union

[oakchas]

Why? Why start this argument?

I'm a union member. I'm proud to be one. I wasn't always. I even "scabbed" once... So I've seen both sides.

My wages are not tied to minimum wage.

For those of you concerned about raising the minimum wage, you probably don't buy American anyway. If you are that concerned about the cost of items, you not only don't buy red white and blue, you more likely won't pay the price for union made either.

Fine with me. I do it too. Harblor freight, RYOBI, Delta, Jet, they all manufacture off shore. Your costs for goods, tools, and now services such as tech support, are all lower... and that's great! We have more money to spend. And we spend it. Nothing much lasts like it used to, but tha's okay, I can buy a replacement cheaper than fixing the old, broke uint. Of course, that means I'm throwing at least half of my money away, buying 2 of things I need for when the first one craps out.

America has gone away from the industrial model. And that should be great too, it should force us to be innovators, inventors and creators. But go to any retail store and tell me how innovative, creative, or inventive those who serve you are! They are our next generation. Most of them couldn't even make change if the register didn't tell them how much to give you. So, where are they going to be in 10-20 years?

Unions were the answer years ago. These poor stiffs were given jobs at a decent wage, they consumed goods and kept an economy going. The unions made certain that they didn' have to work 16-18 hour days to do it, that they had some vacations, that they had a pension after giving their lives to a company to help it prosper and its shareholders decent dividends.

Historically, we know that unions are responsible for the 40 hour work week, vacations, health care, and pensions. Unions are in decline.

The 40 hour work week is going away... people are taking work home, heck, many of them are taking work on vacation with them.

Pensions are a thing of the past (well, except for upper management's defined benefit packages (those are pensions, folks)).

Health care! Who can afford that? Good health care is outrageous in cost. Union and management are suffering on this one. Nobody can afford decent health care for themselves, let alone their employees. I'm one of the lucky ones. I've got decent health care. I only paid about $5,000 for the $1,000,000 cost of my late wife's treatment for Leukemia... Most of the folks I know would have been bankrupted by that, because they don't have decent healthcare.

What we will see again is the return to unionism. Why? How an I say that?

Remember when Wally World was sued by the women for inequal pay?
Remember when Wally World was sued for making people work off the clock?
Have you seen how some communites are not letting Wally World into their areas?
Have you seen how Wally World has closed stores so as not to be unionized?

This is nothing, BTW, against Wally World per se. It is just an excellent example, a macrocosm of what you will see in the future. Right now, you see it as class action suits against employers. Scattered around the country. Wal Mart is one of the biggest, most visible. But there are other similar. And as a result, eventually, you will see the same types of uprisings you saw in the 30's and 40's for unions.

Why?

Because, while you think you are getting richer, with more money to spend... you aren't. Somebody is getting richer though, and that small minority will do all they can to make themselves richer. It won't cost them... It'll cost you. You'll take work home to keep your job. You'll not use some vacation because the "big account" needs you to deal with it. This costs your employer nothing. And it doesn't cost you any money really... just the time to enjoy it. So one way or another you are poorer for it.

And, mind you, we are the new poor. The middle class is the lower class, or becoming that. What does that make the truly poor? The minimum wage earners? I don't know... I think they were the type that became indentured servants (a nice way of saying slaves, almost) in the old days. What will become of them now? some will become criminals. we will put them in prison. Our prisons are already overcrowded. Who pays for the prisons? you and me... not the wealthy, beleive me.

See... this could go on and on and on... I'm content that I won't live to see it, probably, hopefully, honestly. It's gonna get ugly.

But, right now, things don't look so bad... I can afford 2 Harbor Freight Air hammers at $4.99, and a couple of 4 1/2" grinders at $9.99. And some chinese guy is getting a bowl of rice for that! Life is good!

[oakchas]

What does a union president make relative to the workers who are paying his salary?

I know exactly what my union president makes. He makes exactly what I make. He works in my plant at a regular job. When he is off doing union business, my dues pay him the same wage he would get if he were working his job in the plant.

