The employers who value their employees are, for the most part, the ones with unionized employees.
I hope the Koch brothers pulled the trigger prematurely. They financed Walker and he is a right wing union buster by trade now.
The one thing you can not give up is collective bargaining. Otherwise you do not have a union. A single employee has no power in the face of a corporation. They can do whatever they want. No single employee is so good or valuable that he can not be replaced. When an employee dies, the company does not go under.
I suppose most of you were not around before unions came in. it was bad. It will be bad again. I worked with a guy whose first job was a shit checker. In the auto plant there were no doors on the stalls. They did not want people wasting time on the can. His job was to make sure they were really crapping .Factories were loud and dangerous places. Safety was forced on the companies by the unions. Unions got paid vacations. Unions got health care. They are evaporating now and will soon be gone.
Nonunion places had to offer the same benefits to attract workers. They also had to do it to keep their industries from unionizing. We all enjoy a lot of good fought for with the blood and sweat of unions. As they die, do you really think compnies will continue to provide the benefits. A lot are already cutting them back. It will not stop.
Union busting got in high gear when newspapers killed them. Since then, you have not read one positive story about unions. The anti union programming is almost complete now. The young 20s at my racketball club all react in horror when unions are mentioned. For them the anti union programming has been very successful.
The example given was for Frank working as a waiter. I think most restaurant owners will bend over backwards to acquire and keep a quality staff that is capable of providing outstanding service to their customer base. None of that statement equates to a unionized workforce. None of the scenario also relates to offshoring, unless customers are phoning in their orders from the table and the calls are going to a call center in BFK somewhere.
Your view of the business world pertains only to some mega corporations, and almost no small business owners.
As for your claim that working for an employer is an adversarial, it’s sad that maybe this has been your only experience. One of the advantages I think I’ve had in being an independant/non-union employee over the past 40 years. I can negotiate my own deal and if I decide I’m not enjoying where I’m at/what I’m doing, I am free to go elsewhere.
Here’s the deal - if unions have to forfeit collective bargaining, then so do corporations. No more corporate hiring managers. Shareholders - each and everyone one of them - have to interview each and every job applicant and then decide who they will hire.
The government recognized that corporations were a form of collective bargaining for capitalists and decided that labor should have the same right.
The thing that pisses me off the most in all this is hearing workers complain how much more union workers make. Of course they do. That is the entire point. Yet instead of trying to get the same gains for themselves, they want unionists to give up theirs.
Corporations effectively destroyed the private sector unions in the 80’s, and the median wage has been falling ever since while executive pay skyrockets. The unions are not the reason for the declining middle class. They are the reason we still have one.
Public sector employees know the economy sucks, and I don’t know of a single one that has not agreed to pay cuts and hiring freezes until the economy recovers. Of course they fight hard to minimize them, since they also know they are the last things restored after that recovery- while executive bonuses are the first, if they are ever cut in the first place.
You obviously don’t know many restaurant owners. I have. Spent most of career working and managing for small restaurants. Never belonged to union at them.
The first criteria is who can you get that is willing to work cheapest and for the longest hours without bitching and don’t mind receiving minimal benefits. Hopefully they are good at customer service. Wait staff tend to be self-selecting in that regard - better service equals better tips, and great waiters can make good money. Poor waiters make shitty tips and quit.
Counter service - which the majority of restaurants are - the key is speed. How fast can you ring up customers. Food in these establishments is a commodity, not a service, and the goal is to maximize production, not service.
Restaurants are actually a great example of where unions could work great at providing benefits over employers. Most restaurant staffs are too small to get a decent health insurance plan. If workers could unionize, that pool could qualify for better deals. If the government and employers truly respected workers and wanted to save money, they would create legislation to enable unions to provide more benefits directly. Of course that would free most employees from having to tolerant shitty employers and workplaces since they would no longer depend on them for the minimal benefits they now receive.
Seriously? You really believe that?
Here’s the reality: The employers who value their employees are the ones whose employees bring value to the company. The ones who act as though they value their employees are the ones who realize that their employees are necessary and hard to replace. That can mean being in a union, but it can also mean being highly trained, having unique skills, being better than average at your job, or there being enough of a labor shortage in the employer’s industry that it would cost more to lose the employee and hire a new one than it would to keep the employee happy in the first place.
I’ve never worked in a union job, but I’ve been given lots and lots of examples of how my employer values me. Bonuses, better offices, perks, higher-than-average wage raises, etc.
My prediction as to what would happen if a restaraunt unionized:
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The cost of food would go way up. Since you work in the industry, I’m sure you’ve noticed that running a restaurant is really hard to do right, and that most of them don’t survive. It’s also a very labor-intensive business, so anything that drives up the cost of labor has to be transferred to the prices on the menu.
