I’m not sure I follow. I am judged against the market at least once every three months officially. It is up to me to present value to my clients. My clients in this case are companies that I work full time for and bill for 40 - 55 hours a week. I specialize it IT Business Systems Analysis. I have to build skills (either hard project management skills or programming skills) to remain relevant. My inlaws are wealthy but the only direct benefits that I see from that are somewhat nicer Christmas presents than others have. My wife and I have always been determined to make Our own way. It isn’t difficult really. Both of our sets of parents have an extreme work ethic and lots of common sense. That type of success is like following a pound cake recipe.
I wish that everyone would think of their employers as their “clients”. This isn’t a feudal system. It is up to employees to provide some needed value or find something else to do. Socialism didn’t create the modern world and can only exist at all with capitalism dragging it forward through innovation.
My wife works well below market rates because she loves working in the family business .She is also one of the foremost recognized gourmet cheese experts in the U.S. and simply loves the business. I see you live in Paris. She actually holds the key to a town in France for exploring and introducing their cheese to the U.S. market. The entire town had a parade and ball for her in recognition of her work. She is also the only female member of an ancient European cheese guild. We toured some cheese factories in the Loire Valley a year ago October and we just opened up some Christmas presents including some adorable goat dolls from small cheese makers. As you can see, that type of innovation may directly benefit you in a small way across the Atlantic. There is little nepotism there except the initial opportunity to prove herself. She is a vice president while her older brother is her employee making not much money at all. They hire the best cheese experts from around the U.S. that all make good money because of what they built themselves.
This is not a zero sum game. Don’t suck from others or from the whole. Make yourself the best that you can be and make yourself relevant to the project at hand in some way. Capitalism tends to be markably self-organizing as long as people are free to do their thing without hijacking others work.
Speaking only from the perspective of faculty, especially adjunct, I don’t know how the hell we’d survive without collective bargaining–and that’s only if your group happens to be on a campus that has a unit for part-timers. With a good agreement in place–and, fortunately, a decent negotiating team on both sides–the managers can maintain their control and desire for flexibility, among other things. In the meantime, we p/ts are lucky to be in a good unit where I work now. If we didn’t, we’d have no chance in hell of COLA-plus, health benefit program, paid office hours, a grievance process or anything else, unless the management decided out of the goodness of their hearts to hand it over. There’s still no pay for all the prep time, planning, grading, etc., but that’s another matter.
I've spent enough time at two campuses to know how hard it is to negotiate anything, but also how important it is to be able to do so.
Do not take this the wrong way at all. I was in a Ph.D. program in neuroscience at Dartmouth for almost 2 years before I caved and simply dropped out one day after a fight. I have never before or since worked so hard in my my life and I have the utmost respect for anyone that survives to tenured faculty.
That said, there is just to damn many of you. That is a market signal to get out and many take the hint. That is a good thing. It is extremely admirable to have a Ph.D. in English or any other field but there simply isn’t job space for everyone. The market can’t owe everyone a living because they are really knowledgeable about Shakespeare. That doesn’t always require getting out. Sometimes, goals can be modified to the market and sometimes this works out better for everyone.
Again, efficient skill allocation is fundamental to our economy and is in everyone best interest in the long-term.
Look at the list of important inventions that are core to our modern life. Capitalist countries don’t just lead, they have a virtual monopoly. The U.S. destroys the competition alone and then is followed by England. Germany and France made some good 3rd and 4th place showings in the first half of the 20th century.
See below if you want to know what I am talking about. Capitalism gets it done if only because it follows natural law. Like the the laws of physics, it is not nice to give the finger to the laws of economics.
Important world inventions 1950 - 2000. Going backward, you will see important contributions by England. France and Germany do somewhat well before that and then drop off as their experimentation periods take over.
Ignorant isn’t quite the word we are looking for here. Efficient is debatable although probably appropriate. Life in general was quite hard at the time. Hard conditions weren’t confined to industry. “Good” is a value judgement and non-debatable. Relatively pure capitalism did push the U.S. into being an economic superstar and that saved the World at least 1 1/2 times and went on to inevent most things we associate with modern life. In the mean time the Wagner act did give some workers more humane working conditions. OTOH, it introduced a little slice of socialism that benefits few but the union leaders.
Have you talked to many blue-collar union members? I have many times and I used to work with them to train them. That can be a horrible system for them. They tend to focus completely on seniority based incentives that completely screw their younger members. Unions tend not to be popular with young people. God forbid you have any ambition whatsoever. You are a bitch-dues-paying slave that can only achieve stature by paying dues longer than other. Merit has no place there. It is a little slice of communism right here in America. I would bet money that a secret poll of your typical Teamsters Union would vote to fold the union because it sucks for anyone but the laziest, long term, dues-paying member.
