Which is nonsense. Collective bargaining is a form of negotiation in the marketplace.
There’s this comic strip that’s nationally syndicated about the evils of bad management called Dilbert. 
But I kid a little, there.
Bad management is, in my opinion, much worse than any bad union. There has been lately a number of companies (Enron, et al.) that have epitomized bad management at Herculean levels. I’d think these narratives were quite compelling, if not disgusting, and well in the mind of the populace. However, these management stories are based upon the actions of individuals, and once those particular executive managers have resigned, parachuted or been indicted out of the picture they are part of the past.
Bad union management, on the other hand, is fixed upon the union itself and that union’s name persists in the memory. Some action by the UAW, UMWA or what have you will be percieved as indicative of the union itself, regardless of the union leadership, union membership or union policies of the time.
That would be nonsense - but you are ignoring the gorilla in the room.
A union attempts to promote a monopoly. In fact, a government-backed union is in fact a state-supported monopoly, with all its attendant problems. It is no more or less moral than any other monopoly: excusable in some limited circumstances. The problem if you that it’s very easy (and I won’t outright condamn anyone for this, but it is a problem) to start believing the union’s press. They are a busines like any other, and you should never tolerate anything from them you wouldn’t be prepared to sit on the receiving end of yourself.
I think you also need your reading skills checked. Sam didn’t say any of that. What he did say was that public unions start to eat away at the sctructure of government. The fact that its government employees don’t have to join is irrelevant: many will, because of peer pressure and also clear and massive financial rewards over time.
The fact that they aren’t paid of the government pocket directly is not relevant. They are funded out of the employees, who can then vote for whomever promises and delivers more and more and more spending. This means more employees (feeding the cycle), broken budgets, but also more power to the unions. If they can become numerous and untied enough, as in California, they can very nearly control the apparatus of government outright. How many winning politicians there consistently fight against the ludicrous and ever-increasing budgets of the police and firefighter’s union? or the teacher’s union?
Likewise, there are supposed to be limits on their behavior - but they often ignore them, and usually get away with it. Teachers go on strike if they feel like it. There’s just no punishment. This is one reason to push more for local and state government, including local and state unions if neccessary - it’s easier for voters to see, and it contains the damage. (Until or unless Cali or Jersey gets a bailout, I don’t have to care about her unions wrecking the place.)
The problem with government unions isn’t so much that they exist, but that they have no natural check or balance. The only way to limit them is for their demands to grow so large they cannot win at the voting booth. And that gets very hard, because the cycle can go on for a long time before voters realize the trouble.
To sum up Sam Stone’s argument, unions can be categoried as symbiotic, parasitical, and parasitical-controlling. I’m all for symbiotic ones, because even if they occaisionally inconvenience society, they offer substantial benefits in the long term. I’m against parasitical ones, because while they might help a small minority, they can destroy whole industries or weaken them. This is a big cause (though not the only one) which destroyed the north/eastern manufacturing firms. The final type are not only parasitical, but seek to control the host through chemical cues (or votes in this non-biological case).
Frankly, I’m in favor of any government-backed union be controlled exclusively by the government, period. That may appear to conflict with my pro-small government stance, but I have no trouble with federal government authority where it has a legitimate interest. And if we collectively are protecting your union, then you ought to be prepared to suck it up and accept the bargain we make for you. You don’t have to use our protection if you don’t like the cost.
No, you completely misunderstand. Only property owners & managers are exceptional. From capital’s point of view, no matter how good a worker a worker is, he is still a worker. To promote him to a position of power & authority would be to deprive the company of good quality labor.
All workers are weak, that’s the point of capitalism. All owners are exceptional, that’s the justification for rentierism. Unions are there to protect the weak–workers–from the exceptional–owners. I meant what I said.
When the right wing talk about the exceptional, you really think they mean you? You are just a house negro thinking he’s almost a white man.
Put it another way. magellan01 used “weak” & “exceptional” to describe productivity & what he sees as merit. I used them to describe marketplace power. And the anti-Rooseveltian Right’s rhetoric in the 1930’s defined the extra marketplace power of management & property-holders as merit itself, so I consider it to be that I am using the terms in a proper historical sense.
Stopped digital clock.
You’re going to have to clarify this, because on its face this statement is bizarre and flies in the face of everything I know of business.
