Right to Work Vs. Forced Union

[werepossum]

I've lived and worked in both kinds of states. When I was young and working jobs where collective bargaining would be useful it was a complete waste. Often entry-level workers would be required to pay union dues (several hundred dollars a month) and still get minimum wage. Later on in life as I worked more advanced jobs I noticed that in closed-shop states it would become virtually impossible to advance for any reason other than seniority. I've had too many bad experiences with a union taking thousands of dollars a year in dues only to have the labor contracts finalized 3-5 years late and with woefully inadequate concessions.

In my time in RtW states the entry-level jobs still get minimum wage but don't have to pay exorbitant union dues. Advanced jobs are actually available to top performers and not just those who have been there the longest. If you choose to join a union you typically have no additional rights or priviledges. The biggest benefit is the legal assistance, should you need it. It becomes a factor of choice: "Is this monthly fee worth it to me for the legal advice and other sundry services?"

Forced unionization really strikes me as similar to tithing at church; you're buying access to something (heaven/promotions) that you should be able to earn on your own (live a good life/be good at your job).

Good points. I've become a big fan of trade unions, because they actually do bring value to the table (better training) and they compete with non-union shops. If it were up to me, all my jobs would be union because there's a certain minimum competency in union contractors and workers that is simply not guaranteed in non-union workers and contractors. Still, it's scary that almost a quarter of respondents believe people should be forced into unions. It's easy to forget how much progressives hate freedom in any form.

 

[soulcougher73]

Which do you support?

I dont support either. I dont think unions should be forced, but i do think they serve a purpose. I would like both to co-exist. You can join a union if youd like or you can chose not to. Without unions capitalism would have us all working for peanuts in a lot of trades. I wish i had a union i could join for my trade.

 

[soulcougher73]

People who still believe that unions are necessary are fearmongering morons.

The world will not end if unions were outlawed. People would not starve if union bosses could no longer extort business owners. To imply otherwise is nothing short of a conspiracy theory.

To those who believe otherwise: prove it. Show me a non-union shop that is treating its employees like garbage and still remains profitable. Show me a workplace with working conditions circa 1890.

I do not deny that unions were once justified. I simply do not believe that they are still necessary. I would like some proof that the doom-and-gloom you spout would come to pass if the burden of unions was lifted from society.

It happeded once in circa 1890 as you pointed out, why would it not happen again? Sure it wouldnt happen over night if unions were outlawed. But maybe in 20 years we'd be right back where we started circa 1890.

 

[soulcougher73]

Let me tell you a secret but you gotta promise not to tell anyone because it is a really big secret, ok?

Companies like mine, and damn near every other small/mid sized business, aren't trying to exploit our workers. In fact it is quite the opposite, we treat our workers very well and in return our workers treat us well. Don't get me wrong, I can be a bastard at times but I always go above and beyond for my employees. The bonus structure I have set up for the field hands is one of the best in the industry (as a percentage of profit). Why am I dumb enough to give away my prized profit you ask? It is rather simple, when the guys doing the actual work have a profit motivator besides their normal hourly pay to do a good job guess what usually happens? They do a better job!

I don't think its a coincidence that I also have one of the lowest warranty costs and return rates (to fix something that should have been done properly the first time) in the industry.

I personally don't hire anyone that can not speak English simply because I can't effectively communicate with them. Luckily my company is in a market that is relatively new to the area so my competition hasn't been forcing me to drive costs down.... yet.

Thanks for playing though, btw, what exactly do you consider "exploitation"? In my previous examples the workers went to the employers not the other way around and they are extremely happy with their arrangements. Hell, they aren't even treated like illegals because that would mean the companies "knew", as I see it they are treated no differently than the people they replaced. The only person being exploited is the skilled US worker who no longer has a job due to our inability to do anything about the importing of cheap labor.

I have a question about the bolded above. What happens when competition does force you to lower costs. Where are you going to recoup that? Employee pay and bonuses? Just curious.

