Why have the TPTB been able to foment so much union hatred?

Great Debates
141

You’re not answering anything I said directly here. I asked you… how are you going to keep your business going if fewer and fewer people can afford to buy your stuff?

If enough businesses cut down on enough employees every single solitary argument you just made becomes irrelevant. The economy is getting a taste of this right now with this recession. Too many employers have cut back on too much labor and wages and now many of them are going out of business for one reason: no one can afford their stuff. If you disagree with my argument (which is based on following YOUR argument to its only possible logical conclusion) you are certainly invited to claim that this is not happening as we speak.

You see, your argument has this nagging problem called unintended negative consequences. Those consequences persist whether you accept them or not.

142

I’m not so sure they do try to justify every policy that way. Do you have a link to them explaining why they are against not hiring new teachers?

Have they actually threatened a strike?

In what ways are they an active impediment? I live in DC as well, and its pretty clear that there are tons of problems that exist in the education system. The unions have been culpable as well, but even if there were no unions, the DC schools would still suck.

143

I don’t expect and I also don’t deserve to keep the business going if I can’t produce anything that the people have money to buy. Businesses have to adapt to the changing needs of the marketplace. If people can’t afford whatever the business produces, that entity deserves to die off. This redirects investment capital in marketplace to place its bets on another business that might do better. If no business can deliver the goods cost effectively, the consumers can make it themselves or live without it.

144

You do realize, of course, that this results in lower standards of living and could even reduce a country to third world status… right? That’s not an idle fear, either; a LOT of people out there are worried that we’re headed for just that kind of situation.

Have you seen the statistics lately on the growth of the homeless population? It’s also a direct result of all that downsizing and wage stagnation. Don’t tell me… you’re a social Darwinist, too?

145

You have the wrong opposite. A closed shop is a situation in which, in order to work at a business, you have to agree to follow the union’s rules. The opposite situation would be one in which, in order to work at a business, you have to follow management’s rules.

And yeah. I’d be okay with that.

146

To elaborate:

Unions give workers a voice in how an organization is run. If you’re looking for fairness, you’d also want to give a voice to the owners in how an organization is run.

The fact that it’s such an absurd idea to even consider whether the owners get a voice shows how skewed we are. Indeed, some people think that, to balance out giving a voice to workers, you have to forbid a voice to workers, never even considering whether owners get a voice.

But that’s ridiculous. Owners deserve a voice in how their organization runs; so do the people who actually do the work of running it. And unions provide that voice.

Yes, unions are bad sometimes. They’re organizations made up of humans, and humans are bad sometimes, film at 11. But unless corrupt companies indict the entire model of corporations, corrupt unions don’t indict the model of having unions.

147

The problem is the opposition (see: Ruminator, IdahoMauleMan, etc.) sees the entire concept of workers as a (decreasingly) “necessary evil”. They see nothing else but this. The worker is to them an obstacle to true prosperity (the wealth of the industrialist/investor class).

Bringing up the “union” word only aggravates that irritating rash that sits in that unseemly place in their psyche.

148

Meh. I refuse to psychoanalyze the people I argue with: I’m hardly in a position to do it in an unbiased fashion. I’d rather deal with the situation than the people on the other side.

149

I’m not sure if I understand you - are you saying it would be OK if management made it a condition of employment that you could not join or try to organize a union, and that if you did you would be fired? Likewise with things like firing anybody who went on strike, busing in strikebreakers, etc.

If you are, then we agree - both labor and management should be free from coercion, and the state should take no action apart from enforcing the laws against violence and intimidation.

Regards,
Shodan

150

The main issue with the UAW is not wages (Japanese transplants pay comparable wages). It is the unions attempt to sabotage productivity-the UAW requires you to:
-hire useless union “stewards” who draw a slary but do no work
-come up with absurd job classifications, which forbid guys doing one job, from performing another. That is why the japanese plants are run so much better-if a problem on the line shows up, everybody pitches in and gets it up and running again. The union doesn’t want this-for obvious reasons.
-works against productivity improvements-if a line worker comes up with a better/faster way to do something (in a japanese plant) he is given a bonus and an award. In a UAW-run plant, his lunch box will be trashed, and he will be ostracised -“what are you trying to do-put us out of a job”?
BASICALLY, THE UAW IS ACTING LIKE THE WORLD IS STUCK IN 1930!
That is why it is digging its own grave.

151

Think about it this way.

If you go with the irrational premise that the worker is a decreasingly necessary evil and that the worker is seen as an obstruction to the business owner and investor’s goals for prosperity, you can accurately predict a whole host of arguments that are made not only by anti-labor union people but hard core defenders of capitalism in general.

They’ll try to tell you that “what’s good for the industrialist and investor class is good for workers” but as you press them about the holes and factual errors that show up while defending that argument, you will find their responses are all consistent with that one irrational premise.

