent’ that was supposed to help negotiate our contract $78,000 a year, on top of his full-time local gov’t salary of roughly $70,000. He never showed up, not once. This was typical. It’s not typical of all unions, but the people in the middle are the ones who are perpetually screwed.
Again, better than having no wages at all.
While all this is true to a degree, the reason big labor is losing ground is because they’re just as bad as the people they claim to be against. People are getting smarter, more educated, more up to speed on their jobs and the job market. Unions have been shining workers on about what’s possible, promising the moon if only they’ll sign this contract that pays the union to stay in between them and their ‘evil’ employers.
In a strange way unions are like the church, the grubby middleman that needs his cut to ‘ensure’ a lifetime (or eternity) of true happiness, although we all know better, still people buy in to the ‘just in case’ scenario and have zero confidence in their own knowledge, skills and abilities, which opens the door to the middleman, who, once is there, is VERY hard to get rid of.
Following on this…I was once part of a contract dispute between labor and the company. In my case (and many others) I actually preferred the company contract offer (focused on investment, better pay scale classifications, and health plans) and felt it was far superior to the union offer (focused on minimum hourly quotas, headcount retention, and traditional pensions). There was no way in hell that I was going to walk out on strike to support an inferior offer based purely on guilt and intimidation from the those that wanted the union contract.
It is a tough choice for both sides, but still a choice.
Wouldn’t “Four legs good, two legs bad” have got the point across more economically?
With all due respect, so what? That doesn’t change the fact that there are other people willing to work in brutal, dangerous conditions, for ridiculously long hours, for meager pay.
Third world sweatshops are miserable horrible places to work, but people will do just about anything to get hired because it beats the alternative. Supply and demand, regardless of the justice or fairness of holding a decent job.
With absolutely no respect at all, this is horseshit. Labor conditions now are nothing like they were back in the heyday of labor organization, and conditions were improved largely because of government pressure anyway. Also, go ask GM how their labor costs have changed over time and how they’ve fared.
Can I ask a semi-related-to-the-OP question? There’s a House, M.D. episode where there are people picketing and they tell a delivery-man that they have a legal right to delay him for a specific period of time. Huh? Is that true? (I’m assuming that would be in New Jersey.)
And can anyone do that or do you have to be having an “official” protest? Like, I know I’m not allowed to bar anyone’s way outside an abortion clinic. Can I delay people going into a zoo or a museum?