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Once customers realized that the wait staff was unionized, the tips would stop flowing because they would assume that you’re getting all the compensation you need.
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Without tips, the quality of service would decline. If staff couldn’t be fired easily because of the union, service would get even worse.
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Eating out would be like going to the DMV. You’ll kill the business.
Well, if it happens to you, it certainly must be the norm for everyone in every line of work.
No, it’s the norm for every job based on the evidence in front of your eyes - such that non-union workers on average get significantly better wages and benefits than the legal minimum.
All employees bring value to the company. If they are not, they should never have been hired. All employees deserve the right to decent wages and benefits. Not just the ones above average, because then you have already excluded 50% of the workforce. Labor should not have to rely on macro effects like labor shortages or gluts to determine their benefits. And most industries will always have a glut of labor since most jobs are created to only require a minimal set of skills.
Employers could/should offer incentives to reward outstanding workers and performance, but those should be on top of decent wages, not in lieu of them.
Exactly, those that perform are successful. I can see a union steward pulling them to the side and telling them to quit making everyone else look bad
Again, while technically a restaurant, they don’t fit into the Fred the Waiter example above
Question is, especially if you are including the counter service establishments, are you going to be willing to pay the extra costs for your walk-up/drive-up meal in order for the business to cover the increased overhead?
Requests for citation seem superfluous, as we are blessed with the truth from the World’s Foremost Authority. Still, if you wouldn’t mind terribly…
[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
My prediction as to what would happen if a restaraunt unionized:
- The cost of food would go way up. Since you work in the industry, I’m sure you’ve noticed that running a restaurant is really hard to do right, and that most of them don’t survive. It’s also a very labor-intensive business, so anything that drives up the cost of labor has to be transferred to the prices on the menu.
[/QUOTE]
You missed the main point - it is not enough to unionize, but to transfer the major benefits such as health care to the union as well. Costs to the employer would lower, and employees would be able to increase their benefits by pooling their buying power, not relying on the employers which have less.
Perhaps. If they get sufficient benefits from the union, they could rely solely on wages, and not tips. The tip-based compensation scheme the US has now is actually pretty messed up. Getting rid of it would not be a bad thing.
So the threat of being easily fired is the only incentive to providing quality service. Pride in ones’s work automatically disappears when one joins a union? People only become waiters now because they enjoy the job. There are much better employment opportunities, but they choose that one since they actually do like working with the public. Most only do it while going to school and enter the professional job market, but I have met several who made that their career.
You lost me here. The restaurants become a monopoly on providing food? They still need to provide quality service if they want to stay in business.
Not going to happen in a restaurant. Slackers don’t last long. You don’t move your ass when the rush hits, you won’t last the week.
As I pointed out to Sam, costs would lower if employees relied upon the union for benefits (or even better, a single-payer system), instead of their employer. And even if that was not the case, yes, I would. If that is what the true cost of eating out is, then that is what should be paid.
The quest for lower prices for everything - especially the price of labor - is one of the major causes behind the destruction of our economy. But of course, now we need lower prices since no one can afford to pay for higher quality goods.
Driving down the wages means driving down the main incentive for employees to work any harder than the bare minimum. Which is one reason why waiters like their work. It does provide an immediate benefit to providing good service. But of course, most people are becoming less able to pay those tips and instead of going out and enjoying a meal, they just hit the drive thru.
My elected representatives have fled to Illinois and at least on this topic, by not working, they are representing me. As far as this voter is concerned they are doing their job.
But in a union environment, wouldn’t all that change? When was the last time you tried to terminate a union employee?
You do know that unions DO NOT impose their own rules on an employer, right? I mean, in reading your posts someone might begin to think that you were unaware that the terms of contract between an employer and a union are negotiated and agreed to by both parties. In fact, I could see where many people reading your ( and some other’s) posts could come to the conclusion that you have little or no personal experience with or knowledge of unions and how they function.
If a restaurant owner agreed to a labor contract that made it that difficult to fire employees for cause - and not keeping up in a rush is definitely cause, they don’t deserve to own the restaurant.
And in my experience, it’s not the owners that encourage a person to find another line of work if they can’t hack it, but their co-workers.
I’ve personally avoided them like the plague. However, over the years I have interacted with many union employees on various projects and business managers that had to deal with union crews. Based on the information I’ve gathered first hand (from both sides), I’ll stand by my statements.
If the union was doing their job in providing member protection, sounds to me like that would be a harassment grievance
Telling your co-workers that they suck at their job is harassment? Somehow I have never heard of a labor grievance about that. If you have, I would love to see a cite.