My point is this: much like the cost of shoplifting, corporate fraud, and other objectionable things, inflated salaries (above and beyond what the market will bear) are passed along to the consumer, in one form or another. The $500k is an arbitrary number I assigned, and I probably should’ve made myself more clear.
In addition, the pink/white slip example is a silly point to make in furthering the argument for unions. The cost of labor will (and should) find it’s own average point in a free economy. People aren’t going to sell their labor for the real-life equivalent of $.01. There are other forces that work to drive up the cost of labor to a realistic amount that are absent in the model. The model was a simplisitc model that was taken too literally, IMHO.
How about the transit workers union in NYC? Does anyone else find it a little ridiculous that they could be allowed to hold an entire city hostage in order? IMHO, the leaders should be tossed in jail for even suggesting such a thing.
Good for you but you are just one person. As a union member (even as an involuntary one) would you be able to work extra hours if you wanted or would you have to follow union guidelines?
That doesn’t make any sense. The 5 people represent “employers”. They can only make $1 MM if they get enough “workers”. Since there are more employers than workers, they are the ones with all the negotiating power. If the minimum number of required workers is 1, I would expect that the employers would be able to negotiate a very low wage for the workers since they are left to choose between $1 or $0.
If the minimum number of employees is 4, I would expect that the “wages” would get higher as employees get “hired” by white cards since they would be in shorter supply.
I wonder what would happen if you set the minimum to 5 pink slips per white slip so that there is a shortage of labor?
In theory, I belive in what the unions are trying to do. Better wages and all that. I just don’t think that they work in practice.
When your employer behaves in a manner that will put your safety at risk, and intimidates you into keeping quiet or you will lose your job, perhaps the only one available in your area to you, who are you going to call ?
When your employer decides to pay another worker a differant amount for doing exactly the same work, perhaps because you are black, female, gay, or whatever, can you afford the legal fees ? No ? Who are you going to call ?
When your employer decides to unfairly sack you rather than make you redundant after years of loyal service when you are entitled to severance payments, who are you going to call ?
When your supervisor makes unreasonable demands, such as sexual harrassment and you need the job and cannot afford the legal fees, who are you going to call ?
You work in a department where you meet the public every day in situations where they may become violent, your employer will not provide either security staff, or protective screens, who are you going to call ?
When someone at work discovers you are gay, and your employer dismisses you over this, who are you going to call ?
You have HIV, your employer sacks you, who you going to call ?
Your employer demands that you work on non-contracted days, or maybe put in regular 14 hour days, for no extra remuneration, you need the job, who are you going to call ?
Your employer accuses you of stealing, but it is not true and there is no evidence except some rumour doing the rounds, who are you going to call ?
You have made a very significant contribution to your company profits by your work, your innovation, your enthusiasm and creativity, you get a derisory pay offer, you need this job, who are you going to call ?
Unless, of course, you really and truly believe that every union employee is lazy, that every employer is a paragon of fairness and virtue, that I am a lazy person, that I do not have the interests of my membership first and foremost, for no extra pay, and for all the hassle that local working union officials get from both membership and employers.
Unions have to be pragmatic, that large pay rise may well come at the cost of shutting down an entire plant so they have to decide what the phrase “best interests of the membership” really means.
Union officials may decide that some things would be better for the membership, but when an issue is put to a vote they may well be instructed to follow a course of action that is not in the best interest of the members, this is called democracy, if the members vote for something then union officials are bound by the union constitution to take that course of action.
It is noteworthy that some economies have done very well indeed by having unions represented in company strategic planning, it is far better to have workers and managers co-operating than being behind the barricades.
In this case the workers voted for strike action, this is their right, they have the right to withdraw their labour.
If you wish to place the blame somewhere, perhaps you might ask why medical insurance costs are rising so dramatically, yet there are medical staff who are having to pay such large insurance costs that they themselves are withdrawing thier labour in some states.
Maybe, just maybe, the cost of medical lawsuits is rising very fast, maybe some of those claims are out of proportion with the injury, maybe some people are encouraged to make claims on the slightest provocations, maybe you are one of those medical lawsuit claimants and maybe all medical lawsuit claiments are extortionists and leeches, and maybe, just maybe those claiments are in fact you, Joe Public, yes you personally are the ones who are complaining about rising medical costs.
Yes, it is all too easy to say that all unions are bad, that all unions and their officials and workers they represent are bad, lazy and greedy, yes, why not stereotype them all, it is far far easier than actually finding out about the issues for yourself, and you, lot call the Unionised workers lazy ?
