Sure about that? You do recall the Republican opposition to OSHA and other safety regulations. You know the drill, it hurts competitiveness, it cuts into profits, no business owner would ever put his workers at risk… Politically unions can funnel workers contributions to candidates who support workers rights, which is a useful counterbalance to political contributions from industry.
If you want to see what happens without strong unions, just look at China. Odd that conservatives and Commies are in the same boat on this one.
Just a small hijack here to highlight how this shows how conservatives are out of touch with reality. If you have ever been a teacher or a parent, you know this statement is bullshit. For instance, just today a teacher wrote a column on something we observed in our kids’ classes - the parents who come to back to school night and to teacher meetings are the ones who don’t need to. The parents of kids who are doing badly, who make trouble, who cut, never show up. If every parent made sure his kids did their homework instead of watching TV, our school crisis would be over. In fact lots of parents think that school is a waste, so their kids think the same thing.
Basing policies on incorrect assumptions guarantees bad policy.
This is about the same thing as saying we don’t need the FDA because every consumer can research drugs, or mortgage regulations because who would take out a mortgage they can’t afford. If you guys paid attention to what people are really like, as opposed to what they should be like to make your ideology workable, you wouldn’t put the economy in the crapper.
In a closed shop, you cannot get a job without signing a union contract. Back in the day when I was working jobs that were unionized, there were no non-union jobs, so there was no choice. Hardly fair. Particularly since I paid dues and got almost zero out of it.
The biggest problem I have with unions is they tend to get a very high wage paid to un- and low-skilled workers. Every time Boeings went on strike it just boggled my mind how much high school graduates (including my father at one time and my brother until he got laid off) were making. It also tends to be much harder to fire an unsatisfactory employee in a union shop. Unions make running a business much more expensive than it should be.
How is the air in the 19th Century, Airman? In the 21st Century, unions are more to protect workers from such entrepreneurs as WalMart store managers, driven to profit at just about any cost. Maybe workers facing giant corporations deserve the right to band together?
Sure the guy who doesn’t like the boss can go down the road. That is, if in the non-union world the boss down the road is any better. Plus, maybe in a very small company the cost of an employee leaving is close to equal in both sides, but for the most part it hurts an employee a lot more than the employer - and the employee who quits doesn’t get unemployment, remember. Power is balanced by employees working collectively - to think that your average guy has anywhere near the clout of an employer is absurd. When you have enough education it may be a different story, but I for one am not willing to say fuck you to those without my good fortune.
What’s the point of paragraph 1? That a public-sector union should stand at the ready to substitute for parental involvement?
What’s the point of paragraph 3? Yes, it’s exactly the same as your FDA and mortgage points. At least I think it is. Did we resolve that a few threads back? Apparently not.
Who put what economy in what crapper? What? Which? Who? Howzzat again?
Essentially the same thing - in the world of closed shops, non-union jobs don’t tend to exist which means that anyone wanting to start a business in that field had better sign a union contract. As Voyager points out, it is unlikely that a disgruntled Wal-Mart employee is going to be able to get a non-union job, because most (all?) of those sorts of stores were pressured into signing union contracts.
Feel free to read my post describing the EFCA just above. It has the support of all the major labor unions and the vast majority of Democrats in Congress. And it does EXACTLY what you say no one wants to do - it mandates that employers must keep people employed who they do not wish to employ. For instance, under the EFCA, if one of your employees goes around telling other employees that the job sucks, and that they need to unionize so they can force their desires on management, you probably don’t want to keep that employee hired. But if you fire him, you will be in big trouble with the government.
Under the EFCA, your employees can walk off the job and say they won’t come back unless you pay them double the prevailing wage. There can be lineups of new workers outside your door begging you to let them work at current salaries. You’d love to fire the union and hire the new people. But under the EFCA, you won’t be able to.
Under the EFCA, a government arbitrator can tell you that you have to put a union rep on your board of directors, give them all a 20% raise, and give them an extra week of holidays a year. Even if there are plenty of other employees available willing to work for less, you have no choice but to comply.
The EFCA is exactly what you claim no one wants - an extension of union power that takes the right of firing away from the employer and puts it in the hands of the union or a government arbitrator.
You don’t have to argue for it specifically. You can just set up a work environment that forbids merit pay and makes it extremely unpleasant to try to fire someone. My wife is a manager in a union shop, and she has a bunch of featherbedding employees who do the minimum work and demand maximum benefits. They use the maximimum allotted number of sick days (amazing that they’re always sick exactly as many days as the union contract allows), they leave work early, some are surly and don’t do their jobs and leave it to the good ones to pick up the slack.