And, on whole, Union Presidents of the "Biggies", do not make any where near the same multiple of the workers salary as the CEOs do... Do not perpetuate myths.

Here's a good example: UAW international president... one of the "biggies"

from their constitution:

International President, one hundred and thirty-one thousand, five hundred and two dollars and twenty-six cents ($131,502.26) per annum.

source:http://www.uaw.org/constitution/article11.cfm

Gee, he makes about twice my wage... and I'm not UAW so He makes less than double what most UAW workers make.

[Black wallnut]

I've confessed here before that I am a lawyer. ....

Yes, sure, I could understand if business were suffering and Unions were putting people out of business with excessive demands. ......

Curt Jameson

First I think this topic is extremely close to the line as far as a political discussion that is expressly prohibited on this fine forum. That said......

It needs to be said again IMHO that one only has to look to GM and FORD where the cost of union members extended benefits after retirement are breaking the company... or at least contrubiting greatly to that effect.

Years ago I worked for a non-union company that was co-owned by a man that also had a union shop sister company. We as non-union employees made more money and were treated with more respect by the owner than the union employees.

One other time I was employed by a small grocery owner at the same time that a larger non-union shop larger chain grocery store was opening business. I got really fed up by some of my patrons that were union members working for the competion complaing about the pending new store while their union made no effort to even ask us to join. Made me wonder if the unions were only interested in large numbers to increase their income and not the individual workers that they claimed they wanted to represent collectively.

As to minimum wage... I live in a state with one of the highest min wages. Cost of living is extreme...cost of housing is horrendous....cost of fuel is near highest in the lower 48.... and unemployment is higher than the national average. The higher min wage has cost jobs from those in our society that really need them; not that they need jobs any more than any other segment of the population.

[jseklund]

First I think this topic is extremely close to the line as far as a political discussion that is expressly prohibited on this fine forum. That said......

I agree- but it can also be an interesting economics debate. I think it depends on how we treat it, and so far it's been pretty civil. We'll see....

[onedash]

Well I think for the most part (and im sure there are exceptions) people who make minimum wage deserve it. There are all kinds of grants available for education. I am against long term welfare especially when you have people birthin babies as a source of more income. Back to education. Im all for the gov't using my taxes to get someone an education because its temporary and that in turn makes them able to be a productive member of society and eventually pay taxes and so on.
Both the places my wife has worked as a nurse will pay to send their employees to school for about a 2 year promise to work there. So you could start out dirt broke as a janitor or something and become a nurse and make good money. Of course you have to be smart enough to get into school and that might not be easy for everyone but if you are willing to work hard you can move up in the world. And the military has pretty awsome benefits. I guess if you are from a wealthy family it might not look like it but you can get 100% free tuition assistance while you are on active duty and the GI Bill when you get out. SO there are plenty oportunities out there and if you messed those options up at a young age you can't blame society for those errors in judgement.
But it really bothers me when they say tax the rich. Why should the ones that worked hard (some got lucky) to become rich be taxed more than the ones that didn't take any risks.
A lot of people on this forum have the talent to build things for profit. But even if you can build the best furniture doesn't mean you are willing to take the risk to open your own company or have the business sense to be succesfull. But if you did and became the next millionare does that mean lets tax your pants off? NO!!! You should be rewarded for your success. After all if you became a millionare you probably have some employees and are already directly responsible for plenty taxes making their way into the system. The guy who didn't take any risks isnt writing anyones paychecks.
after reading fairtax.org I am sold on that system. might be worth starting a thread on that one.

[Hellrazor]

I can talk from both sides of the fence on the unions issues.

1. Union: Instead of 10% copay of health care premiums, we pay 4%.

2. Union: New, lower paid A#$%^#$%^& insist on fixed raises, instead of %, since they get more money. They outnumber the senior people who want a %.