Every single manager in my office started out as a ‘worker’. My wife has worked her way up from floor nurse to an administrator of a large number of hospital facilities. In my very first job, working as a lowly clerk in a Radio Shack, I had worked my way up to assistant manager in a year, and in three years I was offered my own store. I didn’t take it, because I didn’t want to spend my life in retail sales. But our district manager, a man responsible for about 100 stores and probably earning a quarter million dollars a year, started as a salesman. He didn’t even have a high school diploma. He worked his way up on merit.
Wal-Mart prides itself on promoting from within, and there are many, many stories of workers moving up out of the warehouse or retail floor into management.
My brother worked his way up from a non-union trade position into a management position, and his son did the same thing in a different company.
My mother started working in a grocery store as a minimum-wage clerk, made it to assistant manager, and eventually was given the manager’s position for the entire store as the owner/manager expanded. No unions involved.
In fact, everywhere I look I see people who worked their way up from worker’s positions into management. I’ve done it several times myself. My friends have done it.
In fact, I think it’s the exception that management and workers are isolated career paths. Maybe wall street firms and law firms who hire right out of the Ivy League maintain that kind of separation, but in the mass of business life, workers almost always have a path up into management if they are exceptional.
As for all workers being weak, perhaps you could explain why, despite only about 12% of the work force in the U.S. being unionized, the average wage is more than double minimum wage? If workers are so weak, how can that be? How come employers offer health care plans and other benefits? How come the average vacation time is greater than the mandated minimum? How come working conditions are better than mandated minimums?
I should also add that another path workers have in the U.S. is to start their own businesses. Go phone around to every small trade company in your phone book, and ask the owner how he got his start. You’ll find that very few parachuted in from management school. Most owners are tradesmen who moved up.
To the extent that business regulations choke off small businesses, you’re hurting the upward mobility of the working class.
If you’re staying in a fancy hotel, one of those places with an elevator attendant, and you get in the elevator and bump into Bill Gates then there’s you, the elevator boy and Bill Gates in the elevator. The people in that elevator have an average wage of around a billion dollars (plus tips.) If the elevator arrives at Bill’s floor and he gets out, the average wage of the people in the elevator drops somewhat. What you need to look at is median wages, and they show that for the vast majority of Americans things are going backwards, not forwards. There are one or two jobs in America that don’t offer healthcare too, or much in the way of vacations or what have you.
Sam, in none of your examples did the worker move into ownership, just management. Why is that?
As a great lover of the American project & defender of its traditions from Twentieth Century socialist innovations, you presumably revere the Founding Fathers as the most perfect political scientists in human history. Were they a management class or a capital-owning class? What did they say about land ownership? Or has that sort of thing not filtered across the border? The USA was not founded by workerists, but by capitalists, or “land-ists” after a fashion. Whatever their flaws, they knew that the security of property secured the liberty of the middle class.
This is disingenuous in the extreme. In the USA, the political weakness of labor has created a situation where the legal minimums for these things are quite low.
Let me restate some of your examples to demonstrate that they don’t prove what you think. Yanks don’t get as much vacation time as workers in other First World countries. But the legal minimum is even lower. Yanks don’t always make a living wage. But the minimum wage is even lower. Yanks are dependent on their private employers for health insurance, & many lack even that.
Sounds like a failure of labor power to me.
I have friends who have done this very thing. And at the smallest level they aren’t unionized nor need to be, because their means of production is in their workers’ hands–theirs. Huh, that idea sounds familiar. Oh yeah.
Cite for business regulations that choke off small businesses, in the USA, not in France or somewhere?
Wait, don’t tell me, is it that small businesses have to pay taxes? :rolleyes:
Or is it that it’s so much harder for a small biz with no economies of scale to outcompete the big guy unless he underpays his workers? Oh boo hoo, we should be able to screw over our employees & cheat our way to lower prices!
But then what if the big guys say, “No fair!” & they start underpaying their own workers? Looks like deflation, a drop in consumer demand, & a dropping tide that beaches all boats to me.
And in fact that’s what happens in the USA, because there has been no law to make the big guys pay living wages. Only unionized industries have an agency to protect pay from creeping wage abridgment–because contrary to your fantasies, most American laborers have no laws enshrining either labor unions or workers’ rights for their industries–quite the contrary.
On a national level, the NEA does a pretty good job of lobbying on behalf of teachers and education.