Yes, I’m quite biased, but I’ve had much experience knowing how that clock ticks. Hell, I used to be a Republican just like them.

152

I never said that workers were an obstacle to prosperity. Nobody in this thread has said that. What has been explained repeatedly is businesses do not hire or keep workers that can’t produce the revenue to justify their wages. The revenues to pay wages come from the customers of the business.

I have no problem stating that workers can be instrumental and vital to a growing business. However, I still have to point out that you distorted the foundation of business motives: businesses do not spring into existence because they have the goal of hiring employees.

Any chimpanzee can hang Open-For-Business sign in the window and hire people. Hiring people is the easy part. The hard part is creating and maintaining a sustainable business to pay them. All the year 2000 dot coms that hired a bunch of people but went bankrupt after burning through their investors’ cash is testament to that. The 60% of failed restaurants are more examples of hiring staff but eventually have no customers to fund the payroll.

You think any of us criticizing unions are clueless to what workers do? Virtually all of us are (or have been) workers. Unless you’re one of the lucky few that came out of Princess Diana’s birth canal or are one of the favored suns of Sultan of Dubai, all of us will have the down-to-earth-slap-of-reality experience of working for others. Lucky for us, yes?

Personally, I’ve dug ditches, worked at fast food, manned call centers, and held probably a dozen other jobs after that. I’ve punched time clocks and worked salary. I’ve done manual labor and intellectual paper pushing work. My mother worked 2 jobs and we wore 2nd-hand clothes growing up. Virtually all business owners and CEOs were former low-level workers. We are not strangers to what workers actually do and what their perspective is. It is you and your writing that shows ignorance regarding the real value of workers.

153

But what the union bashers seem to not get is that there is a near perfect intersect between workers and customers.

To wit, when people go around talking about slashing union wages and arguing in favor of bringing them down to non-union wages, you’re talking about cutting the purchasing power of customers. This is especially hypocritical when you look at all the CEOs who got bailouts and then multimillion dollar salaries after running their companies into the ground. There is one consistent thread that makes this hypocrisy and total ignorance of the worker-customer connection understandable: a total disregard for and disrespect of workers, and a total lack of understanding of how important they are.

If all that sounded like too many words, then I’ll summarize: you cut union wages, you also cut your customers’ wages. One or two hundred people taking pay cuts and layoffs is one thing; but we’ve been seeing this happen millions of times in America, and we are now paying the price for that.

Nothing you have written up to this point has shown any consistency with that sentiment.

  1. Excuse me. I never said businesses spring into existence because they have the goal of hiring employees. You accuse me of putting words in your mouth and then you turn around and do the same thing.

  2. Oh, I totally understand your point. A lot of businesses are run by one person or a family or 2 friends or a married couple and have no employees at all. My insurance business started out that way.

Businesses spring into existence for the sole reason of making profit and that is not a virtue. It is a problem. There are other considerations that should be taken into account, such as the good of society. Businesses that cannot grasp that concept have no place in society: like workers, they can be liquidated and replaced.

Businesses may not solely exist just to hire employees, but they need to get re-acquainted with the concept of the social contract. That’s how I run my business and I’m doing quite fine.

Capitalism has gone too far with “businesses exist solely for profit”. Our society is in this mess because we have ZERO sense of community. The people on top have shown that if you screw over everyone below and exploit the world, you get filthy rich. You have mega corporations like Wal Mart coming into towns and driving mom and pop stores out of business; the workers at Wal Mart wind up getting public assistance. Wal Mart’s lack of a community spirit means we taxpayers have to cover the mess they leave in their wake. Worse yet when they force manufacturers to go overseas to meet their price targets: which means more jobs lost, more unemployment benefits paid out, more welfare and medicaid, the latter two covered entirely from “jump” by us taxpayers.

So please, this is NOT about some straw man argument about whether or not “businesses spring into existence because they have the goal of hiring employees”. I did not say that. Nobody has said that. What we’re talking about here is why we need Unions to help America fight this trend. Unions, of course, are far from the only solution, but they are a part of it.

The whole solution, which sadly is beyond the scope of this thread, goes way beyond mere Unions: the solution is that we need to resurrect the concept of the social contract, and bring about a system of Trickle-Up economics.

And when you bust unions, drop workers’ salaries and engage in a race for the bottom as is the state of affairs all over the country, you guarantee that even more restaurants than normal will fail… along with a lot of other businesses.

I will reiterate: because workers and customers intersect nearly perfectly, and after a million or so layoffs and pay cuts across the country, the blowback to every business in America is totally unavoidable.