It’s almost impossible to fire these people. You have to give X number of warnings, then give them some sort of plan of improvement, then more warnings, then you have to go to the union to set up a review meeting if none of that works. In the meantime, the employee is almost guaranteed to file some kind of grievance against the management along the way, just to muddy the waters. So then management gets grilled by the union, which always takes the worker’s side. If you’re lucky, and the employee is a complete basket case, they *might agree to a transfer to a different department or some other kind of disciplinary effort. Usually on the condition that once the punishment is meted, the employees record will be expunged and they get to start clean, which triggers the whole process again.
What happens in this environment is that the management winds up just working around the bad employees, and the good employees have to pick up the slack. So excellence is punished, bad behavior and laziness is rewarded, and ultimately the good ones leave the profession and go somewhere where they are allowed to rise to the level of their ability, and the poor ones stay and make everyone else’s lives miserable. I’ve seen this pattern repeat in that industry for the last 20 years.
Yeah, I don’t believe this for a minute. Why would an employer go through the hassle of firing someone and hiring someone else just because they asked about lunch time? It’s a royal pain in the ass to do either of them. I simply don’t believe it happens.
That is as it should be. Otherwise, management could fire anyone who joins a union, regadless of their demands. We have seen what happens when big business is allowed to operate without regulations to force them to consider interests other than short term gain for stockholders.
And management wants to extract the maximum production with the minimum benefits paid out. Why is one evil, and the other isn’t?
Eight-hour day - Wikipedia Heres a Wiki article about the 8 hour day. The concept predates the union movement. It is much older and bases in England.
Note the American part. It was because of unions that it was established. Unions fought(and had to fight) to get it accepted.
My grandfather was a coal miner. You can not imagine how the enlightened deserving owners exploited the workers. The company stores and owner housing had the workers risking their lives for practically nothing. The refused any and all safety measures,because they NEVER have enough money. They hired professional killers and goons to wipe out the union movement.
The day my dad was born my grandfather and grandmother were at the hospital. There was a union meeting at the church. The goons blocked the doors to the church and set it on fire killing every man ,woman and child in the church. Just owners being owners.
It did happen. It does happen. I made up none of those anecdotes. You know nothing about my union, our practices, nor our contracts. If you have evidence that anything I said isn’t true, present it or stfu.
This particular argument doesn’t work, since if every employer has unsafe working conditions and dangerous chemicals around, then “going right down the street” won’t get you anywhere. If it costs too much to make working conditions safe, then every employer will have unsafe working conditions, and the workers are screwed.
I’m not saying unions are necessary to fix this problem, I’m just saying your argument doesn’t work.
The evidence is the implausibility. The person you’re responding to pointed out one reason that it is implausible–the cost benefit analysis just doesn’t even come close to working out.
The three anecdotes I quoted here definitely sound like a “not the whole story” sort of story.
If you go back to the post I responded to, there was a statement that teachers unions are eevil, justified by the assertion that all parents are solidly behind their kids’ education. If you assume that everyone is in it for the kids, you might not need a teachers’ union. But that isn’t true, and any policy based on it is flawed. Ditto with the other stuff I mentioned.
If employers and employees are both in it for the good of the company and have respect for each other, unions aren’t necessary. Compromise always beats a strike for both sides. But they aren’t, so the best we can do is to try to equalize power, which is why unions are important.
No it doesn’t. That is already prohibited by federal law under the National Labor Relations Act. EFCA merely strengthens the penalties for violating the law. Currently, there are no fines against employers who violate existing federal law.
No it doesn’t. The so-called secret ballot is controlled by the company, who is in a position to intimidate workers to vote against unionization.
No it doesn’t. This is already illegal under the NLRA. EFCA strengthens penalties for violating existing federal law.
I want to thank you, though, Sam, for prodding me into reading more about the EFCA. I now know enough about it to support it without reservation, and contact my Congressional delegation with my statement of support.
The plural of “anecdote” is, of course, “data”. That said the one time in my life I was fired, it was a week after I was awarded Employee of the Month. I was the second employee that this had happened to, and I know it happened to at least one other person after me. My supervisor had no input over the EotM awards, but he could fire people underneath him. Since the only path of advancement was through his position, it was in his best interests to fire any overly-good subordinates.
We had no union, and so we had no redress. Complaining to his supervisor became our word against his.
So, yeah- people DO get fired for the smallest of reasons.
