Yeah, but you are in essence complaining that other people have better benefits at their jobs. If you want what someone else has got, maybe it’s worth negotiating for… with collective bargaining. :eek:
I note that the examples use four different local points of comparison (in addition to the province-as-a-whole comparison). Apparently the writer found that not all of the cherries that best fit her thesis could be picked from the same tree…
If you don’t like your job or your contract with the government (meaning: me) you can quit and go find something else to do.
Have you ever asked for a raise? If so, why didn’t you just quit and find another higher paying job?
In other words, why is it that anti-union types think that the answer to every employee complaint is that the employee should quit?
Unions are organizations that use the power of numbers to fight against the owners who would separate and use them as they saw fit. Any organization can survive without an employee. They can not get rid of them all. Unions fight for safe working conditions, reasonable working hours ,fair pay and lots of other benefits. In America health care is one of those. Unions brought about the 8 hr, day, the 40 hour work week, the end of child labor, paid vacations and safe working conditions. Corporations fought and killed union organizers. They still would be happy to do that again. Organize a union in the coal mines of America and see how that works out.
The benefits that unions won, spilled out over the rest of employment. Non-union companies had to follow along or people with a choice would not work for them. The white collar workers automatically got the union increases. The company did not want them to organize.
But, unions are being destroyed. Benefits are being cut, Health care is being diminished. When they are successful with the dismantling. wages will drop( they already are), benefits will diminish,(they are now) and the power of a worker will disappear.
Unions get no good publicity at all . The newspapers killed the unions a decade ago. The TV networks are owned by huge powerful conglomerates that are anti-union. The people have heard so much anti-union messages that the people all have accepted it as fact. We will all suffer in the end. Just ask a 20 some year old about unions. They all hate them and don’t know why. But they will say that unions are the problem. It is sad what we can be convinced of if we have the corporations controlling the message.
I’d miss the satisfaction I derive from knowing that every dollar I receive was taken from somebody like you.
It’s true. We all sit around our air-conditioned offices (dozens of us) with our feet up on our desks, eating donuts and drinking coffee and laughing about how people like you have to go out and work real jobs while all we have to do is steal your money and spend it on ourselves. It’s pretty sweet. And thanks to NAFTA I now get to steal canadiankorean’s money as well.
Oh dear, what rubbish, I can produce study after study, cite after cite, quote after quote ad nauseaum that demonstrates that public sector workers are paid less for carryin gout similar work that the private sector, with one exception only.
State employed workers do very badly when their posts have been put out to private contracts, this is because the successful bid by the privatising organisation predicated it on the basis of asset stripping, that is reducing numbers, and of reducing wages, but in turn this also ends up with impoverished services.
There have been other privatisations that actually did the downsizing, cut the number of workers, but in turn they became even more dependant on thsoe reamining, such that their incomes rose to levels signifcantly higher than privatisations.
We have a multitude of fialed privatisations here in the UK, where the service cost has increased well beyond the rate of inflation, ask any Brit what has happened to energy costs.
We also need to look at the service provided, because many public services will never directly turn a profit, and so are not attractive for privatisation, however these services may well enable private business to take place, whether hospitals, roads, or transport.
There is an old adage about indusrial relations which is as true now as it always has been “There are no bad workers, just bad managers”
The way to reduce the power of any union, is to have a collaberative business, a non-adversarial labour system. When everyone is behind their barricades then costs rise, efficiency goes down.
I love how unions get the blame for poor management.
Blaming unions is shorthand for saying the management team is useless, transfers the responsibility for running an organisation from those who are paid to do just that, to those who are not paid to do it.
Oh yeah. Like when gas prices spiked and SUVs became less popular, anti-union types tried to deflect the fact that Detroit executives were choosing to build cars that had little future by bringing up these allegations that unionized auto workers make too much money. Whatever.
Suppose the worst complaints are true. Suppose union workers receive grossly unfair wages and benefits.
So what?
Isn’t that the way capitalism is supposed to work? Everyone acts in their own self-interest? Buyers, sellers, owners, workers - everyone is trying to get as much as they can. The union member deserves his raise just as much as the board member deserves his bonus.
So if you think union members are making so much, stop complaining about it and go join a union.
My goodness…it’s not about me getting paid the same.
It’s about the wasted money paid to these union members that are ruining services and causing government budgets to run a deficit.
For example, Transit (I pick on them because they are in the news a lot recently).
They have to run buses and subways. You can’t stop it or the city is down.
But instead of looking at union workers and cutting the fat like eliminating ticket collectors who sit and just collect tickets. Let’s say there are 100 of them.