There’s no stopping a huge number of restaurants or (past/future) dotcoms or whatever individual business you can think of, from failing - that has always happened and always will. But back in the day we used to have new industries coming along to absorb these job losses. We do not have that now, and blaming the unions for this state of affairs is grossly inaccurate. Blaming the Government is also way off-base.

Speaking of blaming the Unions, for all the BS about the United Auto Workers in this thread, no one has yet to mention the fact that the number one cause of the Big Three’s downfall was NOT Union wages. It was the fact that the Big Three was producing gas guzzlers that no one wanted to buy despite that they cost LESS than Asian cars! Let’s put it another way: if you had gone into General Motors and gunned down every Union worker EVER, and replaced them with zero wage mindless whatevers to build GM’s cars… they’d still be SOL. The problem was not Unions. It was the investors and upper/mid-Management, who designed those crap cars. Go ahead, tell me it was the Unions who designed those cars. Please do.

THIS is why I say there is a hate-the-worker sentiment here: the rampant, militant disregard of glaringly obvious facts that, to rip your statement off, a chimpanzee could figure out, far exceeds what can be excused by ignorance.

Yeah, I come across as angry here. It’s because I’ve had to deal with Conservatives trying to take Americans for suckers for years. Blaming Unions for stuff that was not their fault. The utter hypocrisy of bashing Union wages while giving CEOs a free pass for making millions while their company is run into the ground, and then having the nerve to come get the taxpayer to bail them out. Then, after voting unanimously for this thievery, coming back and blaming the DEMOCRATS and the UNIONS for it. Yapping endlessly about how the evil Unions wreck companies and broadbrushing them all as being useless, and then falling totally silent when there’s an Enron, or worse, APOLOGIZING IN CONGRESS for the hate being directed at BP.

What surprises me is that Right Wingers didn’t blame unions for taking down AIG.

154

Agreed. And those businesses will fail. So what?

You can’t legislate competence.

I’m sure most business owners would love it it money would fall from the sky, too, or if their customers would pay them a billion dollars for a dog turd. So?

155

You think you have some amazing insight about the Venn Diagram showing that workers and customers overlap?

Ok, did you also know that business owners and customers overlap as well? The customer with a dual status as “worker” or “business owner” or “shareholder” is irrelevant.

You said in a previous post, “The point is, if you ever achieved that holy grail of no workers, you would also have no profits. What would be the point of going into business?”

That didn’t sound right to me.

How nice of you to be so generous.

I take the more consistent approach. If businesses owe society a so-called “social contract” then EVERY SINGLE HOUSEHOLD owes society that same social contract. EVERY HOMEOWNER should hire with carpenters to fashion wooden cradles, bunk beds, tables, and toys for the children. Every homeowner should hire those homeless folks off the street to help clean their house. Every single unemployed philosophy graduate that can’t find a professorship should be hired by parents to tutor their children. We should hire all hire local actors and clowns to entertain our kids instead of “outsourcing” it to television and DVD players. According to your logic, this would create more “consumers” and more consumer spending. This ignores the fact that the homeowner reduces their consumption to make this happen.

Are homeowners and parents not on tho hook for all this simply because they aren’t “Mr and Mrs. Jones Inc”? That little “Inc” suffix is just a cosmetic label. Either we have this supposed universal social-contract or we don’t. I don’t see how businesses have this special status that they owe us this social-contract. As a matter of fact, if you really want to talk about community, we should start with parents & homeowners first to take the initiative and not the businesses.

This I can agree with.

I have no problems with the underlying idea of unions. It’s just a collective bargaining unit. It wouldn’t be much different if a bunch of “employees” got together and formed a corporation called “PeoplePower” and sold their services to corporations under a “business contract.” A union is convenient way to sidestep such a legal construct.

However, the other abuses that really depart from the collective bargaining is real and justifiably attracts the ire of consumers and voters.

The century is still young. Give it time for such a narrative to form. No, don’t worry, that won’t happen because most history books are written by liberals. :slight_smile:

156

That’s okay–I’m sure you don’t :).

No, I’m not okay with that. The flip side of that would be a union making it a condition of employment that you could not listen to what management said, and that if you did you would be forced out of the shop. Neither arrangement would make sense.

But having a closed shop, in which labor gets a represented, coercive voice, puts labor on equal footing with management, because management ALWAYS gets a represented, coercive voice.

The only way to say that management isn’t coercive is to point out that you’re free to work elsewhere. And that’s equally true for a closed shop.

