Why do you assume that management treats the workers equitably, and the workers seek to “force their desires on management”? It is likely that in a case where workers are not happy with their employer they are looking to improve their working conditions, wages & benefits so that they can better provide for their families. If it really is just one crazy worker, his fellows should tell him to stfu and the organizing will stop there. To use a favorite argument of conservatives from another setting: if an employer isn’t doing anything wrong, what does he have to fear?
Wildcat strikes have been illegal since the NLRA was passed in 1935 and I’m not aware of any language in the EFCA that changes that.
Actually, once something goes to an arbitrator, even today, the arbitrator’s decision is legally binding. And even today an arbitrator can order any damn thing he wants. There are no restrictions on their decisions, although as my trainer from the FMCS told us, a bad arbitrator will soon find himself unable to draw any business. And the EFCA talks about an arbitration panel, not one arbitrator, so you got that part wrong as well. Check Section 3, paragraph (h) subsection 3. Also, the first contract, should it go before the arbitration panel, would be for only 2 years.
No, it’s an attempt to level the playing field. Over the last 73 years business interests have been very successful at getting their laws passed, many of which reduced the influence of the NLRA at the expense of worker’s rights and in favor of business interests.
You seem to find fault not so much with the actual process for disciplining an employee as for the fact that there is a process at all. I cannot sympathize with you on that, and suggest that you ask your wife’s employer why they agreed to the process. If indeed it is cumbersome and has resulted in employees who do not perform their job, it would seem that your wife’s management made a poor decision to sign that contract, then. Why have they not renegotiated it? Contracts last only a few years usually, and are then up for renegotiation. Why do you blame the workers for the poor decisions that management made? And why do you generalize the behaviour of all unions and all workers from 1 experience?
treis and Frylock, in a hiring hall union, getting a new worker is as easy as telling one guy to go home and making a phone call to dispatch to send another out.
An employer can permanently bar a union worker in a RTW state simply by filing a Letter of No-Rehire. An employer does not need cause to do this, since it is a RTW state.
Not all unions are the same and not all union workers are the same, even within the same union. Heck, different locals of the same union are different as night & day usually.
This a bit of a straw man if you’re using the debate over the Employee Free Choice Act as a base of discussion. Nobody is arguing against unions. If more conservatives are arguing against the EFCA it has more to do with a loss of freedom and privacy. I’m surprised that anyone would argue FOR this, regardless of party affiliation.
Read thru the posts on this and the EFCA and you’ll see a number of people call for the forced dismantling of unions… people actively calling for the revocation of the 1st Amendment right to freely associate for union supporters. Shameful, but true.
You would be much better off to avoid all expressions, euphemisms, and strong implications that any poster has lied in this forum.
Stop it.
That said, Snowboarder Bo, demanding of another poster to know whether that poster is calling you a liar puts them in the awkward position of being called upon to affirm or deny your statement that you are lying. It would be better to avoid that or similar questions, as well.
I’m not going to try to defend US labor law - I think it is an utter disaster. I am, though, extremely pro-organized labor.
I find it most amusing how conservatives in the UK were always in favor of economic freedom until it came to that freedom applying to workers. Britain traditionally had a system of voluntarism as regards unions - the law did not protect union membership or union activity. A person could be fired for union membership, or for going on strike. Firing a union member under those conditions however would lead to picketing and boycotts of the business. If unions could use their bargaining power to negotiate a closed shop for the workplace, and the owner agreed to it, then there was a closed shop.
The contents of the contract were between the union and the employer, based on their relevant powers of negotiation. And then the right worried unions were getting too powerful. So they broke their side of the deal, and started to impose restrictions on labor. Unions then (mistakenly IMHO) moved away from voluntarism, and started to look for government level protections. And then we had the late 70s. And then we had the witch Thatcher, who used the coercive power of the state in unprecedented ways against unions, unleashing the police on them at Wapping and Orgreave, and essentially calling anyone who wanted to join a union as a potential security risk (GCHQ).
