So, it is illegal for those NY transit workers to strike. I’m curious, then, about the source of leverage in negotiations:
“If we don’t get a contract we like, we’ll make funny faces!”
What’s the SD? Thanks!
I have been pondering this question for most of the last week. If I were the authority in power, I would just tell them to screw and then start making things painful for everybody on the other side the best I could. I think the idea is that the two groups could always reach compromises if they just talked it out. That idea is foreign to me. Why would you compromise with someone when you hold all the power? Fire and then cause pain would be my initial reaction. Maybe other people aren’t like that.
Collective bargaining is not just about the ability to strike, its about having representation that understands the businesses and the details of labor law, benefit plans, etc. Don’t think of it as a strike tool, think of it as more like an ongoing class action suit by the union for the workers against the company. Union hires lawyers and consultants to try and find the magic point that the company and the workers will both accept.
That is good information, but what tools do the lawyers have to make managment accept any term or any set of terms? Court orders?
Why would a company do that though? If I were in charge, I would just say no to everything and then fire people that disobeyed. I realize that it may be drawn out and you just can’t always do exactly what you want but I would think an immovable stance would be the best one in the long run. This isn’t purely hypothetical, I have family situation that requires crushing unions. So far, it works. You just have to be consistent with the search and destroy.
Are these problems caused by leaders that tend to waiver rather than taking a hard stance? That may be true on both sides.
Part of the problem being IIRC part of the contract is that an employer may not fire a member of the union. So in a nutshell the union has to boot them or the employee has to have committed an infraction that the union agrees is a legit reason to terminate an employee. Striking is not one of those. Firing the employee would be a breach of contract betweent the employee and employer opening the employer open to lawsuits they would probably lose. do that en masse, and kiss your company goodbye.
IANA union expert, but I asked a lot of these same types of questions to my old boss who was some kind of union rep in a previous job. My mom works for the IRS who also have one of those “not allowed to strike” union.
Right. The strike is the “nuclear option” of labor relations, to be used when collective bargaining fails, and it is common that in the case of some “essential” public services it be legally mandated that you will NOT bail out from collective bargaining because the service MUST continue to be provided.
In theory, the alternative in “no strike” situations is mandatory binding arbitration. However, a lot of public employee contracts leave out either the “mandatory” or “binding” part.
Initally they don’t have to. If my employees suddenly decided to join a union and I am approached by their rep, I can tell him to go find a short pier, fire everyone, and start hiring. Of course the union will be happy to keep me in court defending myself from unjustified termination suits for the next few years since they have nothing better to do. Once you agree to a contract through the union, you now have just that, a binding legal contract. Breach it and face the wrath of the civil courts.
Also IIRC these types of no strike unions only really exist in government agencies. They serve more to as i mentioned before serve as legal support to the workers and help mediate on terminations and such. So its a little different style of game.
Right. Socialism based on the lowest common denominator is right in our backyard. They are usually the uneducated and the hostage takers that they sometimes hold people and corporations to.
I don’t think it is a very moral idea for one semi-skilled worker to bring down a family company that has been built up over 40 years. I think you can understand my opposition to unions. Contingency plans are already made based on union threats to remove the thread fully and take things internationally. In any case, the plans call for every blue collar worker being scrutinized and most being fired based on existing records. Everyone does something wrong and this is the time to use it.
It isn’t me that has to deal with this, it is my FIL. Any infiltrations have to be absolutely crushed. There are a lot of legal ways of doing that and it has happened legally many times.
To the OP. I don’t understand why they just don’t reject everything. They can if they want. Demands with no binding threats are ridiculous. I lose respect for any wimp that doesn’t crush, fire, destroy, and demand apologies.
To make more my position more clear:
I have no idea why unions that don’t have the right to strike get anything. Why would management give them anything? They have no power whatsoever. I would just start punishing groups one by one until they caved.
Why wouldn’t everyone play the winning hands and crush the losing ones until they lose? It is just a game.