157

Quote:
Speaking of blaming the Unions, for all the BS about the United Auto Workers in this thread, no one has yet to mention the fact that the number one cause of the Big Three’s downfall was NOT Union wages. It was the fact that the Big Three was producing gas guzzlers that no one wanted to buy despite that they cost LESS than Asian cars! Let’s put it another way: if you had gone into General Motors and gunned down every Union worker EVER, and replaced them with zero wage mindless whatevers to build GM’s cars… they’d still be SOL. The problem was not Unions. It was the investors and upper/mid-Management, who designed those crap cars. Go ahead, tell me it was the Unions who designed those cars. Please do.
You misrepresent the situation. When gasoline was cheap, Americans WANTED big cars. GM, Ford, and Chrysler made them, and for the people who wanted small cars, they built (or imported ) small cars. These were always secondary to the big, V-8 powered sedans. The japanese and europeans always made small cars-because gasoline was expensive in their home countries. That is why (when gasoline tripled in price) Detroit was stuck with lines designed to make big cars.
Meanwhile, the UAW forced GM to adopt something called the “jobs bank”-this was a system whereby every union worker would be paid (85% of his salary), even if the lines were shut down!
the cost of this made it absolutely impossible to make smal cars in the USA (at a competitive price). By 1998, it was estimated that the Japanese had a $2000 labor cost advantage/car (over GM).
GM, Ford, and Chrysler attempted to close the gap by cutting doen the quality of the parts these used-which is why GM’s small cars were crap (ask someone who bought a Cavalier). The UAW also refused to renegotiate the insame “jobs bank”-which lead to GM going bankrupt.
True, GM management was pretty bad-but UAW work rules and regulations made it impossible to compete.:smack:

158

what does TPTB stand for?

159

The Powers That Be

160

Well, sir, you got me there. So let’s hypothetically take out the working class from the superset of overall customer population. What kind of purchasing activity do we have left then? How would that affect the economy?

But it is right. Businesses would love to run with no one at all. You tried to compare my not hiring a secretary to do my SDMB posts to being just like that and that comparison had serious flaws which I pointed out.

You should have just argued that technology itself is making many types of workers obsolete. That at least is a more solid argument, and it would logically summarize all those points you were making. Plus it would actually be a tough nut of an argument to crack. (See, I used to be a hard core free market laissez-faire advocate. I know this stuff, man.)

How telling of you to scoff like that.

Sigh.

Shakes head

Just about every household already does that. Please, tell me how many households out there do you think there are that don’t go to the store and buy cradles, bunk beds, tables and toys that were made by various craftspersons-equivalets and sold to the store (middleman) to sell to us? Again, the problem that has bedeviled them is technology and… foreign, cheap labor. What we need to do is buy more Made in the USA. Or, more accurately, made in a Western Democratic nation that imposes fair wage, workplace safety and pollution control laws.

I buy person-crafted stuff because it lasts longer.

Or, at least hire American labor instead of illegals.

I’m all in favor of giving the homeless vocational training as well as pulling them off the streets immediately. A lot of newly minted homeless people out there are sane, sober people who got washed out in the Recession and who’d love the opportunity.

Funny you should say that. The tutoring business is pretty brisk nowadays.

Now your arguments are getting silly. Who do you think makes those TV and DVD movies? Actors. Those actors we see on TV don’t fall into Hollywood from the sky; they come from our communities. Talent shows featuring local acts from all over the country are making a comeback. American Idol, anyone? Your argument is incredibly shaky, although it might have been more sweat-worthy had these talent shows not become so common and popular.

Look, your counter arguments are just not accurate. You’re reaching for straws here.

As I said, if you would just say that technology is allowing homeowners the convenience of getting more of what they want with less workers, and that the danger of my point is it implies that we need to roll back technology, you would actually make me sweat over this. The word you’re looking for is “Luddite”.

Automation is a dangerous weapon against all workers, including Unions. However, as I said before, you’re still going to need someone to have money for you to sell your goods to them. My overall point still stands: if you put millions of workers out of a job with automation or productivity improvements (two words which cover every argument you’ve made) and they have no jobs to replace it, your society is still screwed.

I believe that homeowners should buy more local goods.

Part of what ruined America’s working class is that we got suckered into going for lower prices. We bought into the argument that “why buy a $3000 television made by American workers when you can get a $300 TV from China?” You sound like someone who’s been on this Earth longer than me… who was that TV maker that used to have the old guy that said “Expensive… and darned well worth it!” America’s mistake was that we did not listen to that.

I agree with your point in spirit: we need to do more buying local and be more socially conscious about our purchases. To rip off the slogan of those who bash Wal Mart, there is a very high cost to low prices. I am a big advocate of shopping at farmers’ markets, for instance: and when the dollar tanks and gasoline becomes outrageously expensive, everyone will be wanting to do that.

Eh, Unions are actually legally defined organizations.

How are these abuses any worse than the abuses by corporate bosses? I never hear you having anything to say about corporate bosses who walk away with millions at non-union companies as they’re going under. What, you think they do no wrong or something?

You guys already blame unions for the fall of GM, Chrysler and (almost) Ford. That’s almost as desperate a reach.