Well, guess it depends on what you mean by skill. Is peeling a potato a skill? Sure, by the loosest defintion. Same with welding, only to a lesser degree. Welding can be learned very quickly and mastered without having a college degree. Riviting, hammering, and all those other things too, can be classified as skills, but by your defintion, so is bagging, or cart collecting. Some people do it better, right?
And no, I am no civil engineer. I have worked in Unions all my life. (not long, I am only 28). Two years ago I decided I didn’t want to deal with the laziness and sense of entitlement everybody around me had (and the lack of job security even in unions is scary), so I went to college. When I get a job in a labratory (biochem major, probably doing to do physiology studies for drug manufacturers), I won’t have a union, and I will barely make as much as some of the people in unions, but it is a choice I gladly made. Money isn’t everything, but it gets old hearing everybody around you complain while they pull in 50k a year doing 5 hours of work a day.
The skills you learn in a factory are gained within a week of working there. The skills it takes to drive a fork-truck take a week or less. The skills it takes to drop fries into a fry-vat take even less. The skills it takes to sheet rock, fix plumbing, lay tiles, and hammer a nail are skills that are pretty easy, and take less than high school education level to learn in less time than a month.
I know, I have done all these jobs, and it is a joke to call them skills. Welding may be a little more of a skill than the things mentioned, but comparing them to people that have skills that have taken them decades to learn (computer programming for example), is laughable.
Epimetheus, I don’t think you’re giving due credit to the level of skills involved in most trades. Sure, there are lots of factory jobs that are mostly drone-work, but just because training for most trades is on-the-job doesn’t mean it can be learned in a month. If you think a plumber, framer, drywaller, etc., can master his trade in a month you’re out of your mind. To be really good at most trades requires years of experience. Just because a guy can learn to swing a hammer in a day, and can productively help on a construction site after a week doesn’t mean he won’t still be learning things about how to build houses after 3 years.
And, as for factory drone-work, if it pays so well while being so undemanding, why don’t people flock to do it? Because it’s mind-numbing, soul-destroying work? Well, yeah. Exactly. And so you have to pay people more to do it than the basic demands of the job would suggest.
This isn’t a terribly well informed statement. Operational locations for many, many industries have union works because there were large unions pre-existing for that particular industry. Such locations will often unionize whether or not the company in question has “a history of bad feelings.”
No to hijack but with all due respect re welding, plumbing, carpentry, tile work etc. these may be jobs you can do at a very basic level with less than year’s training, but to do these jobs correctly and professionally often takes years of real world training in handling different materials and dealing with real world challenges, and especially considering that some jobs involving these “basic” skills are far more complex than others. People that brag (or think) they’ve mastered these skills with little training are often the bane of of real trade professionals who have to come behind them and clean up the messes.
Perhaps I do underestimate some skills. I still don’t think they compare to the skills a Doctor or a computer programer has to master. Not everybody can master those, whilst a larger percent of people are certainly going to be able to master the skill of putting up drywall. (which I can’t see taking 10 years to master, unless I am some drywall genius, cuz it has always been simple for me)
Welding isn’t something I have ever been very good at, but I don’t do it a lot. It does take a good eye, a steady hand, and some knowledge of proper techniques. Still, to compare it to the level of skill needed to design a bridge, or to run the entire operation from start to completion is just absurd.
Of course I realize that many welders don’t make as much as civil engineers, so it is probably a poor example. However, Civil engineers, according to the occupational handbook, only make a median annual earning of 60,000. My friend in Kansas City, does welding on the line at Ford. He makes 32 dollars an hour and he has been there less time than a civil engineer will spend in school and take to get to that level of pay. (>10 years)
Oddly enough, I don’t even think my friend does much welding. They have machinery and robotics do most of it…
I certainly have not mastered it, but I am probably the bane of professionals anyway.
I should add that I don’t think that a carpenter or plumber is equivilant to a bagger at M-mart or anything like that. Obviously these people have some skills. I am just staggered by the idea that people equate them to the skills of a doctor or engineer.