At the local level, not so much. There are several districts in my area whose teachers are working without a contract and have been for quite some time. I’m not sure what the hold up is, but I know a lot of teachers who are not happy about it. I also know of districts who were forced to let some of the non-special education aides go because there was no longer any money to pay them. The schools wanted to invite parents to volunteer in the classroom to make up for that, but the union pitched a fit, claiming that any classroom work that involved working with students needed to be done by a certified aide. Who also happened to be union members. I also believe (but can’t prove) that the union was behind some districts’ decision not to bring in student teachers, even though student teachers can’t work unsupervised.
Unless Bill Gates makes an hourly wage, he doesn’t really count. Notice I said hourly wages? That eliminates rich people who don’t get hourly wages. Therefore, the median and the average are quite close. According to the BLS, the median wage in the United States in 2009 was $15.95.
The point was that workers tend to make significantly more than minimum wage. That means some other force is at play, which has nothing to do with government or unions. It’s called the free market.
Workers are paid based on their productivity. The desire of management to minimize labor costs is offset by competition for labor between companies. This is basic economics. The more productive you make yourself, the more money you can demand for your labor. Of course, this uncomfortable fact means believing that workers are powerless without unions or government is false.
Um, because I was talking about management. You grouped ‘owners and managers’ together as being some special powerful class, pitted against ‘workers’. I was pointing out that workers become managers.
As for ownership, all the workers in my company are eligible for a company stock plan, and the company matches it up 6% of an employee’s salary. Any public corporation is owned by the stockholders, and they can be managers, workers, or, for example, my 13 year old daughter who has mutual funds in her college savings account.
In private business, there is no expectation of worker ownership unless the worker started the company or the owner offers shares in the company to the worker. And that’s as it should be. After all, people have a right to property, and that includes their own business.
BTW, I had an employee when my business went under. He lost his job, but I lost my job AND tens of thousands of dollars in losses. I’ll bet he was sure glad he wasn’t an ‘owner’.
And again, if you want ownership of a business, you’re free to start one. Or invest in one. Or find a business that has a worker co-op arrangement. It’s a (semi) free country. Go nuts.
I’m sorry, I can’t hear you. There’s a giant straw man in between us.
‘Security of property’ suggests to me that workers shouldn’t be allowed to expropriate the property of business owners. Don’t you agree? If you do, then exactly what are you suggesting? How do you give workers ownership if the current owners of businesses don’t want them to have it, while still keeping that security of property? Or in your mind is it only the ‘middle class’ that has a right to property?
By the way, the notion of individual rights to property go back a hell of a lot farther than the founding fathers. And the establishment of property rights, including the right to profit and own businesses helped Europe escape out of the dark ages. Hundreds of years before the industrial revolution centers of trade and commerce were set up where explicit property rights were given to business owners to encourage them to develop trade routes and produce products for the people.
No, it sounds like people in some other countries have managed to use government to give them benefits they otherwise wouldn’t get. But these benefits come at a cost, and that cost is overall wealth of the workers. Forget minimum wages - let’s talk about median wages. You’d think that if workers were so weak in the U.S., their median wage would be lower than those other ‘first world’ countries, wouldn’t you?
But in fact, the U.S. has one of the highest median household incomes in the world. And those first-world countries with long vacations and high minimum wages lag WAY behind.
For example, according to the OECD the median family income in the U.S (measured in standardized purchasing power). was $49,777 in 2009. In the UK, it’s $39,000. In Ireland, $35,000. France and Germany also have lower ppp household median incomes than does the United States.
Or another way to look at it - by mandating longer vacations, some of these countries have simply forced the employees to trade off vacation time for income. There are no free lunches.
Check your calendar, it’s not the 1930s, and Roosevelt hasn’t been in the White House for over 60 years.
The point I was making uses the words I used as they are commonly understood. Regardless of theory, the fact is that there are workers who are at the lower end of the productivity scale and those at the higher end. Unions seek to erase that distinction. There existence rewards the less productive and punishes the best workers. That does a disservice to both the workers and the company. It even cheats those who don’t naturally fall to the upper end of the spectrum by depriving them of the incentive to improve. Not only is this a bad idea from a practical sense, it’s flatly immoral.