In the MTA situation the union leaders finally faced up to the prospect that they would be spending Christmas in jail. On top of that they were facing heavy fines that would bankrupt the union.
For all of the rhetoric, the union guys figured out that they had NO public support. Everybody in NYC was pissed off at them and they started to come to the realization that the courts were serious.
At that junction its wise to ask for arbitration and save some face by going back to work.
The union was the Grinch that killed the Christmas spirit in NYC. I’ve never seen a situation where everybody was uniformly spewing hatred towards a union and its members. The public’s attitude towards the union was really nasty. It was time to cut a deal.
They get things because you are wrong in that they don’t have power (usually.) There are legal devices that give them the sort of power normal unions do not have.
Typically in a lot of professions where legally striking is prohibited there are statutory devices in play that give unions in those situations more innate power than they have in regular situations.
For example, the police union in most municipalities has a lot more power than virtually any private union. You have to go through the union to fire a police officer.
The rules of the game are often specifically changed just to avoid what you’re talking about doing. In many public-service unions, there is a legal requirement that you cannot fire someone without cause, and the union will vigorously oppose any attempts to get around that legally (and if they can prove the firing was without cause, it’s nulled out, you have to accept them back at work.) There’s also the concept of mandatory binding arbitration as already mentioned. The union doesn’t have the ability to strike, but it has the ability to demand i’s grievances be brought to an impartial abritrator, the employer has no legal right to refuse, and must accept whatever decision the arbitrator comes to.
If the employer says “screw em” they can be fined. Or they can be sued in civil court and will almost always lose, and lose big.
Now, of course, certain organizations pretty much are immune to striking and any other union demands. Congress and the White House for example are pretty much immune from any labor laws out there from what I understand. Which is funny because labor laws are passed and signed by Congress and the White House.
Everyone – especially Shagnasty – please pay attention, because you’re all looking for the cookie in the wrong jar. It is not at the negotiating table; it is at the ballot box.
NYC has long been a union town, and any official that needs to get elected will cross a union at their peril. Candidates pander for union endorsements, especially those of municipal workers who can swell the campaign coffers, man those phone banks and turn out the votes on election day. The New York State legislature, in particular, returns the favor by passing laws that give sweet deals to city unions like the NYC cops. The city, of course, gets stuck with the tab, but what does an upstate assemblyman from, say, Tioga County care?
Now, truth be told, the municipal unions don’t have the power they once did, but they are certainly no paper tigers here in Gotham.
Err…No. Not knowing anything about thesituation, I’ve no reason to assume the moral highground is on your side. Actually, given your “If you’ve the power to do so, just crush them” stance, I tend to assume you aren’t very interested in morals, hence that you’re more likely to be the bad guy.
Besides, I’m not sure what being “semi-skilled” has to do with anything…
A game? Yeah, sure… A game the livehood of many people depends on…
And you mentionned morals in your first post?
I think this one can be aired out a bit better in Great Debates, so off we go.
samclem GQ moderator.
If it wasn’t smack in the holiday season, I’d’ve hoped for a Reaganish mass-firing. I’m still kinda rooting for NYC to take that route at a time of its choosing. It’ll be fun to watch from a distance.
This isn’t about morals, its about business. Morally is it somehow right to the business owner (they are people too) pay a minimally skillled worker $30/hr just because the union says so. Personally I thought it was hilarious when a bunch of the car assembly lines started to install robtics. If not for the inflated wage demands of the union, it would have been less cost effective to install those robotic assembly systems.
Unions can serve a purpose, the way many trade unions handle hiring pooling and such I think is great in many ways, but turning jobs bolting on body panels into $70,000 a year jobs is begging to have a plant moved out of country.
As a business owner, I aspire to never have union reps knocking on my door, but at the same time, nobody IMHO has the right to tell me how I am going to spend my money, especially if the vast majority of my budget is already labor, and all of the risk is mine to bear. Union reps can easily create some lovely fantasies about how good everything is going to be and how they are going to get what the employees deserve. Problem is, they often do little more than milk a business dry and watch it collapse.