Dr. Venkman wrote:You certainly have a "right" to a job if you are more highly trained and experienced. This is what Union labor is offering. Trained, experienced, skilled tradesmen. People who have gone through apprenticeships that can last up to five years depending on your union, while simultaneously attending school to learn their trade, would certainly argue that they have a right to the job over a guy off the street with a bag of tools. Unions also put programs in place to train more minorities. Hard-working middle-lower income workers deserve an opportunity to make a decent living and not have to live in constant fear of losing their job over some bullshit.

This is largely true of skilled labor positions. In lots of other unionized professions, though, it’s not really so. Hotel workers, grocery store clerks, janitors, nurse assistants – these are all Union to some extent. While there are possibilities that these folks may undergo some on the job training through their Union, lots don’t. This actually makes the argument for their unionization stronger.

Dr. Venkman wrote:Unions keep big developers and construction companies in check. That's why the buildings in our union-friendly cities aren't falling down like they are in other countries where there are no labor unions, worker's rights, and therefore no incentive at all to care about quality control and/or craftsmanship.

Again, this depends on your industry. “Quality” as experienced by the ultimate consumer may bear no correlation to unionization. In the world that I’m familiar with – nursing home workers – some places are Union and others aren’t. Some times, the homes with the worst care are the Union homes. Shitheel boss lawyers will tell you this shows Unions suck and they will be wrong. I can tell you a motherfucker who doesn’t treat the employees in their facility well also doesn’t know how to run a nursing home that cares for its residents. These situations are fertile ground for unionization.

Dr. Venkman wrote:

andy wrote:Why is it a bad thing that an employer can fire you at any time for any reason, or that I can leave an employer at any time for any reason?

You really don't believe this, do you? What would be incentive for you to take this sort of job? The reason you have a job is to generate a steady stream of income that you and your family can depend on. In your world, anytime a boss feels like it, whether it's warranted or not, he/she can send your household into a financial tailspin from which your family may not ever recover. I don't know if you own a house, but if your boss decided that he didn't like your face one day and canned you, it would only take a couple weeks for most middle-class homeowners to be up shit creek. The boss can always replace you, it's much harder for you to find another job.

How about on the job site? Would anyone speak up about anything? Who would report unsafe work conditions or harassment if you were subject to un-checked retribution from your employer? Anyone who doesn't wanna eat, raise your hand! What about compensation? "Broke your leg on the job? Tough shit! You're fired!" With no job security, the average working people of America are forced into an impossible financial situation.

This gets to the heart of the matter. I don’t really care whether anyone has a sense of entitlement about their job or not. But there is a real difference in power between being an individual worker and being a boss. Any suggestion that the power to quit is the same everywhere as the power to fire is foolish and has nearly the entirety of human history to argue against it. It’s not the same and this becomes truer and truer the lower the wage and the skill to do this job. For that group of labor to say that they must be dealt with collectively evens the score a bit. It’s not about expectations – it’s about power.

Galanter wrote: I think what Andy is missing is that unionization is a way for laborers to work under a contract.

Without the union workers who are employed in numbers that render them a sort of human commodity are very weak as individuals relative to negotiation. If a single potential hire comes in and says "ok, here is what I want in my contract" the employer says "contract? are you nuts? NEXT!".

If the workers band together it helps to compensate for the centralized power of the employer. And now they can have a contract. And part of that contract will address the terms of hiring and firing.

So it's not so much the workers have a right to a job. It's that they have a negotiated contract. The "big guys" get to negotiate contracts to their benefit all the time. Why shouldn't the "little guys?

Excellent point. Usually a collective bargaining agreement has a No Strike/No Lockout clause. This is the heart of the matter and it’s what employees are giving up – they will not withhold their labor collectively if management abides by the terms of the contract (and also agrees to deal with conflicts of interpretation in the contract through a process of grievance and arbitration). This is appropriate, it should be protected and bolstered by law and it should be something that a hell of a lot more people get the chance to participate in.

Also – Galanter: be careful here. You’ve got a reputation as a right wing malcontent and you’re damaging it.

= Justin

capnreverb wrote:As this forum's probably only card carrying teamster

nope

Andy wrote:I don't understand this sort of notion that there is any sort of right to a job.

Why is it a bad thing that an employer can fire you at any time for any reason, or that I can leave an employer at any time for any reason?

Gotta be top 5 dumbest things I have ever read on here


If it wasn't for labor unions we'd all be making 2 dollars an hour, 100 hours a week from the age of 5, getting our fucking hands cut off then fired.
Leaders of industry have shown they have no souls or humanity and must be kept in aggressive check at all times.
How could someone be anti-union is well beyond me....they are corrupt? What, MORE corrupt than the CEO of your company?
I doubt that very much.