3. Union: Votes are by majority of those present. So if 15 out of 200 show up and approve something... you are SCREWED.

4. Union: Protection of employees who are useless.

5. Union: Officers ignore things they shouldn't unless it effects them.

-------
I've sat at the negotiations table for 3 contracts at work. My reason, it was simple, I didn't want idiots speaking on my behalf. I frustrated the **** out of 2 different union negotiators we had. They don't want to be at the table long, they want to get it done so they keep getting $$ from us. Some of the demands the idiots put on the table actually made people on both sides laugh or snicker.

But my days in that are over, I am now on the management end of the game.
Now I pay about double of what I used too but I also have far better coverage. But union dues + old copay is still more than I pay now.

Sitting at the table was fun though. I used to number crunch the insurance copay offers and trend them out 10 years at the current yearly increases from the insurance companies vs the copay increases. Then I'd have them reject them because 5-7 years out the copay would exceed the projected raise. It got to the point that our negotiator used to joke if I remembered my calculator. We actually made out well on a 4 year deal because I trended it out and proved it wasn't a good deal for us down the road. The idiots used to think it was a good deal until you looked at the precedent you are setting for years down the road.

[paintandbodtman]

Never worked for a union,have been self-employed 95% of working adult life. Every one should have to try it sometime, self-employment would go a long way towards elimanating obesity in this country if a great amount of workers on someone elses payroll were self-employed and were'nt anymore productive while working for their selves than they are now they would probibly starve to death.
I have to agree with most of the comments however both for and against unions in this thread, but don't agree with most of the reasons for not increasing minimum wages. the OP was concerned dems were going to raise wages and therefore affect his lifestyle because of increased prices in my opinion if the republicians really wanted to preserve marriage as we know it now than they would want wages to increase so families could spend more time together instead of haveing to work two and three jobs just to exist, but instead their're concerned with whos sleeping with whom behind closed doors.
Next time union stewards and management meets to discuss working conditions in this country the unions should try to holdout for workers pay to meet a certain ratio of upper management pay, maybe then the stockholders would insist on management pay coming back down to some realistic figures and then everyone would benefit, both workers and consumers alike.Also if lowend wages were raised maybe the american worker would be willing to work these menial jobs again in hopes of bettering theirselves and we would'nt have as many illegal imigrants cause the jobs would not be there for them. Just my 2 cents worth of rant.

Wayne

Wayne

[fiasco]

Indirectly, yes, union wages (and many non union) are more then likely tied to minimum wage.

Any wage that includes COLA (cost of living) fluctuates based on the consumer price index. Increased minimum wage = higher cost to deliver service or product produced by low end jobs = increase in price index.

And, if a company chooses to "argue in bad faith" and replace a union workforce with a "unskilled" and "untrained" non-union workforce, for whatever reason whatsoever (even if the reason is that the president of the company is anti-union), it should be within their rights to do so.

A contract is negotiated full of stipulations and methods of grievance for both sides. You can't up and break a contract for any reason whatsoever. Kind of negates the import of having a contract in the first place.

[cgallery]

A contract is negotiated full of stipulations and methods of grievance for both sides. You can't up and break a contract for any reason whatsoever. Kind of negates the import of having a contract in the first place.

Many contracts "negotiated" by corporations are a means of delaying the inevitable. That is, you can continue to meet the union's demands (and eventually see the business fail). Or, you can refuse the demands (and the business fails now). Kinda darned if you do, darned if you don't. But I don't feel contracts agreed to under these conditions should be any more enforcable than one you sign with a gun held to your head.

IMHO, too much power has swung to organized labor and that is primarily what has gotten many of today's largest corporations into such a mess. A mess, BTW, that we will all pay dearly for when they walk away from their pension obligations. It is going to make the S&L fiasco look like a walk in the park.

Just my $.02.

[rickd]

Without a minimum wage, unscrupulous employers(there are always some) would take advantage of those who are least able to afford it - the working poor! In fact, the minimum wage was introduced for this very reason - too many business owners refused to be honest and pay a fair wage for work and thus govenment action became necessary. If all employers had acted fairly then a minimum wage wouldn't be required.