Also, how can anyone possible defend their practice of job segregation? (e.g. truck unloader vs. picker vs. forklift operator). God forbid you have the wrong mix of those jobs on a shift. Pickers have the inability to bend at the waist, forklift operators can’t reach over their head, and truck unloaders can’t drive a forklift even if they have done it for 20 years).
The people on top actually typically do a lot more than the people on the bottom. Top corporate executives manage millions upon millions of dollars in assets in various different ways, they mess up and the company could collapse. An assembly worker messes up and a few specific units that he messed up get ruined, not the whole company (unless some crazy assembly error results in a consumer death and the company goes bankrupt due to the lawsuit.)
And the owners of course deserve to make way more than the employees, the owners are the ones who take the economic risk that allows the business entity (be it a sole proprietorship or a corporation etc) to exist in the first place.
Anyways, I do think unions should be considered just a part of the free market. At the same time though, I think employers should always have the right to refuse to accept any negotiation with them, and to fire them should they decide to strike. And in general in the United States we have a system where that is possible.
If the employer can afford to do that in the first place then it means the laborers aren’t skilled or unique enough to have the sort of market value to be making demands of employers.
tomndebb I respect you and I freely admit that I don’t know everything or even close to it. However, I can’t think of a situation where a union has built itself to help the businesses it targets in any way. They tend to just make, well, demands, without offering anything in return. An example of how a union could partner with a business would be finding the most talented and skilled workers available, requiring them to undergo ongoing training, and then providing disciplinary action for workers that didn’t meet the standards. In return, the workers would get higher pay and benefits because the employee was being fed the best of the best. It must have happened sometime. It is a gigantic country.
I am actually more modern examples that are relevant to today’s businesses.
In some sense unions really do operate in a manner similar to a cartel or a monopoly.
The only reason I think they necessarily should be allowed in a society that strives for a free market is because most students of economics or history have found that the absolutist position of no government modification to the market and its operations actually can lead to both an unfree market and a disastrous domestic situation.
No, the only opinions I give are academic. My FIL controls ultimately controls everything but my wife is executive vice-president/adviser. I am her husband and I have related skills on distribution and warehousing consultation that I learned from working for major retail chains. I tell them remarkably little and stay out of it.
My opinions are strictly my own and I am a fierce libertarian who only wants to make his own way in life. Whether that ends up living in a mansion or a cardboard box doesn’t matter. I have literally done both of those in my adult life.
My wife is quite the hit in France and has done very small things to help the French economy. She speaks French fluently and knows French culture quite well. I adore France with all of my heart and it hurts me that it is going to undergo major crisis in the next few decades. We fly to France at least once a year and some of the people dearest to us are French business leaders that fly over at least every three months.
France is trying to defy the laws of economics and it isn’t going to work out well. I am from Louisiana (another French region) and it looks like we are all going to hell. Lighthouse please change course.
There are actually some unions that do this. However, my reaction was to your claim that unions “concede to 15% extortion instead of 30%.”
There definitely are unions that are excessively grasping; there are also companies that are needlessly miserly. The history of unions over the past 30 years has been a succession of give-backs to companies in many industries–often followed by the companies reneging on deals made.
I agree that a lot of the union rules about job segregation are stupid. I do not claim that every union is a paragon of virtue. However, your posts have painted an inaccurate picture of “socialism” and “extortion” and applied them to all union activity in a blanket condemnation that indicates a real lack of understanding.
[ Anecdote alert! ]
I worked for a client that had three union shops in Ohio and three non-union shops in the South. Some members of management had a real hatred of the unions and tried everything they could to harm them. At one point, the unions (who had not asked for raises because they knew the company’s general financial situation–it steadily made money but rarely had huge increases) were told that they would have to accept a major cut in health insurance and used the threat of the strike to prevent it. The company did not need to cut employee benefits. The HR people argued against the cuts made in the benefits of the non-union employees and the company lost good people when those cuts were made, but it was able to hang on to experienced labor in the shops where the unions had prevented the cuts. Eventually, the company had to restore most of the health benefits to the non-union shops in order to keep skilled employees–an issue they did not have to face in the union shops.
Later, the company (due to stupid actions on the part of management) got itself bought out. A couple of the officers who were retained (briefly) made it a point to tell the new owners that they did not really “need” the union shops, so the buyers moved the product lines to the non-union shops and shut them down. (A clear example of unions “forcing” themselves out of work, I suppose.)