I am SO not kidding about that. A good CEO is worth that kind of money. GE earned profits more than 100X what he earned this year, good CEO’s create that type of wealth, bad CEO’s destroy it. If GE isn’t willing to pay him, someone else will, and he’ll create fabulous wealth for THEM and not GE. He’s doing better than shitting gold, he was a major factor in creating $11.5B of profit last year!
I’m not going to address all your points, point by point, but here’s a summary:
For most of your complaints, you call the EEOC or other government agency that handles discrimination/unsafe work conditions/harassment. For some of the other complaints, you call a lawyer and sue the Bejesus out of the company (many will work on contigency based on the settlement). For a few of your complaints, you suck it up and either accept the employment agreement that you are presented with, or you sell your labor elsewhere.
If I walk into a grocery store and the bread is too expensive, I either A) buy the bread anyway, and accept that I’m not getting the best deal B) don’t buy the bread at that store, and go somewhere else to buy it, or C) don’t buy any bread at all. I don’t get all the other customers together and try to make the store manager sell the bread cheaper.
The issue with this strike here is that even though GE is absorbing ~90% of the increase in the cost of medical insurance, the workers strike because they also have to foot part of the bill. Whose fault it is that medical costs are so high is irrelevant. The fact that they are, and the union feels that they should be impacted 0% by it is what makes people, myself included, frustrated by unions.
The union’s justification for not have to pay any of the increase? GE’s record profit. When that profit goes down, is the union going to give back the money? Try clawing something back from a union…
Jack Welch, Immelt’s predecessor, pretty much shat gold coins, so if Jeffy-Poo can do as much (and, thus far, he hasn’t sunk the ship), then yes, he is worth whatever GE’s board wants to pay him.
I mean, GE’s market value going from 14 billion to 500 billion? Why do you think a lot of GE’s workers have their jobs?
I’m not saying that GE is the best company in the world (although, I do have an ex-girlfriend who’s doing pretty well in their technology department, and she thinks they are), but if you want to pick on some company’s executive for not being worth his/her compensation, you’ll probably do better not to start with GE.
Aside from which, from what I’ve seen, GE provides a competitive workplace that focuses a lot on quality and leadership. Prove yourself and you move up; don’t and you may find yourself out of a job. For a company concerned with profits, that ain’t a bad way to go. YMMV, of course.
The company has stumbled along the way (anyone remember Kidder Peabody–GE’s attempt at stock brokering?), but I think it’s fair to say that they’ve done well for themselves and a majority of their employees.
You miss the point – the million dollar reward represents gross sales of the company’s product, minus all non-labor costs. Whatever’s left over will be divided somehow amongst the owners and the workers.
There are three objections to this model that folks have presented:
In the real world, nobody will sell their labor for $0.01. This is true, and if you’re willing to add a small complication to the model, you can easily meet this objection without substantially changing the results. Just declare that you must bring in at least $10.00 (or $10,000) in order to have a significant amount – less than that, and your results are thrown out, since you didn’t earn enough money to survive. The pink slips will rise in value to meet the minimum survival amount: all you’ve done is raise the bottom value for a single share.
Someone mentioned that as the number of pink slips required per white slip rose, the value of a pink slip would rise. This is untrue until there are no pink-slip-holders competing to join with a white-slip-holder. As long as a white-slip-holder has four pink-slip-holder allies, needs only one more pink-slip-holder, and there are two pink-slip-holders left, the white-slip-holder can force the pink-slip-holders into a race to the bottom. If you get to the point where there’s a shortage of pink slips, the model changes dramatically – but then it no longer reflects ratios for most nonprofessional jobs (in which there are more potential employees than there are jobs).
Someone asked why the unionized pink-slip-holders wouldn’t take all the money for themselves. The reason for this is that they don’t have all the bargaining power: if the white-slip-holders withhold their slips, the pink-slip-holders get nothing. If the pink-slip-holders don’t unionize, though, the white-slip-holders can force the pink-slip-holders into competition against one another. There will definitely be losers amongst the pink-slip-holders without a union; the competition there merely determines who the losers (who get nothing) will be. Unionizing the PSH’s makes it so there’s an adversarial negotiation between the WSH’s and the PSH’s, but not competition amongst the PSH’s. Changes the dynamic.
If you’re worried about extortion, why don’t you take a glance at the way large corporations do business. “Hey, city council and/or state government, give us massive tax breaks and subsidise the rent on our corporate headquarters, or we’ll move offshore.”
Or, “Sorry, American workers, we know you expect a fair day’s pay for a long and boring day at work, but we can find people to do the work for starvation wages in countries with little or no effective health, safety, environmental, or wage legislation. So fuck you. Oh, but please continue to buy our (now imported) products, because it’s your patriotic duty as a citizen to ‘Buy American.’”