A minimum wage is fair to employers as well as it protects one business from unfair competition by another who takes unfair advantage of workers. For the same principles, only in reverse, a minimum wage is just as important as 'monopoly laws' are for business who use that as a way to stifle or eliminate competiton.

Eliminating, or having too low a minimum wage, is simply false economics IMHO. If an individual is unable to get by on the wages he or she earns then inevitably that individual in the end is going to have to rely more on government assistance for their well-being(welfare, medical care, housing assistance, food stamps, education expenses etc. etc. etc.). Only in this cases taxpayers will foot the bill while unsrupulous employers just put more money in their pockets and get the rest of us to subsidize their business!

A minimum wage isn't a give-away! It's a sound investment for everyone who pays taxes.

Rick

[cgallery]

A minimum wage isn't a give-away! It's a sound investment for everyone who pays taxes.

Rick

It does seem kinda arbitrary, though. I mean, shouldn't it be pegged to something? It seems useless in its current form.

[rickd]

[quote=cgallery;221162]It does seem kinda arbitrary, though. I mean, shouldn't it be pegged to something? It seems useless in its current form.[/quote
I don't think it is as arbitrary as many other laws and regulations passed by governments - like income tax for example. There are a few obvious factors that apply to miniumum wage considerations.

First, the minimum wage should be enough to encourage an individual to work rather than go on welfare. Secondly, the minimum wage should take into account the annual salary that equates to the basic 'poverty level' in a jurisdiction.

Here in British Columbia where I live, the minimum wage is $8.00 hr. It's been at that level for a while now and is going to be re-evaluated next year. It was set at that level based on stats for poverty levels, economic development issues and what it takes to achieve a modest standard of living.

Rick

[vaking]

Firstly about the minimum wage - in the tri-state area where I live I think it is a meaningless concept. Wellfare assistance is comparable to what one makes working full time on minimum wage here. Wellfare assistance comes with medical coverage, minimum wage - does not. In other words - if you need to live on it - you will be better off refusing the minimum wage job and going on public assistance. I know people in their sixties who were offered jobs for $12/hour (much more than minimum wage) and refused those jobs because they would loose more in social benefits by accepting the job. The only people I know taking minimum wage jobs are teenagers making some pocket money. At the same time there are people here making less than minimal wage. Couple years back I had a roof of my house redone. I signed a contract with roofing contractor and the next day a truck full of mexicans arrived and started working on my roof. One of them spoke few english words. I bet they were all illegal and paid less than minimum wage.
Now about unions. I also was on both sides of the barricade. I started as a member of IBEW (electrical workers) but later became engineer and a manager in the same company I had worked earlier as a union employee. That union was the worst example of what a union can be. I quit the union at first opportunity. Several years Later there was a nasty strike between the union and company management. The strike was totally unjustified, the management was many times stronger than the union and had the ability to crash the strike in a day if it wanted to. But it did not. The strike lasted 4 months and at the end the union accepted the terms that were actually worse for the union than the ones offered by the management from the start. The union was pretending to be fighting but in reality was making everything possible not to upset the management. I spent 4 months working 72 hour weeks because I was one of few managers who grew from the union and knew how to do the union work. When I analyzed for myself the results of the strike - I figured out what happened. It was not the fight union vs management. It was an attempt by a competing stronger union to get rid of a weaker competition. The weaker union conspired with the management and provoked the strike in order to defend its positions. The management went along because weaker union is good for the management and short-term strike was actually good for the company bottom line (corporate customers are simpathetic with the company fighting the strike so revenues are uneffected but salaries are saved). The union members spent 4 months without pay and never got a penny for it. The union trumpeted the final terms as a win though the terms were no better than the starting offer. I was so disgusted - I quit few months later not only the company but the industry altogether.

[fiasco]

Many contracts "negotiated" by corporations are a means of delaying the inevitable. That is, you can continue to meet the union's demands (and eventually see the business fail). Or, you can refuse the demands (and the business fails now). Kinda darned if you do, darned if you don't. But I don't feel contracts agreed to under these conditions should be any more enforcable than one you sign with a gun held to your head.