100x 65,000 base salary… that’s 6.5 million saved. Use that 6.5 million to build automated machines to collect / sell tickets. save the budget 6.5 million a year.
Now if we reduce wages to match private sector by 10% across the 30000 employees with an average savings of $6,000… that’s 18 million saved and hopefully used to improve service.
I’m complaining that my tax dollar is being misused.
Maybe a bad example but let’s say you give $100 to a charity.
That charity decides to pay $30 to a worker to get it done. However, since they have 2 people on staff, they said let’s pay $60 for the same work cuz we have 2 people.
Now they were committed to give $65 to a country in need from my $100.
So they now are asking the government to give them $25 to make up for the deficit.
The government says, ok since you promised to give that money.
The government comes to me and says, we need more money I’m taxing you $25.
How would you feel?
Wouldn’t you say to the charity… 1 person at $30 can do that job… why are you paying 2 people and losing money?
on top of that, the other charities have people that do it for $20. Now instead of asking the government for more money, you have leftover money to help more people.
But why single out the government for waste? Why not apply the same principles to everyone? Why don’t we decide that the executives at General Motors don’t deserve their high salaries; they’re just going to spend in on high living anyway. They should all take a paycut down to $52,000 a year. Everything above that is waste. And the reduced cost of executive pay will be passed along to the consumer because they can charge less for the cars they sell.
How is paying one guy $65,000 a year wasteful when paying another guy $6,500,000 a year is not?
Nope, still there:
Bus Driving is a low-skill job. $60,000 in base salary is about 1/3 more than the national average for all workers.
No, they do not. But this thread is not about white-collar workers, who are not unionized. I have several freinds, and a girlfriend who work white-collar government jobs. They do make less than private-sector equivalents; they also have more security and less stress. I know multiple lawyers and MBAs who work 40 hours a week; those are quite rare everywhere except government.
With unemployment at 10%, nobody has a hard time finding workers. But as I’m currently unemployed and I live in greater D.C., I’ve had *lots *of people advise me to get a government job.
No, it’s not. Unions work the way they do by letting a significant fraction of a businesses suppliers of a particular resource (labour) get together and act as a single entity. This is not considered acceptable behaviour anywhere else - it’s the whole reason we have antitrust laws. If Shell, BP and all the other petrol selling companies got together and tried to exert this sort of control over their customers, telling your business “If you don’t buy Shell’s petrol at $100 a gallon, none of us will sell you petrol,” they’d be committing a felony.
Because if you don’t like how General Motors does things, you can tell them to go fuck themselves, and take your money elsewhere. General Motors can’t force you to buy their product, the government can and does.
You are wrong about this. At my federal agency, the attorneys are part of the bargaining unit unless they are classified as confidential. Many federal agencies have bargaining unit eligible OGC units that are either part of AFGE or NFFE (two of the biggest federal unions). I’m an OGC (Office of General Counsel) attorney as well as a volunteer union steward for one of the big two. I have to go to training for my labour position and meet plenty of unionized white collar federal workers from a variety of different agencies.
How do you describe a corporation board? Don’t they get together and act as a single entity in representing the corporation? If management is allowed to act as a single entity, why can’t labor?
I have a say in how the government is run. I don’t have any say in how General Motors is run. It seems you have things backwards.
Great example. The cost of living in San Francisco is about 1/3 higher than the average American cost of living. Cite.
Do you expect bus drivers in SF to make the national average, so in effect be 1/3 poorer than the average American bus driver?
You don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about. Bringing up management with regards to this topic is a massive non sequitur.
The important thing you must understand is that the business should have multiple choices of supplier for a particular resource, and the supplier should have multiple choices of customer for that resource. The existence of companies does not disrupt this arrangement, because each company only represents a portion of the market share. If you’re selling labour and you don’t like Company A’s terms, there’s nothing stopping you from going to Company B. And in return, in the absence of unions, there’s nothing stopping Company A from hiring someone else who has similar skills if they don’t like your terms. Forming an anti-competive agreement with other suppliers of labour is just as disruptive to this balance as if the businesses that buy that labour did the same thing.
No, you don’t. Not unless you happen to have at least a couple of thousand friends that feel the same way you do. And even then, you’re still only at the level of asking them nicely to desist, instead of being able to cut your ties unilaterally.
The real money of course is being gobbled up by the Bankers. Goldman just gave themselves another 5 billion in bonuses. That is tax money. But at least they aren’t unions. Then you would be pissed off. But who are you to question your betters. Just jump all over a guy working for a paycheck. Your position is equal or above them so you have a right to criticize. But don’t crab at those who have perfected the eating of tax money.
And likewise, in the presence of unions, there’s still nothing stopping Company A from doing that.