Anyone who has ever exhibited at a trade show in a union city can probably come up with several examples. Here’s mine:
[ul]
[li]not being allowed to carry a box of equipment into our booth space - got to pay a union worker.[/li][li]not being allowed to plug our equipment into the electrical socket - got to pay a union worker an hour’s pay for 20 seconds work[/li][li]having to hire a union worker to “help” construct the booth, but as he had no clue how it is constructed, we had to pay him to sit to one side and drink coffee[/li][/ul]
A perceived need to use profanity is a sure-fire sign of a feeble, under-developed mind. Anybody with half an ounce of either common sense or imagination can quite adequately get his point across without resorting to such infantile nonsense.
Several of these ideas have been previously stated but I will say them in my own way.
1- unions are a vital way for workers to balance the power in a system. Whenever people have a need for their voice to be heard people join together to have strength in numbers. Gun owners want to insure the right to have guns, what do they do? They form the NRA.
2- The notion that Unions can make companies unprofitable is absurd. Companies can only pay what the market is willing to support. If a company can’t pay the wages requested they won’t and the Union is broken.
3- I work for a company who is the largest in the world in our line of work. ( Cranes and Rigging) We are also 100% Unionized at every branch. Maxim is the largest, therefore the most profitable and yet we are 100% Unionized. Seems to be working. We make a living wage and the company’s owners are able to still make massive profits.
4- The reason the narrative on Unions has changed is you have to consider who is giving the narrative. Corporate media. It is in corporations interest to disseminate the idea that Unions are bad. If you talked to any American and just left out the word Union and gave a questionnaire of the things Unions are for. The majority of Americans would side with a Union.
"Are you for good healthcare? Living Wages? Retirement? Workplace safety? Training? Profitsharing for the workers and not just for stockholders? Job security? Etc. These are all the things and more that Unions ( which are just associations of people) fight for.
This right here is, unfortunately, a common element.
Unions are hated without understanding where they are mostly unknown, sort of like nonwhites and immigrants.
There can be corrupt union leaders, as there can be corrupt elected officials, corrupt businessmen, and corrupt church leaders. Would you try to categorically abolish the other three groups?
Well, if he said it was the Jews, you’d laugh at him, right? (Not saying the previous poster is an anti-Semite; pointing out that it’s just that kind of convenient conspiracy theory scapegoat.)
As others have pointed out, not strictly true. But for the sake of argument, follow this rabbit hole all the way down:
How do we have a law against monopolizing a resource? We have a legislature that passes that law.
Can I as a private person hire a different legislature? No.
So lawmaking capacity is a monopolized resource? More or less.
So is the prohibition of monopolizing a resource an absolute? Can’t be.
I have run into this sort of workplace issue myself; I had a manager who wanted to move me to nights, but didn’t want to have to move someone else with seniority for some personal reason. I forget what the fix actually was, but I think she found a work-around.
Heh. Take a good hard look at executive compensation over the last 30 years. Because what you’re describing is what the capitalist class did: They demanded ever higher compensation even as they shortchanged and laid-off their workers. But they called themselves, “masters of the universe.” Class has its privileges.
I’d be glad to tell you a personal story about unions. Years ago I owned a small software business. Every year, we displayed our products at an industry trade show. It was very expensive for me to do this, but we generally got enough business out of it to make it profitable, even if I had to borrow the money to go.
One year the trade show moved to New York. Now, because I didn’t have much money I always traveled with my own equipment rather than renting it, and set up my own booth. In Atlanta, or Colorado, or any of the other places I’d been, this was not a problem. I owned my own booth panels and computers and did my own artwork, so it was just a matter of renting booth space and a hotel.
But not in New York. Oh no. There, I was not allowed to erect my own booth panels. I was not allowed to plug in my own freaking computer. I was not allowed to carry my own gear in from my own vehicle. This was union work. The price was exorbitant. I wasn’t about to pay some clown $50 to plug a cord into an electrical outlet or $100 to ‘transport’ my own computer from the back of my own van.
And of course, a lot of trade shows set up or tear down on the weekend, and the unions charge double time for that.
I asked what would happen if I simply carried in my own gear. Since it was my property, why couldn’t I? The answer I got back from the trade show rep was that while the rules allowed it for smaller booths (less than 10 x 10, if it could be erected in half an hour without tools, as I recall), it was ill-advised because people who did so often found that there was a freak ‘accident’ whereby some union guys would accidentally pull a cable across the booth and snag a computer and smash it on the floor, or perhaps bump into it while carrying something. I might find that ‘regulations’ would require that my booth power be unplugged because non-union plug-inserting could be a fire hazard.
In short, they’d make sure to make my life miserable if I didn’t pay them a large sum of money for doing very little.
I cancelled the trade show. So did a lot of other people. The next year, it was back in Atlanta Georgia (a right to work state) and the trade show people made sure to tell us that they would never use New York again.
As I understand it, unions in New York destroyed the trade show business there.
Thanks for the story. I guess what’s happening there is the trade show had an agreement with the union that stipulated that the union members must be responsible for the tasks you mention, and to participate in the trade show, you had to sign something which stipulated that you, too, agreed to that arrangement. If that’s not what’s going on, I don’t know how these rules could have been legally in force.
