Is it the job of fellow union members to push someone out? If so, that’s one hell of a mob rule union you got there.
In truth, I never worked in a union job in my life. I was raised in Detroit by people who were involved in union formation in the auto plants. A couple uncles were at the battle of the overpass and took severe beatings.
My grandfather was a coal miner in Colorado . The day my dad was born there was a union organization at the church. my grandfather was with my grandmother while she gave birth. During that time, miner goons blocked the doors to the church , then set it on fire. every man ,woman and child died inside.
I have seen the price people paid to get some power for workers. The power is disappearing. If you think bosses and companies won’t screw over workers, you live in a fantasy world.
There was a manufacturing company in my area that hired kids out of school. they allowed no safety equipment because they felt it slowed down production. Many employees lost fingers and hands. A friend of mine lost a finger. the policy they had gave him 500 bucks. Sounds fair. @9 years old without a finger for the next 60 years.
I am 67 now. When I was growing up, lots of older people had missing digits. They were former factory workers.
Seriously? You need a cite for that? Are you seriously under the impression that the typical non-union worker in America makes minimum wage and minimum benefits?
But whatever…
U.S. average salaries by occupation
You’ll notice that some of those careers are generally unionized, and some are not. None of them make minimum wage.
Labor is governed by the laws of supply and demand like everything else. If you offer minimum wage, and you can’t find doctors or programmers or mechanics willing to work for you at that price, you have to raise the price.
My company has union workers and non-union workers. But the company constantly surveys local prevailing wages, and if workers are making lower than the local median, they get automatic raises - whether they’re in the union or not. This happens for the simple reason that if you’re paying lower than median wages, you run the risk of losing your employees. And you won’t be able to replace them for less than median wages, and in the meantime you lose their productivity and you incur all kinds of HR costs and it takes time to make new employees productive. So employers expend serious effort to make sure their employees are compensated well enough.
This is basic economics. More than that, it’s the plain evidence in front of anyone who’s ever worked in private industry. That some people need to be constantly reminded that America isn’t full of minimum-wage drones is… baffling.
Here’s a nice table for you, right from The Bureau of Labor Statistics.
From that table you can see that only 2.3% of American wage earners earn minimum wage. The large majority of those are young people. Of people over 25 years of age, only 1% earn minimum wage. The largest category of minimum wage workers is females between the age of 16 and 24 - and only 8.6% of them are making minimum wage.
I’ll bet those numbers are WAY lower than you thought they were, right?
This should be indisputable proof for you, unless you think that 97.7% of American workers belong to unions. But maybe you do… So I’ll give you the actual number: About 12.4% of American workers belong to a labor union.
So not only do non-union workers overwhelmingly make more than minimum wage, they make significantly more than minimum wage - the median personal income in the U.S. for full-time workers is just shy of $40,000 per year. Minimum wage in the U.S is about $15,000. So the median wage in the U.S. is more than 2.5X the minimum wage, and the vast majority of those workers are not unionized.
As for benefits, the BLS has the statistics for that as well. And it’s about as far away from the minimum required as is the wage.
I wonder if some people have their beliefs distorted by their own career trajectory - if your only experience in a non-union job is that summer job you worked as a student, and you went from that into college and then into government or teaching or some other union job, you may have a very distorted view of what private industry is really like. Summer students are the worst-treated employees around. But even the large majority of them are paid better than minimum wage.
[QUOTE=flickster]
Is it the job of fellow union members to push someone out? If so, that’s one hell of a mob rule union you got there.
[/QUOTE]
So no cites, just straw men.
And not one cent more. But you offer only evidence of your employer’s practices, which is hardly common. I daresay rather rare. The trend I have noticed is simplifying work procedures to minimize training time, so new workers can be brought up to speed as soon as possible - as well as the standard of seeking workers with experience. And the majority of the costs of training and orientation are fixed - the whole HR department is pretty much a fixed cost once a firm is established, so the variable cost of new employees is fairly low. Also don’t you work in Canada?
No one here has made that claim. elucidator was alluding to claim that workers get “significantly better wages and benefits than the legal minimum.” But a nice data pull.
Some may consider that significantly better, except that is the median for all full-time workers. The average weekly wage for private sector non-supervisory workers, (68% of employed workers) - the ones we on the left tend to care about the most since they have a harder time getting a seat on compensation committees, is $645.96 as of last month. [Table B.6] Assuming (and it is a big assumption) they get two weeks paid vacation, x 52 = $33,589.92. Drops a bit doesn’t it. So the majority of workers in this country make just over double the minimum wage.
As for management - the median wage was $102,900 in 2009. I would definitely call that significantly better.
From your cite:
"Sixty-five percent of private industry employees had access to retirement benefits, compared with 90 percent of state and local government employees. Eighty-five percent of state and local government employees participated in a retirement plan, a significantly greater percentage than for private industry workers, at 50 percent.
Among full-time state and local government workers, virtually all (99 percent) had access to retirement and medical care benefits. Part-time workers’ access to these benefits was more limited in both private industry and in state and local government.
Medical care benefits were available to 71 percent of private industry workers, compared with 88 percent among state and local government workers. About half of private industry workers participated in a plan, less than the 73 percent of state and local government workers."
I can’t help wondering if the difference in those rates are due to the prevalence of unions in one sector over the other.
Union Members Summary
“The union membership rate for public sector workers (36.2 percent) was substantially higher than the rate for private sector workers (6.9 percent).”
By the by, overall union membership dropped again. Now is only 11.9 percent, with the majority in the public sector.
I’ll call your unsupported hypothesis and raise you my undocumented anecdote. I grew up in a middle class suburb of Seattle (Bellevue to be exact). Our experience with unions were the rather common strikes and lockouts by Boeing, the school districts, and the grocery stores. And the press was notorious for emphasizing the inconvenience to the public over the causes of the strikes. Much like today in Wisconsin. Even though work stoppages are very rare. PDF
Said grocery stores were also a common summer job, and I knew several kids who complained about being forced to pay dues since all they wanted was more spending money. So the majority experience was negative, and then they went to college and most went into the private sector and got professional jobs, and their memory is only of being ‘cheated’ out of their pay by the big bad unions, forgetting the majority of their co-workers worked there full-time, year round and depended on those union-contracted benefits, and perhaps remembering they had a few extra weeks of summer a couple years because of the teacher strikes.
So you have no real experience yourself with unions, either as a member or as an employer. And you fail to acknowledge the gentle correction to your aberrant understanding of how union contracts are negotiated and enacted, while crowing loudly that you “stand by” your obviously ignorant notions. Okaaaaaay…