So what you’re saying is that you weren’t paid enough for your factory job to provide you with enough incentive to stay at it? Then you weren’t being overpaid. Allowing your soul to be destroyed is worth some pretty substantial coin, for most people.
Well, drywalling isn’t one of your most demanding trades, for sure. Nonetheless, I see a lot of crap boarding jobs, so obviously doing it well isn’t overly common - though one suspects that this isn’t due to lack of skill, but to lack of care while trying to get done as quickly as possible. I don’t think anyone’s claiming that trades work is as demanding as medicine, but just that you seriously downplayed how demanding much of it is.
Nah, money wasn’t really the issue. The pay was ok, the job security wasn’t really there, and it definately wasn’t satisfying. Job satisfaction is much more important tha money, and I doubt that it would be any different even if I was making twice the amount. The soul sucking nature of the work isn’t something that can be countered by money. At least not for myself. Others apparently disagree, because they have been doing it for 25 years.
As quickly as possible is probably pretty common. Yeah, I was sort of deliberately downplaying the demand of the job, more for hyperbolic effect than offense. Sorry.
Well, but this is exactly the issue. Some jobs that are undemanding with regards to required skill are necessary, but have extremely low job satisfaction, and there’s no way around their being necessary or shitty to do. So how do you get people to do them? Well, either you hope unemployment levels will be high enough that people will be desperate enough to take them, or you have to pay more than the skill requirements would ordinarily suggest. Saying that the guy doing the soul-destroying unskilled work for $24/hr is overpaid when you yourself aren’t willing to do that job at any wage at all strikes me as being very odd. Course, there are some unskilled jobs that aren’t overly soul-destroying but well-paid nonetheless due to unions. I won’t dispute that. It’s just that if you’re going to complain about the assembly-line guy making more money than you are, when you aren’t willing to do his job for his pay, I don’t think you’re entitled to complain. (Hypothetical ‘you’, that is - I don’t mean to say that you yourself were adopting this attitude, but it’s not an uncommon one.)
I think when workers have a means to make improvements, they do so-- and this just doesn’t stop at the paycheck level. I think a good majority of the workforce has a dissatisfaction with (at least some) element of their jobs-- pay, hours, asshole supervisor, workload, benefits, whatever.
But if Joe Nonunion went to his boss tomorrow and said “I don’t think I should have to work 50 hours this week,” or “I’m being charged too much by this company to insure my family,” he’d get no where. But when Joe Nonunion and 50 or 100 or 20,000 of his co-workers get together, pool a few of their resources, hire negotiators, attorneys, lobbyists and others to represent them, that’s when the boss listens.
People that say “I have a degree, I work harder than any union worker, and yet I make less and work harder than any union worker” get very little sympathy out of me unless you’ve actually tried to do something about making things better in you work situation.
Instead of resenting those workers that have formed a union in order to make things better, more people should try working toward making things better for all workers. And if you’re a nurse, engineer, tech, programmer, journalist or any other white collar worker shy of management, this includes you.
Instead of saying people, and the jobs they perform, are worth less than what they make, we should be advocating for all workers to be treated better-- which is what the institution of a union does. If you have two bachelors degrees and are working as a professional and don’t feel you should be making less than $25,000 a year, you have the right to fight that.
I am employeed by members of a union, AFSCME, and I don’t solely work in order to maintain my job, I work to improve the lives of the workers that employ me. And I would say that that’s true for 99 percent of the union employees I’ve encountered. So anyone that thinks “unions” are constantly on the lookout for a fight in order to justify their existance is wrong. People that are employeed by unions do what they do because it is the job required of them by the members. The members don’t have time to sit in the state capitol every day, or know what laws have passed that will effect their work environment, or hold the boss accountable on every shady deal he transacts, or negotiate a pension for themselves, or alert the press when their employer is violating the law. That’s why the members hire people like me. And if the majority of members think they can do just as well working independent of a union, they have the right to do so.