The bottom line is that economic conservatives have preached economic “freedom” for as long as it worked in the interests of capital. When freely organized unions got overly powerful, they showed their true colors and used the state to attempt to destroy unions…
Everyone on the leftist side is arguing against murder, intimidation by force of arms, and poisoning workers with dangerous chemicals. That’s great and all, but it’s like arguing against Fascism—no one is going to support the opposite position, and all those things are highly illegal, anyway.
What Sam Stone and I are arguing against is not unions themselves, which are perfectly legal under the First Amendment, just like any other assembly, but government-enforced recruitment into them and the prohibition against firing members of unions. Again, I can’t see why anyone is for this. Do you really think that business owners have the duty to employ and provide for people in some kind of feudalistic contract?
I am not aware of any right to have a job or any duty to employ people. Business owners should have the right to fire anyone at any time (unless they have agreed not to do so in a contract, in which case they should be made to pay the penalties provided for in the contract). Unions certainly have the right to demand such contracts, but business owners should have the right to say, “I don’t think so,” and fire every last one of them. But that might cripple their business, WHICH IS WHY UNIONS HAVE BARGAINING POWER IN THE FIRST PLACE.
I was actually saying the reverse. In my universe, WalMart is non-union. In a non-union world, no one would do any better than the WalMart employee, so leaving won’t help very much. (We don’t have to go into their other sins here.)
The philosophy behind the closed shop is that since all employees get the benefits of a union contract, all employees should at least pay dues, though I believe in some places they don’t have to join. We can argue this both ways, but it at least has some justification.
But why should business owners be forced to give union benefits to people who would rather do without them instead of paying dues?
The worker is saying he wants to be a non-union worker for an owner. The owner agrees and proceeds to compensate him in return for his work. The government steps in and says, “Oh no! Can’t have that!”
Can you spot the error?
I see no inconsistency. I did not say employers should hire non union workers; just that they had the option of not signing a union contract. That this would create a hardship on management is of little concern to labor. How is that different from telling workers to quit if they didn’t like working conditions or wages?
That’s strange, because only 7% of the non-government workforce in the United States is unionized, and yet the median wage is $14/hr, and the average wage is $16/hr. How do you reconcile your statement above with the fact that 88% of the country is not in a union of any sort, and yet has median wages 50% higher than Wal-Mart’s?
I don’t think most of you on the left have a real understanding of how wages are set and what they represent. You have this simplistic, dystopian view that workers are powerless serfs who need to gather in groups to fight off the dogs of capitalism, or to have government protect them from people who would otherwise work them into the ground for subsistence wages.
In reality, every worker in a modern market economy is in fact a small business. A business of one. You have a product to sell: Your time, your skill, your productive capabilities. These are things businessmen need to purchase to make their products. So you enter into price negotations. But so do many other people. Labor is scarce - even in times of general high unemployment, it is always difficult to find the perfect person for the job you need done, at that time and place. So you have to bid for their services along with all the other businesses out there who need people.
What do you think would happen if all minimum wage laws were dropped today, and unions vanished overnight? Would we be back to Oliver Twistian robber barons and powerless employees? Would the average wage fall?
Not bloody likely. The average wage is set by the laws of supply and demand, not by the power of unions or even government (since the average wage is significantly higher than the minimum wage).
If you look around the world at the emerging countries, you might notice something - even though unions are unheard of, and there are little to no employment laws, every time a country gains in overall wealth, the average wage rises. Why do you think that is? It’s certainly not because the AFL-CIO helped them - they actively work to keep those people poor by supporting protectionism and other measures to keep their products out of our markets.
The answer is that average wages go up as the people become more productive, because their labor has more value. If a business refuses to pay them what their labor is worth, other businesses will see an advantage and hire them at a better wage and conditions. This forces the first company to respond. Eventually the wage that a given job earns is roughly equivalent to the marginal value the employee brings to the company, minus a small amount of profit which represents the return on the business owner’s capital, risk, and his own productive capability in the form of intelligence, or inspiration, or drive, or sound investment decisions.