A number of my friends use to interact with a major car manufacturer’s parts subsidiary. The stories they told me were frankly amazing (in a bad way). Every aspect of the company was undercut by the most egregiously unproductive behavior imaginable. This is a far cry from the days when the same unions fought for fundamental things such as safety.
When I worked in a service industry my company did not want to deal with such unions and made an earnest attempt to match their wages. We had an in-house grievance committee that brought issues before management and also arbitrated worker/company disputes. We had a really good work force and if an employee was a slacker they were not given a free pass because that meant someone else had to pick up the pace. It’s a shame all companies can’t be like that.
There will always be a place for unions but like anything else, power and stupidity can get in the way of a good thing. The automotive unions certainly deserve criticism for some of the bailout mess. Please note the word SOME.
One of the reasons Las Vegas and Atlanta became trade show hubs was because the unions drove the trade show business out of New York and New Jersey.
I was booked for a trade show in New York about 15 years ago, and when I researched the costs for it I discovered that the unions ran the trade shows like a racket. Even the owner of a computer wasn’t allowed to carry it onto the show floor himself. Even unpacking a van outside was controlled by the unions - there was no law or rule preventing a trade show participant from unpacking his own van on a public street, but I was advised that if I did so, it was highly likely that my equipment would suffer an unfortunate ‘accident’ sometime during setup once I was in the union-controlled facility and not allowed to touch my own gear.
Once in the facility, you couldn’t even plug in your own power cords in your booth. You had to wait for a union electrician to come along and do it. Of course, all this was charged to you, and the total fees associated more than doubled my cost of exhibiting at that show.
I canceled. So did a lot of people. That trade show stopped being held in New York a couple of years later.
- Maybe I’m just tired, but can you clarify “Public unions are unaccountable to no one but politicians”? That just doesn’t make any sense. Do you mean they are *accountable *to no one but politicians?
- Public unions deal with politicians because it is politicians who are basically their employers.
- Corporations have learned to play the political game very well too, but right-wingers don’t seem to have a problem with that. Oh right, because corporate interests are right-wing interests.
- The public employees’ union dues is not tax payer money; it’s the public employees’ money. Once payday rolls around, it ceases to be the taxpayers’ money any more. You don’t get to claim that your tax dollars are going to fund unions any more than you get to claim that your tax dollars are going to fund grocery stores, porn sites, liquor stores, car dealers, or any other place the public employees spend their money.
- Union dues can’t target the general public in a partisan political matchup to support one candidate over another. Unions have voluntary PACs for such activities.
- You’re absolutely right about public employees voting in blocs. What’s wrong with that? They’re acting collectively to hold their employers accountable, just as any other bargaining unit does. But at the end of the day, getting public employees to consistently vote a certain way is like trying to wrangle eels.
- Very few public employees have the right to strike.
Quite the contrary. First, saying public unions get power and finances from the government is like saying the UAW gets power and finances from Ford, GM and Chrysler. Second, by demanding better pay, better staffing, better safety, etc, public employees are actually equipping themselves to better benefit the people who pay their bills. Negotiations is not just some independent third party demanding of the state/county/city/board that they “give us more money!” It’s the workers themselves demanding better staffing, health and safety regulations, funding for equipment, binding third-party arbitration, etc.
Teachers who demand smaller classes are doing so in order to more effectively teach the kids of taxpayers. Teachers who demand better pay are hoping to attract and retain better teaching candidates to teach the kids of taxpayers. Correctional officers who demand better staffing and training will be able to better protect the taxpayers who live in the vicinity of the prison. Correctional officers who demand pay higher than $20,000/year are doing so because they want to attract and retain quality officers, and protect the taxpayers. Firefighters who demand regular training are doing so to make sure they can more effectively protect the taxpayers. Nurses aides at state mental facilities demand better staffing to ensure those with disabilities have enough people caring for them to keep them safe. And those same nurses aides demand adequate pay to ensure they can continue to attract quality candidates for these jobs. RNs and CNAs at veterans homes demand the same things for the same reasons.
These public employees put pressure on politicians because it’s the politicians who at the end of the day control the purse strings. Imagine there’s a state rep who votes to slash funding (and ultimately staffing) at an over-populated MRDD facility. In a non-unionized workforce, your average MRDD workers probably aren’t going to know how their state legislator votes on this bill or any other bill, or have the political know-how to fight back when their funding gets cut. But with a unionized workforce, these workers can take action on behalf of the developmentally disabled patients (and their families)-- and themselves-- because their union has a political department keeping tabs on all funding bills, and their union can help them organize letter-writing campaigns, rallies at the state capitol, media campaigns to shine a light on what budget cuts at an MRDD facility would do to the residents, etc.