Marsupialized wrote:Gotta be top 5 dumbest things I have ever read on here

If it wasn't for labor unions we'd all be making 2 dollars an hour, 100 hours a week from the age of 5, getting our fucking hands cut off then fired.

No, maybe you would. He would be writing software* and books no matter what other trades did.

At least notice that his question is messed up - the idea of a "right to a job" is only rhetorical bullshit. As I'm sure you know, unions don't guarantee employment, they - and labor law advocates - fight for fair terms of employment.

Seriously, if your local tells you that you have a right to a job, do you really believe that? I couldn't. I could believe my local if they told me I had a right to collectively bargain, to safety, to notification, to a lot of usual ideas of fair treatment. But if a local told me I had a right to a job, the same bullshit alarm goes off in my head as it would when a TV commercial tells me the Olive Garden sells edible food.

-r

*And since Andy has written a lot of open-source software, given away for free and in super-wide use around the world, $2 an hour would probably be a raise in pay for him (on those projects.)

warmowski wrote:But if a local told me I had a right to a job, the same bullshit alarm goes off in my head as it would when a TV commercial tells me the Olive Garden sells edible food.

The bread sticks are quite edible.

Right to a job means right to be paid and treated fairly and keep the job even if some halfway qualified asshole comes and says he will do it for 5 bucks less an hour. That's what right to a job means.

I am currently in my third union, the American Federation of Teachers.

In high school and college, I worked summers at the Bremner Biscuit Company, a factory that made cookies, crackers, and moon pies, and for which my mother worked as a secretary in the personnel office. Working there demanded that I join the Bakery, Confectionery, and Tobacco Workers' Union. If I'd had any doubts about the necessity of unions, they were erased by David Oechsli, my union steward. He was bright and humane and one of the most politically aware people I've ever met. He'd aspired to public office, but when he knocked up his girlfriend at seventeen, he married her like a good Catholic and soon found himself working at Bremner. He really opened my eyes to so many things and helped me to shrug off my father's anti-union bias.

When I was in grad school at UMASS, all of the campus teaching assistants decided to unionize. We were only the third university in this country to do so (after Michigan and Berkeley). Although we taught 1/3 of the courses on campus, we had no rights whatsoever. As a T.A. who made about $8000 a year, I was paying $350 to insure my wife and I while a tenured professor making 80 grand got his for under a hundred bucks.

Additionally, we were being illegally taxed. Michael Dukakis had pretty much bankrupt the commonwealth of Massachusetts; there literally was not enough money for the university system to operate. T.A.'s (and R.A.'s) get tuition waivers but still have to pay rent and buy books and pay fees, the latter of which generally amount to a couple of hundred bucks. The administration opted to create a $500 "curriculum fee" for all grad students--in other words, they invented a tax (tuition in disguise) simply to provide the curriculum that we were already trading work to receive.

When we unionized, it ruptured a lot of relationships. I lost respect for a lot of my classmates who chose to cross the picket lines because they "couldn't do that to [their] students." What are you teaching them, I'd always reply, by letting the administration fuck you in the ass? What lesson is there in that? I told my students what was up, why I'd be refusing to teach indefinitely, and all but the Young Republicans supported me. I'm proud to say that it was my idea to picket in front of the new basketball stadium that was being built; the construction workers chose to honor our picket line (though there were only about ten of us), causing the first major event in the strike. When the Massachusetts Society of Professors voted to walk out in solidarity with us a couple of weeks later, threatening to shut down the entire campus, the administration capitulated. Of course, they immediately began rescinding the strides we'd made in the ensuing years.

We had invited a number of officials on campus to shop around for our union and opted to affiliate with the United Auto Workers. I wondered what the UAW would want with a bunch of budding artists and academics, and the answer I got from the union president caused a standing ovation. He said that--and remember that this was 1990--our country had never been less favorable to labor interests; over a decade of Reagan and Bush had pushed naked greed to an all-time high and that young people were buying into it like never before. If there was any hope of the country becoming more sensitive to the needs of working people, what better way to accomplish this than by making teachers union people and educating our youth?

Well, he sold me. I already had strident working class sympathies but had often been led to believe that because I'm a poet and an academic, I'm not really "working people"--kind of Rush Limbaugh's notion of the cultural elite. But if I have no money and no power, not even the power of being banded together with my compadres, how on earth am I the "elite"? My first full-time teaching gig was teaching five sections of freshman comp per semester for 19 grand. If you don't think those are slave wages, you've never read a shitty essay.

Yes, I am a union man. I understand that unions, like any human institutions, can become reified and be used for ill as easily as good. But as long as their primary goal remains fighting the rich in order to help the working man and woman, they can take a chunk out of my paycheck every day of my life.