IMHO, too much power has swung to organized labor and that is primarily what has gotten many of today's largest corporations into such a mess. A mess, BTW, that we will all pay dearly for when they walk away from their pension obligations. It is going to make the S&L fiasco look like a walk in the park.

Just my $.02.

I'm familiar with the UAW so I'll use that for reference.

The hourly wage paid to workers is but a small fraction of the total cost to build a vehicle. The big hit on labor costs in a vehicle is pension and healthcare and that varies by manufacturer (GM is really eating it). I personally think that pensions won't be there when I retire and don't plan around it being there. I would rather see Chrysler buy out pensions of current employees and switch to matching funds (1-1 or 2-1) on my 401K then a questionable pension plan.

This would reduce the cost of retirment "down the road" to the company and it would protect my retirement because I would be in control of the funds and won't have them yanked out if my pension fund collapses or the company files BK. I max out my 401k every year.

"Too much power" has not swung to organized labor. In fact, organized labor and the unions are weaker now than at any point in the last forty or so years. Your whole "gun to the head" analogy is farcical at best. The company negotiates a bad contract for itself (killing itself with pension load twenty years down the road) and it's anyone's fault but theirs? I don't know if you have ever read a UAW contract but some of the verbage is comical at best and often added at the companies (not the unions) behest.

[fiasco]

I do like the stereotyping of the typical union worker occasionally brought up in this thread as lazy, greedy ect. The fact is that those types of union workers do exist and methods are written in the labor contracts to deal with these people. However, I find in the case of the company I work for that they don't take advantage of it and keep these people on regardless of incompetence, unreliability or open violations of the labor agreement.

Further, that incompetence isn't restricted to union workers in my plant. The incompetence goes right up through (non union) management who disregard cost saving measures even when they are blatantly obvious. This is a fortune 500 company. These are supposed to be captains of industry, stars in their field... generally speaking.... they are anything but.

Just a short example of how my company ignored my advice on how to save over a half a million dollars because my plant manager wouldn't accept advice from a "lowly lazy union worker". This same event has repeated itself numerous times.

The vehicles are assembled in body shop largely by robots. The shells are sent through paint and just before coming into assembly robots spray undercoating under the vehicle and in the fender wells. Occasionally the robots go a little nuts and will hose down the entire vehicle shell in undercoating. On this particular day, the robots hosed down 10 vehicles in a row.

Here is where I and management diverged on the solution. Managements solution was to pull ten floaters (extra people not tied to a job already) and stopped the line to wash the vehicles. (undercoating is VERY difficult to get off even wet). Having seen this scenerio played out before I walked up to the plant manager and told him that it would take a minimum of half an hour to clean the vehicles up. I told him that the best solution was to tag those shells as no builds, put the VINS back in the system and pull the shells off of the line with forklifts at the corner (where the line turns 90 deg) and get the line started back up.

Management disregarded my advice and kept the line down for 30 minutes trying to save these ten shells. Our plant pumps out one vehicle every 45 seconds. We lost 40 vehicles produced dicking around with these 10 shells. Assume an average (low) dealer cost of $15,000 per vehicle that is over half a million dollars in lost production.

After 30 minutes, the vans still were not clean and management came up with a brilliant plan to start the line and pull the shells off at the corner.

Do you think that management learned it's lesson? No. This event repeats itself a few times a year like clockwork. Every time it happens management has forgetton the lesson of the past incident and immediately reverts to the original "Wash them off" gameplan.

The ultimate irony is that it used to be a job for someone to stand there and supervise the underbody robots to correct the situation before a string of vans gets hosed down. This job was eliminated. So, instead of paying less then $200,000 a year for one person per shift to supervise the robots and protect production, we lose 1.5 to 2 million dollars production per year to try to repair the vans when the robots mess up.

The simple fact is (in the auto industry) that money would be saved, the cost of producing the vehicle would go down and the end cost to the consumer would be reduced if simple common sense was applied in areas that have absolutely nothing to do with labor costs.