I wonder whether there is any rule, law or regulation in NYC that forced the trade show organization to enter into such an agreement with that union. Does anyone know?
Nobody said workers would be more productive (although a case can be made that better-paid workers have better morale which leads to more productivity, that’s not what I said.)
All I said was that workers with more money are going to spend it, certainly a larger percentage of that money than the wealthy does. And only with a customer base with disposable income does any business stay in business. Again, that’s the whole “demand” part of supply and demand.
Even if Ford’s primary motivation was not to create a buyer base, the $5.00 daily wage unquestionably resulted, as a by-product, in increasing his customer base for his Model T’s.
Demand drives an economy. When the middle class is making a fair wage, they are the engine that drives the economy. If nobody is buying wickets, it doesn’t matter how little is costs to make wickets. And if nobody has any disposable income, nobody is buying wickets.
I’ve been thinking a little more about union horror stories like Sam Stone’s. Why not just say that the market has spoken, rendering that union’s business practices unsustainable? (They charged too much, and put conditions on the business arrangement that were unacceptable, so the trade show took its business elsewhere.) Why draw a larger conclusion about unions in general from a story like that?
the ideals of freedom, equality, and opportunity traditionally held to be available to every American.
a life of personal happiness and material comfort as traditionally sought by individuals in the U.S.
Some of the greatest runs of prosperity in this country came because of the industrial revolution. Why is it a shock that for many at those times that a factory job - one where the worker had job security and made much more money than he would have farming - was a big part of that?
Maybe it’s not anymore… But that doesn’t change the fact that we still have millions of Americans toiling away in factories.
Probably no law. A few unskilled laborers formed a cartel so as to lock out others who would be willing to perform the work in higher quality for less money, thus decreasing the viability of small business owners such as Sam Stone. At least that is the perception, and that’s what this thread is presumably about, perceptions. Do most unions create artificial barriers to entry to a trade? I don’t know. Do most unions use mafia style threats of “accidents” to keep business from straying? Probably not.
But union visibility is low. I’ve never been in one. I’ve only held two jobs that were remotely union-eligible. I would have signed up at one of them had I decided to stick around rather than go to college, despite shady recruiting tactics. I don’t think I know anyone nearby (or in my last town) who is in a non-governmental union. Most of us aren’t in unions. It’s what, 7% membership in the private sector? So when we have experiences like Sam Stone, or hear similar stories, those of us who are employed by what is perceived as merit are turned off.
I think perspectives get skewed on both sides. I remember a roommate telling me a rah-rah union story about her father, who “only has a job because of the union.” He worked for a power company in Eastern MA, and his skills were 25 years old, so he (and others like him) couldn’t work on any new equipment because he hadn’t bothered keeping his skill current. Never mind that younger potential employees could actually do the work for less. The company was sold and the new owners tried to bring in workers from some of their southern subsidiaries, but her father and his coworkers harassed their families, followed them home, etc., until the scheme collapsed. Better workers were kept out, and ratepayers were paying for useless labor. This was supposed to impress me :dubious:. To her, this all was a good thing. I was horrified. Very different perceptions of the situation.
Or (and I think this is what you are getting at) why not concede that these horror stories are outliers and that one can remove the bathwater without throwing away the baby.
We like to throw away the baby when it comes to unions. To get back to Scott Walker, we all know that the teacher salaries were a blip on his budget, that whatever he saved in busting the union was small change. And most of us know that the unions in good faith had already negotiated and made concessions.
Sure, if a particular union is stubborn and unwilling to compromise, maybe that union needs to go. But how often does that happen - especially in today’s climate?
Again, if you work for a unionized company, you really work for the union. A goon called a “shop steward” will punish you if you find a faster or better way of doing a job. If you work smarter in such a way that the firm’s costs are reduced, you will be attacked for “putting your brothers out of a job”. Or if you side with a manager in a dispute (such as when you are made to “cover” for a union member who comes to work drunk), you will be ostracized. To a union member, management is “the enemy”, and is never to be cooperated with.
that is why GM is a disaster, while transplant firms like Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, etc. are thriving.
And suppose one day the supervisor asked a mechanic to move mail, and laid you off because he didn’t need you any more?
Job protections exist for a reason. You have a contract that gives you certain pay and overtime for your job. You don’t want management undercutting that by letting someone else do your job, do you?
Do you not think that unions are aware that pushing for unsustainable pay or work rules is unsustainable? That they don’t know that a trade show can choose to take it’s business elsewhere? Unions have an interest in their employer’s success. They are partners more than rivals. They don’t always get it right, but they are not out to destroy their own employers.
Remember, when you hear stories about how unions screwed things up for a business, take them with a grain of salt. Sometimes its just someone blaming the unions for their own failure.
Regarding unions and trade shows. In many cities, local unions have a monopoly over trade shows. This means that (in NYC) you will have to hire union electricians to screw in light bulbs and plug in cords. If you do this yourself, some union goon might happen by and break all of your light bulbs. You might also have to hire union workers to erect signs, lay carpet, set up chairs, etc.
Essentially, they have the right to enforce a monopoly. This is illegal for businesses, but OK for unions.