People that accept the shittiness of their status quo have no right to dog others for trying to improve it. Fight to make things better. That’s why unionized workers seem “dissatisfied.” Because they are. As are most people. Their dissatisfaction is just more publicized because they’re acting collectively to make it known.
No one’s doing that. But don’t think most doctors aren’t part of a larger organization fighting for the benefits (pay, etc.) they receive as workers. That’s why so many doctors make so much. A completely independent storefront doctor would make far less. Whatever you want to call it, acting collectively works. More people should do it; then there wouldn’t be so many people bitching about the benefits those that already act collectively receive.
My feeling (based on three years of being in the CWA and three more years of being management) is that union workers seem to feel entitled to benefits and annual wage increases automatically, without regard to the quality of their work. This, to me, is just wrong on so many levels. Why they feel that way, I have no idea. Maybe because that’s how it has been for such a long time. Techs in my shop are some of the most bitter, spiteful people would will ever come across, and yet they make between $55K-65K for answering the phone.
Exactly. The existance of a union promotes ineptitude and retention of incompetent workers. On the other hand, the union also promotes a professional environment towards the workers, as Happy noted. I belong to one of the most abusive union in existance (California Teachers Association), so I know a little bit about the abuses. It is the constant demand for “Better than Yesterday, even if we don’t deserve it” attitude that destroys businesses that are unionized.
Now, over years, a (good) programmer will pick up additional languages, increase familiarity with the applications being supported so as to be an asset to the users, learn disciplines to speed up debugging practices (or, better, to avoid coding bugs), but the same thing is true of even unskilled work. (And I am seriously in favor of more good programmers being hired at much higher salaries.) To switch from drywall to pipelaying (since I had the opportunity to watch a lot of that last year), experience makes the difference between a 5-man crew laying 300’ of 12" ductile iron water main in a day or 600’ or 1300’. Those differences in time are directly connected to the ability of the company to make money. (Drywall is served the same way, with an experienced person or crew getting greater numbers of rooms prepped for the painters with baseboards, electrical and plumbing outlets cut in correctly to avoid rework, etc.)
I am not arguing that ditch diggers or sheetrock installers should be paid programmer wages, but it is an error to conclude that the ability to learn the basics in a week renders further experience moot.
While it is true, now that we are in our fourth or fifth generation of unionized labor in some industries, that not every current situation includes antagonism, I know of no industry that was originally unionized without serious antagonism between labor and management before the unionization took place. Such odd places to find unions as airline pilots and much of the white-collar jobs at Chrysler in the 1950s came about because the companies made demands (even if legitimate–and many were not) in ways that seriously irritated the workforce.
Watching management, perhaps? I don’t recall ever being with a company that actually held management increases (or even performing realistic performance reviews) on upper management. Middle management can take it in the neck, but the guys at the top often seem to live in a world of constant perks with no responsibility.
I agree that there are unions that are destructive of their own industries and there are union members with no sense of reality, but I see them as simply trying to emulate the guys at the top (who have destroyed no few corporations and walked away with lots of rewards for their “efforts”).
This question is way too vague. Each strike is for it’s own particular reasons. Usually the company is either cutting benifits, wages, or jobs or all three.
You can’t make these sort of sweeping judgements about unions.
I begrudge the I-make-ten-million-dollars-a-year-yet-my-company’s-failing-miserably CEO far more than I begrudge the $15 an hour unionized supermarket clerk.
You could also argue that there are many more unions than just the stereotyped “Workers of the World Unite!” construction unions that many think of. There are nurses’ unions (a necessary, skilled and underpaid profession), and…doctors’ and lawyers’ unions. Otherwise known as the [insert country here] Medical Association and the [insert country here] Law Society. They would both fit all the criteria for being considered unions.
Are nurses underpaid? I was under the impression RN’s with a few years experience are in high demand and could easily make 50,000 to 100,000 annually in most urban areas depending on the number of hours they wanted.