Unions push the equilibrium around a bit through monopoly power. Generally not to the benefit of workers as a whole, but rather by redirecting some wealth from other workers to themselves. I certainly would be happier if GM employees made $15/hr. I’d get a cheaper car. But I’m forced to pay more for a car than I should because the Union has been given special coercive powers, and the union shops protected from outside competition through tariffs.
Right. The justification of a protection racket. If the employee is forced to give his money to a third party to pay for the cost of negotiations he never asked for, that’s the antithesis of ‘Employee Free Choice’. That employee may think the union is a bad idea, and there demands are ultimately going to cause the company to fail and him to subsequently lose his job. But he’s forced to play along anyway.
Also, unions give money to political campaigns. This means that if I’m a Republican and my job forces me into a union, I get to spend my working life having part of the fruits of my labor being spent to support political ideas and politicians I disagree with. That’s one reason why a person should never be forced into union membership. Or if you’re going to have forced union membership, how about a law that says unions might remain apolitical to keep their certified status? Don’t the employees have the freedom of conscience?
Not to mention that most of those “robber barons” you always hear about in warnings against unregulated capitalism got their power by government cronyism and the use of force, not by free market economics.
Nope, not unlikely since that’s the way it is. When you have evidence that things here in Las Vegas are not that way, please post it. You won’t ever have that evidence, so we’ll never see it posted here. Continued insinuation that what I have posted is untrue, without evidence, is not helping you.
But hey, call the NLRB yourself and ask them about hiring halls unions. Here’s the number: 702-388-6416.
Here’s the thing union supporters need to realize: it’s a global economy. You can’t hide from it, you can’t close your borders to it, and you can’t subsidize the problem away. Like it or not, there is a planet full of people will to do the job you can do, for lower pay. And they’ll happily trade with each other if you won’t want to play the game, and the world will be more efficient than you are and you’ll wonder why your country’s wealth is slowly leaving.
What keeps your pay up is not going to be your protection inside a union, but your ability to meet the global challenge and earn your paycheck like everyone else. Already being in a 1st world country, you have a huge advantage. You get to leverage good power grids, stable societies, educated co-workers, geographic location near many wealthy customers, and most importantly the high amount of capital investment in the companies you work for. THAT is why you get paid a 1st world wage. Not because unions are fighting for you.
UAW production line workers would have made about $50/hr instead of $73 over the years if the union didn’t exist. And that’s still a very high wage. How come? They’re not necessarily intelligent or highly trained, although many are. But even the line workers with no education make big money. Why? Mostly because of capital investment. Each employee’s productivity is magnified by millions of dollars of investment in machinery and automation, plus the billions of dollars invested in R&D, building distribution and service networks, etc. If cars were hammered together with small tools and took 10,000 hours of labor to build, all the union power in the world couldn’t get the wage for building that car above $1-$2 per hour, because that’s all the job would be worth. Pay the employee any more than that, and there’s no reason to make the effort in the first place because no one will buy the vehicle.
To the extent that unions protect jobs that shouldn’t be protected, and maintain wages higher than they should be, they are part of the problem. The UAW kept its member’s wages and benefits high - right up to the point where they pushed their companies out of business. Now there’s a whole lot fewer American auto workers, even through there are a whole lot more cars being built in the world, and a lot more wealth to purchase them with.
There are pockets in the economy where unions can do some good, so long as the balance of power between the union and the employer is limited to free negotiation and collective bargaining. But in general, wages rise to their natural levels by market forces, and many unions are formed in an attempt to deny that basic reality. With predictable results.
cite that line workers with no education make big money because of capital investment please?
cite?
cite?
cite?
You make a whole lot of assertions, and nary a cite to back anything up. We’ve already seen that your explanation of the EFCA sometimes had little to do with the actual bill, so would you be so kind as to provide cites for the assertions you made here? Thanks.
You want a cite for general labor economics? For the law of supply and demand? I picked $50/hr for a non-unionized auto worker because that’s what the non-unionized auto workers at Toyota and Nissan and other American car manufacturers cost.
As for what makes wages rise and fall, I’ll just have to refer you to any Econ 101 textbook.