So there’s a job site I drive past every morning where there are union strikers out with placards and the giant rubber rats on display, indicating that there are non union workers building this strip mall.
What do they want from the general public who they’re putting the display on for? For us not to shop there when the building is complete? That doesn’t make much sense, I don’t know who built almost any of the bulidings that I frequent. For me not to pull over and pick up a tool belt and start doing some drywall work? No fear of that happening. I recognize what they’re doing, but I guess I don’t really understand why or what I’m supposed to do about it.
What’s the point of the big public display? What do they expect to gain from it?
“Rats” are strike-breakers, i.e. scabs, i.e., not just any, run-of-the-mill non-union worker, but one that’s displacing a union worker’s job while that union worker is on strike. Hence the “rat patrols” are meant to intimidate the rats principally, generate bad P.R. for the construction company or customer secondarily, and garner public support if they can.
For a normal strike wherein there are no rats and the company is sitting idle, you shouldn’t see the rat patrol about.
I come into contact with quite a few contractors in my biz and something has become very apparent to me that is not so obvious from the outside world. The level of networking and friendly working relationships betweeen building trades is HUGE. Lots of contractors have friends in other aspects of the biz that could cripple them.
Example, one of my customers is a structural steel estimator one of the few in town. He works with 5-6 different clients. If one of them was doing something to upset him or hurt a good friend of his who also happens to be a steel builder, plan on estimates taking longer, costing more, coming in higher than anyone elses bids, etc.
Sigh. As the child of staunch union parents I’m old enough to remember when unions meant something in this country and therefore old enough to be resentful of you feckless youth for whom unions aren’t even a memory out of the history books. Get off my mental lawn!
Union history is utterly fascinating and is in many ways the story of today’s middle class society. Since virtually all of America is middle class society that’s a big something.
I won’t go into it all. But to answer the OP:
The point of picket lines are to put up a line in the sand. Do not cross. They have to be public, otherwise they have no meaning.
Unions once had both the support of the majority of the working population, which in the heady days of industrialization was most everyone. People would often not do business with a company that was being picketed. You would not cross the line.
Even more important than that, other unions were supposed to show solidarity to their union brethren. No member of any union was supposed to cross a picket line. That’s how unions demonstrated strength. If one union went on strike, so did all the others and so the company had to shut down for lack of workers or else hire scabs and all that meant.
This was a serious threat. At times there were thousands of strikes per year in the U.S. and the loss of production was severe. So severe that companies capitulated and give the unions guaranteed work contracts and health benefits and pensions and all the other things that are now destroying the auto industry. Nobody in 1950 could foresee a day in which retirees would outnumber workers three to one and the whole structure would collapse.
But everything about what a job should be that we take for granted these days came about because of union activism (mostly from the Depression period onward when the government stopped being actively hostile to unions and allowed them to compete fairly).
That’s why picket lines exist. They may not mean anything any more, but they once symbolized the greatest shift of power from the corporate bosses to the workers that the world had ever seen.
They have no meaning today anyway. Making them public only identifies those willing to put the desires of the union over the needs of their families (in most cases).
Yeah, but most bargaining unit contracts prevent so-called sympathy strikes today, as well they should. It’s bad business not to. If you want to support your union brothers and sisters, don’t do your personal business with whatever company, other than that, you’re just hurting yourselves for something you may not even believe in.
The unions got greedy and took everything the companies had and then some. Yes, the companies DID capitulate, but they had to, a small margin is better than no margin at all. The auto industry is the biggest working example of that, the biggest defunct example of that is Steel. The unions ruined the American Steel industry by creating the environment of entitlement, they paved the way for competition who made equal or superior products for almost 1/3rd the cost.
Now that’s true. Unions gave us the 8 hour work day, the 40 hour work week, OSHA, the EEOC and most of the regulation American workers and companies are under today (either directly or indirectly). Problem is, now many workers are hostile to the unions. They’ve proven themselves inefficient and unresponsive in many cases, and in some cases (specifically the auto industry) are at least in bed with, and at most, worse than the management they’re fighting against.
The reasoning Claricaun behind the big rat and the “informational” picket the local is holding, is to make the public aware of a non-union shop and/or job and to shame those that cross the picket line into not doing so. They do so failing, as union management often does, to take into consideration the families of the strikers. My dad was on strike for 9 months when I was growing up. We were BROKE during those nine months. I mean FLAT broke.
If you hung out on the picket line, you got about $20 a day. If you didn’t, you got nothing. Meanwhile, business agents of the union and other union-employed personnel (i.e. shop steward) still got exorbitant payments from the union while their membership went hungry, and it continues with the Teamsters still today (see link below).
Problem is, a lot of people don’t give (ironically) a rat’s ass about picketing and picketers. Many people are happy to have a job that pays well enough to keep them in bread, milk and diapers for their kids, and still have enough left over to go out to dinner every so often and vacation once a year. They don’t care about being union or not, they just want a job and a paycheck.
All that said though, I’m NOT anti-union. I’m anti-BIG union. The organizations today are so bloated and corrupt, that they’ve exchanged their usefulness to the membership for money and sweetheart deals for their own upper echelon.
As an example, there’s one person I know of that works for a company who, after 20 years pays him upwards of $70,000 a year, that’s usually before overtime. He also represents the union, who pays him an additional $80,000 a year for the work he does for them.
Funny, but Toyota, Honda, BMW, etc. all offer the same or better benefits, and they seem to be doing just fine in the auto industry.
I’d say the problems of the (American) auto industry have more to do with failing on that old standby of business “give the customer what he wants”. Detroit didn’t, Japanese & German automakers did.
But this is getting off-topic. Open a new thread if you want to discuss it more. (Probably in IMHO.)
If you are talking about their plants in the US, you’re missing a big piece of the picture. Those companies have been in the US for a fairly short time, and their financial obligations to retirees are much smaller than those of the old-line companies.
If you mean their plants in Japan and Germany, health care costs are much lower for employers there. Either way, it’s apples and orangutans.
Just for the record, the quote that’s always bandied about is $75 per hour straight time for UAW auto workers versus $50 per hour for non-UAW auto workers. This doesn’t count retirees and so on, just a single man. I can’t imagine that the non-UAW companies are able to purchase so much more for their money than the UAW companies, so I have to imagine that there are significant benefit differences. Probably the biggest is the quality of the health care coverage that’s provided. I’m pretty sure the UAW guys have something like $5 copays, aren’t stuck in HMO’s, and stuff like that (I’m salary at a UAW company, and I know my medical benefits aren’t as good as the hourly guys).