Or, “We don’t want to contribute to the land where we make most of our income, so we’ll set up our offices in an offshore tax haven, but still expect the American public to subsidize our profits through large government contracts.”
In this last case, there was an amendment introduced into the recent Homeland Security bill that would have prohibited corporations that had moved to offshore tax shelters from getting federal government contracts on homeland security issues. 318 members of the House of Representatives voted for this, including a good number of Republicans, but the Republican House leaders, with strong support from the White House, ditched the amendment and effectively prevented debate over a separate bill that would have dealt with the same issue.
Of course, when corporations get this sort of hand-job from government, it’s not called extortion, just lobbying.
mmjewett wrote:
and Cheesesteak wrote:
What planet are you guys on? First, not everyone is suffering. There are plenty of people still worth hundreds of millions or billions in this so-called sagging economy, and they are the ones who, in fact, tend to do comparatively better in times of economic downturn. And if you equate the suffering of losing one’s low-paid job and not having enough money to pay the rent with the “suffering” of losing a few million on some executive’s massive stick portfolio, then perhaps your need some sort of moral re-alignment.
And, regarding executive compensation, the most outrageous thing about it (apart from the disgustingly high packages) is that study after study over the past few years shows that corporate compensation packages often bear very little relation to the actual success of the company concerned. Plenty of executives leave with massive golden handshakes after spending a year or two overseeing a decline in their company’s profitability and/or share value. In 2001, for example, according to the New York Times, median CEO pay grew by 7%, while company profits dropped 35% and stock values declined by 13%. Granted, average CEO pay did decline by 8%, but this was mainly affected by a decline in a few very high-rollers, and most CEOs continued to get pay increases even in a flagging economy.
Why is it that when an economy is bad, the prevailing wisdom is to pay workers less to make them work harder, but pay CEOs more for the same reason? Is there some genetic or biological trait that i’m missing, which says that workers respond better to the stick, while CEOs need the carrot?
If you want to see the discrepancies between performance and pay on an individual basis for a bunch of different companies, go to this site. Of course, the fact that the site is run by the AFL-CIO means that some dunderheads will automatically dismiss any claims it makes without even reading it. However, all the information given on each company is marked with footnotes, which show that the facts and figures come straight from mainstream media and financial sources (USA Today; Bloomberg News; Wall Street Journal; New York Times), as well as from the companies’ own Reports to Shareholders.
Some examples of company performance and executive pay trends include:
CEO C. Michael Armstrong has a total compensation package of over $15 million. Under his leadership and proposed restructuring plan, stock prices have fallen 60%, and up to 10,000 jobs will be cut. And he doesn’t lose out no matter what happens to the stock price, because if the 446,179 restricted stock units he received when hired fall below $10 million in value, “AT&T will make up the shortfall in cash.” Armstrong also received an additional 1.4 stock options that he can exercise the right to buy at a price very close to the 52 week low - a low that his own leadership helped to bring about. Talk about reward for shitty performance.
CEO Douglas Daft’s total compensation is over $105 million. His original package tied a 1 million-share compensation package to Coke’s earnings performance, but when performance fell short of Daft’s promises, the directors agreed to lower the requirements for him. At the same time, Coke’s share price has tumbled, halving the value of the workers’ 401(k), to which Coke will only contribute company stock that the employees must hold until age 53.
Despite overseeing K-Mart’s decline into bankruptcy, Charles Conaway received over $22 million in total compensation in 2000, and walked away with a handshake worth over $9 million when he was replaced. Meanwhile, the company is shedding 22,000 jobs in an effort to survive.
And i’m sure i don’t need to remind anyone about Enron, where Ken Lay exercised over $120 million in stock options just before the collapse left more than 6,000 workers and thousands more shareholders holding the bag. Lay’s retirement package was also secured from creditors in the event of bankruptcy, unlike workers’ pension plans.
Yes, folks, it’s those unions that are killing America with their unreasonable demands and their sky-high compensation packages. I mean, what are they thinking? Health care? Overtime pay? Meal breaks? It’s lucky that Macro Man is showing us who the real crooks are.
Bwahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!
(Well, true, sort of, on those occasions when they get caught.
I mean, no company has ever hired any thugs to break a union, bought the police force to prevent the union from picketing, or played with the books to avoid honoring a contract.)
First of all Cheesesteak, if that is your justification for Immelt’s package then what about these cases:
I suppose these guys are worth it too. After all they are cutting costs.