And *that *is democracy at its finest. It’s not thuggery or bullying. It’s public servants fighting to make sure they can adequately serve the public-- through political means. They’re taxpayers themselves, they’re voters. They have that right. They’re not holding anyone hostage.
For the record: I work for a public employees union. Lord knows I’m not getting rich and I’m not sitting back in some office just collecting a pay check. I’d love to be home with my wife and kids every night, but am on the road probably 150 nights a year on behalf of the members I represent. I’m considered “union management,” but I’m not a thug; in fact if I were, my job would be a hell of a lot easier. Everything I do is for the well-being and safety of my members, who work for the well-being and safety of taxpayers. I’ve campaigned for both Republicans and Democrats on behalf of my union’s PAC. I’ve never sucked a public teat, nor do I care to. Although I’m sure as a baby I sucked a teat in public once or twice. I do believe in fully funding public services, not because I want to keep sucking at some public teat, but because I 100% believe fully-funded public services make for a better overall society. And de-funded public services create a society where only the “haves” will thrive.
And that is why I work for a public union: I believe having an organized public workforce that holds politicians accountable for their actions is the most powerful tool to ensure we have a thriving middle class. I suspect many right-wingers are especially afraid of public unions because they see these organizations as the most powerful thing getting in the way of their Libertarian Tea Party utopia. So a tactic to demonize the PE unions is to spread memes like “lazy” and “undemocratic” and “bullys” and “political insiders.”
I read fine, I get paid for it. I think you need to read between the lines a bit more.
Where the hell did he say that? How many federal employees do you think there are? How many of them do you think belong to unions?
Federal employees have enough job security that they don’t need a union.
What percentage of federal employees do you think belong to a union? Heritage pegs it at 35.7%, I think that they are overstating the percentage. Once again, job security isn’t an issue for them.
Federal employees are not members of AFCME, their lobbying activity is pretty tame. Their lobbying for pay usually starts and ends with them trying to get the same raises that the military gets or inflation. Federal employees get paid about 20% less than similarly qualified private sector employees.
Then why did Sam say it? Maybe he didn’t mean to say it but it slipped out anyways as if it was relevant in some way.
How is that abusive? Are you saying that federal employees shouldn’t be able to vote.
How many federal employees do you think there are? How many of them do you think join unions?
Yeah but its a LOT easier to bash federal employees. They do it every election cycle. They don’t bash cops and teachers and firemen every election cycle and their unions are FAR more likely to be the kind of union that Sam is whining about. Which is the disconnect I am trying to point out. All the complaints about unions are really things that happen a LOT more a the state and local level and yet conservatives pretend they happen at the federal level and say we should move stuff to the state and local level while ignoring the fact that corruption and waste are FAR more prevalent at the state and local level than the federal level.
Teachers are not federal employees.
See there you go again. You are confused. The union activity you seem to have a problem with IS at the state and local level.
Federal employee unions also have very little power. They can’t strike they, can’t use union dues for political purposes.
Yeah, noone’s been bashing federal employees. Nope noone.
which ones are these, name three.
Unions can’t vote. Union members have no more right to vote than you do.
How exactly would that work? Federal employees pay their EMPLOYERS union dues to negotiate working conditions for them with their EMPLOYERS?
How are we collectively protecting the federal unions?
A few problems with unions:
-they are monopolies-they can force you to join (if you want to work there)
-they are immune from certain lawsuits
-they are able to force employers to pay above -market wage rates (one reason why GM collapsed)
-the union management people are often corrupt-like the Teamsters (under J. Hoffa) the Mafia stole billions from the union pension fund. Guys like Jackie Presser and Frank Fitzsimmons became millionaires, via the theft of union money.
THey also make work conditions worse-take the UAW-they force employers to pay for non-productive employees (shop stewards), and compromise the management’s ability to run the business.
There is a reason why the UAW has been unable to organize the workers at transplant automotive plants in the USA (Nissan, Toyota, Honda, Hyunai)-and it is because the workers see what the UAW has done to GM.