Justin from Queens wrote:
That comment about US cars sucking because of the UAW - I sincerely disagree. What's your evidence? The implications are that the fixed cost of labor (as determined by the collective bargaining agreements negotiated by the UAW) create an unfair advantage for non-UAW competitors. This is a popular and inaccurate myth.

= Justin

it's not the whole truth, but it's not all myth either. i have no proof, and no one ever will; it's all speculation.

possible reasons american cars generally suck ass.

1. too much labor costs due to unions negotiating exorbitant salaries and benefits for work performed which leads to;
2. car companies paying low dollars for crap parts, or,
3. unionized american auto workers sucking. (most "japanese cars", made by non-union labor, are made here now, and clearly they don't suck.)

this may all be based in the fact that CEOs and other higher ups make astronomically large salaries and in order for them, and labor to make so much money, corners must be cut.

a poorly made machine is poorly made either because it's parts are poorly made or the labor building them is sub-par. i can't see any other possible reasons.

labor unions are fine until they are too powerful.

i know that CUE (university employees) succeeds in preventing their members from gaining promotions that would have them leave the union. that is seriously FUCKED UP.

Brett Eugene Ralph wrote:I am currently in my third union, the American Federation of Teachers.

Thank Christ for this post. Salut, Brett Eugene Ralph!

CUPE, my university's non-academic staff, are on strike here. A bunch of services have been shut down as a result. Initially, my classmates were making a bunch of complaints about the way they were operating and I took them at their word despite not seeing any of this. It soon dawned on me how remarkably underappreciated these workers are; in fact, the bulk of students simply think of CUPE as the janitorial and food services staff when in reality they run everything from the campus library to registration to information technology. These people are providing essential services to twelve thousand people every day and they're barely scraping by minimum wage in a lot of cases because the pay structure agreed on in the last contract wasn't worth the paper it was printed on.

Unions can sometimes do shitty things but oftentimes they fight like hell for the rights of their members. NOT CRAP.

warmowski wrote:

Marsupialized wrote:Gotta be top 5 dumbest things I have ever read on here

If it wasn't for labor unions we'd all be making 2 dollars an hour, 100 hours a week from the age of 5, getting our fucking hands cut off then fired.

No, maybe you would. He would be writing software* and books no matter what other trades did.

At least notice that his question is messed up - the idea of a "right to a job" is only rhetorical bullshit. As I'm sure you know, unions don't guarantee employment, they - and labor law advocates - fight for fair terms of employment.

Seriously, if your local tells you that you have a right to a job, do you really believe that? I couldn't. I could believe my local if they told me I had a right to collectively bargain, to safety, to notification, to a lot of usual ideas of fair treatment. But if a local told me I had a right to a job, the same bullshit alarm goes off in my head as it would when a TV commercial tells me the Olive Garden sells edible food.

-r

*And since Andy has written a lot of open-source software, given away for free and in super-wide use around the world, $2 an hour would probably be a raise in pay for him (on those projects.)

I have a right to my job. A right which I intend to defend vigorously if it's ever threatened.

Dude, are you his lawyer or something? This thread has received no explanation of his statements from the man himself.

enframed wrote:it's not the whole truth, but it's not all myth either. i have no proof, and no one ever will; it's all speculation.

Just because we don't have proof doesn't mean we can't throw out hypotheses that clearly don't fit the facts we do have. So let's see if we can find any...

enframed wrote:a poorly made machine is poorly made either because it's parts are poorly made or the labor building them is sub-par. i can't see any other possible reasons.

You left out shitty engineering and shitty decisions made by management.

Japanese plants have historically been organized so that assembly-line workers are empowered to stop production if they see a defect. I also get the impression that management and labor traditionally have a less adversarial relationship. I won't go into the reasons why cordial management-labor relations would improve build quality, because I think they're self-evident. I'd argue that establishing this type of relationship is at least half management's responsibility, and probably much more.

Japanese engineers are encouraged to re-use parts that still work well rather than redesign them (American marketing execs have been known to brag that a new model shares no parts with the old... obviously, the difficulties in working out the kinks haven't done quality control any favors). I'm not an expert on other such decisions that have impact on quality and reliability, and that may not be the best example.

Japanese cars made by unionized Japanese labor: good
Japanese cars made by unionized American labor (just one plant, a joint venture with GM): good
Japanese cars made by non-unionized American labor: good
American cars made by unionized American labor: mediocre
American cars not made by unionized American labor (meaning, in Mexico): mediocre

I see a pattern here that doesn't hinge on what type of labor's being used. This pattern is slowly changing as American cars get better, of course, but through the '80s and '90s it's been the rule.