Face it, Immelt would have received that compensation whether or not GE made a profit. Moreover these CEO compensation packages are outrageous (from the same source):
As for the bullshit about CEO compensation not being related to employee compensation: what the fuck is it related to then? Profits? Company stability? What?
As for those of you dogging the Unions, have you ever even set foot in a Manufacturing plant, on the Union docks, or on in an active construction project? Let me tell you I’ve been in all three and you couldn’t pay me enough to do these jobs. They are more often then not, dirty, dangerous and monotonous.
Moreover, where the fuck do you think you got most of your workers rights? Generous corporations, who care so much for their workers. Think again. You can thank the Unions for all sorts of your benefits. Little things like, paid vacations and sick leave, overtime pay, and workplace safety rules.
The GE strike was written into their fucking contract. What part of this don’t you guys understand? Management knew about it, had replacement workers in line for it, and it only will last two days. How is letting you employer know that you are upset with a rise in health care costs extortion?
The funny thing is, the corporations and CEOs into whose collective asses you have inserted your shitty-brown tongue have spend millions of dollars on Washington lobbyists to cut back the budgets and the responsibilities of those same government agencies.
And those same corporations have also spent similar amounts of money convincing conservative politicians that we need “tort reform,” which would prevent exactly the type of lawsuits you are talking about here.
It’s always an interesting paradox when a free market whore, when asked what we can do in the face of corporate iniquity, tells us to run to the same government that s/he would probably like to shut down altogether. And when they advise us to seek legal remedy when those same legal remedies - which would, in an ideal world, actually constitute a reasonable non-government solution to certain problems of corporate irresonsibility - are being closed off by corporate lobbying.
Maybe you have not tried to raise a complaint with what we in the UK would call an Employment Tribunal(I assume that the body you mention is similar)
This is how it works.
You make a complaint, the management are notified of your complaint and impending investigation, they are required to provide lots of paperwork, evidnece of certain management parctices that would redeem themselves, and all this reflects very badly on the direct managers of the complaining employee.
So your complaint is valid, and the tribunal finds in your favour, how much longer do you think you will be employed at that company ?
If your complaint is not substantial(it still may be serious to you) enough then no lawyer going to be interested, and anyway, why on earth would you want to be paying anything up to 50% of your succesful lawsuit claim to a lawyer when a union appointed lawyer will do it for the regular cost of your subscription.
What happens when your employer is behaving in an illegal manner such as dumping toxic waste, or doing an ENRON ?
Do you dare to go to the police ?
Do you keep your mouth shut and take the easy option, or maybe you go to your union representative and it is raised by their lawyers.
Companies can and do behave in utterly reprehensible ways as often as they think they can get away with it, sure you can walk away, but it won’t clean up that toxic waste, it will not reveal how tobacco companies have been skewing research to keep folk making claims against them.
Employees need reasonable protection from unscrupulous employers, this is what unions can do, I have noticed in the UK that unionised workplaces have lower accident rates than non-unionised workplaces, that seems to me to be enough reason for them.
I also resent very deeply the unfounded accusations made by some ill-informed ignorant posters here that union officals as a whole are lazy, corrupt, or extortionists, you know who you are, and personally I find this abusive and disgraceful, I will accept an apology if one is offered, or I may open another thread to discuss this further, choice is yours folks.
I think we may be talking about two different timeframes. When companies would use violent tactics and get away with it, unions served a very real purpose. I have serious doubts that ‘union busting’ would not get prompt legal attention today.
I’m sure we are all aware of companies cooking books, but for the most part this isn’t something a union could help with, though I agree that employees end up hurt. Since there is a law against this, why not use the law instead of a union?
There could be many variables, as well as some base number that they build off of. I think in very rare cases are employee health insurance costs one of the modifiers. Are you saying this is bullshit because you don’t like it, or because you think I’m incorrect? If the latter, prove it.
If possible, it’s even worse in the US, where government agencies designed to protect workers’ rights have suffered a sort of death by a thousand cuts, with budget cuts, staff reductions, etc. etc. A great example of the consequences of such cuts, with respect to the American meat industry, is outlined in Eric Schlosser’s fine book, Fast Food Nation. Schlosser looks mainly at the impact of cuts on meat inspection and oversight, but also examines working conditions in the industry, which is the most dangerous in the country with respect to deaths and injuries on the job.
[BTW, casdave, i spent quite a few cold evenings in the early 90s watching the Castleford rugby team at Wheldon Road. Yorkshire’s a great place!]
Can you prove that? As far as you know, and as far as you can provide, research-wise, has GE provided the same compensation regardless of company performance–especially when profits are down?