The division of the new company that represents the old company has had 10 years of successively falling sales, because the money makers for the company were in the union shops, not in the non-union shops where the workers were turning out “support” products. Moving the manufacturing of the “union” products to the other shops resulted lower productivity, higher rates of product failure, and a loss of “pull through” for the non-union products that were add-ons to the union-built products.
[ /Anecdote Alert ]
I also disagree with the specious claim that employees have nothing invested in the company for which they work. An employee takes a job with a certain expectation that service provided will be repaid in continued employment. Based on that expectation, the employee purchases a house in a particular locale, enrolls children in particular school systems, joins particular churches and fraternal organizations. Claiming that such a person–particularly when the employee is on the low end of the wage scale–has a real life ability to just find a “better” job is nonsense. It would often require that the employee pick up and move away from a location, possibly selling the house at a loss, uprooting children and spouse (and in today’s two-wage-earner families, moving requires that both spouses be able to find employment in the new location). And that is simply theoretical posturing with no basis in reality.
I get the feeling that some people don’t quite undertand the practical side of this whole problem. Let’s quickly go over the way a typical Teamsters Union works. I learned this from being a ditrsibution systems manager for two Boston area supermarket chains.
Teamster, A Dream Come True
No upward mobility. There is zero ability for any junior member to aspire to anything higher no matter how hard she or he works. All benefits are strictly based on time on the job and the dues paid to the union.
Job segregation - all jobs are strictly defined and members are not allowed to step across those lines. If there are five forklift operators standing idle and trucks are backed up, forklift operators are not allowed to help unload the trucks.
Everything is based on time in the union and dues paid into the union - very senior union members get five weeks vacation. New members get one. Senior members get to pick all five of their weeks first. New members get forced to take their one week of vacation in February because their monetary value to the union is Nil. At the start of every shift, any senior member gets to bump a junior member for less desirable jobs. Once a junior member is bumped, that senior member doesn’t have to do any lesser job even if there isn’t any work for the picked job and there is a backup of other jobs.
Unions are abusive to both their members and business. They need to be crushed and crushed hard.
So, because you have had a bad experience with the union that is recognized as probably the most corrupt in the history of U.S. organized labor, you think that you should generalize to all organized labor on all occasions and demand that they be “crushed”? The plural of anecdote is not data.
I suspect that “some people” have let personal experience overwhelm all reason and logic on the topic.
I think that there are any number of problems with unions in the U.S., some localized and some systemic, but I strongly suspect that a long list of abuses by corporations would be met with protests that “sometimes bad things happen” or “those are rotten apples” or “the benefits are more than the deficits (no matter how many people get screwed),” but for some reason, we are supposed to treat the evils of unions as intrinsic while we treat the evils of management as happenstance.
No one needs to be crushed, Shagnasty. People need to stop thinking that other people need to be crushed. They are human beings – not infested cockroaches coming to steal your cheese.
I can think of a number of ways that unions have benefited the businesses. For example, a teachers’ union that negotiates smaller class sizes will have teachers that are better able to meet the needs of individual students. How about the person working in air traffic control who is relieved of some of the stressful and distracting conditions on her job? Is she not likely to be a more focused employee?
Shagnasty, falling victim as many morons do to the fallacy of the excluded middle, assumes that we are left with a choice between corrupt unions, on the one hand, and no unions at all, on the other.
And to make his ridiculous point he chooses as an example one instance from his own sheltered experience, and in the process selects a union which is (as tomndebb rightly points out) “probably the most corrupt in the history of U.S. organized labor.”
A brilliant mind is at work here folks. :rolleyes:
This can only be representative of American Unions, which are quite weird in my European eye (the concept of having having one union per company per job category, instead of several unions, all representing all categories of workers from
forklift operators to management, with workers picking wichever union they prefer or none at all). For instance you can’t base any benefit on time spent in the union when you have no obligation to join any union, let alone a specific one.
So your one, unsubstantiated anecdote is completely demonstrative, but the history of one of the largest unions in the US for the last thirty years should be disregarded?
Must be convenient to turn it on and off like that.
Does your reading comprehension deteriorate on a month by month basis?
I have noted that there are problems with unions.
I have made no claim that unions should be exalted, given special treatment in society, or even that they are mostly as good thing. Shag has extrapolated a couple of personal incidents into a blanket condemnation.
I have not made a blanket defense or claimed that any individual action justifies all abuses. My experience, as an exception to Shag’s absolute condemnation, demonstrates that his condemnation is over the top and based on faulty reasoning. On the other hand, my unsubstantiated anecdote does point to my claim that not all union activity always results in harm to the company.
If I were to point to my anecdote as a justification for the abuses of the Teamsters, you might have had a point, but it appears that your failure to actually read what I have written suggests that you are simply looking for ways to take cheap shots–even when they make you look silly.