 

[soulcougher73]

It's good until your union does something stupid and it causes people to get fired. Remember how unions had the balls of GM and Ford in a death grip? Incredibly high operating costs that drive them to bankruptcy. It also means driving up the cost of vehicles so they can't compete. Cars made by Honda or Toyota were tip top quality for the price because the price reflected the actual product. GM was stuck with pensions to tens of thousands of people who don't even work there and haven't been working for the past 20 years, so the GM product that is the same price as a Honda is actually a significantly worse product because there's all this other shit that needs to be included in the price. Then they lose market share and factories close. Thanks for getting everyone fired!
That oil rig guy in this thread mentioned something about this earlier. If the unions go too far and a company can no longer compete against non-union companies, eventually that union company fails and those union guys all lose their jobs.


Another hilarious event happened at my dad's place of employment. He worked for the phone company which was at one time government owned, so it's all union. A few years ago, they had a "walk out" which is apparently not the same thing as a strike. Lots of people left the job and simply didn't go to work, but a small group kept working since it's not a strike. As a sick irony, the company was running like this for about 6 months and it seemed to be doing just fine. Those 10% of guys who still showed up? Yeah apparently they were doing about 90% of the work. After seeing how disgustingly overstaffed the company was since the walk out didn't seem to affect anything, the higher ups decided to hack and slash the company. Installers? They were all fired. Every single one of them. The phone company now uses contractors for phone and DSL installation.


Something similar happened that relates to my work, but I don't want to give too many details about company names or anything like that. A brief summary is that much of the transportation in Canada was done by one large company, and it is a union company. That company didn't want to deal with unions anymore so it started dealing with contractors. While that company is still huge and still very profitable, all they do now is transportation. Their engineering departments were butchered, and I work for a contract company that does the engineering work for that large company. In fact, most of my coworkers were canned by the big union company and are now doing pretty much the exact same work they were doing before but for a different company and with no union.

How do the pay/benefits compare between when it was union and now contract?

 

[soulcougher73]

Years ago when I started working at a large bakery, the shop steward was trying to talk me into joining the union. When he saw that I didn't want to join, he stated "What if they try to fire you, what are you going to do?" My response to him was "If I do a good job why would they want to fire me?"

I will not knowingly buy from a unionized company if I can buy a comparable product from a non-union company.

These union jobs moving overseas just don't bother me much. Unions have been pricing themselves out of the market for years. If they want to force companies to pay a person an very inflated wage to perform a menial task, then don't expect me to shed a tear when that job moves overseas.

Are unions pricing themselves out of the market or is global economics pricing them out of the market? If we didnt allow companies to outsourse would unions still be marketable? Hard to compete with 3rd world slave wages isnt it?

 

[ShawnD1]

How do the pay/benefits compare between when it was union and now contract?

Pay and benefits are mostly the same, but the union guys had a defined benefits pension whereas contract guys have a defined contribution pension.

Defined benefits pensions are worth a huge amount of money. That's one of the greatest reasons they were trying to contract things out. Companies and governments with old unions and really struggling to pay for their defined benefits pensions. What ends up happening is that people retire when they are 65 or younger (sometimes as young as 55), and they get paid about 60% of their average salary until they die. My dad has a pension like that because he was a government employee, and he makes more money on pension that I make working.

Be sure to tell your friends about the pension thing. Working for the government is awesome.

 

[soulcougher73]

Pay and benefits are mostly the same, but the union guys had a defined benefits pension whereas contract guys have a defined contribution pension.

Defined benefits pensions are worth a huge amount of money. That's one of the greatest reasons they were trying to contract things out. Companies and governments with old unions and really struggling to pay for their defined benefits pensions. What ends up happening is that people retire when they are 65 or younger (sometimes as young as 55), and they get paid about 60% of their average salary until they die. My dad has a pension like that because he was a government employee, and he makes more money on pension that I make working.

Be sure to tell your friends about the pension thing. Working for the government is awesome.

Oh this i know I wish i did, but my type of work does not have many gov. jobs available.

 

[DrPizza]

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/brooklyn/rubber_room_dirty_old_man_t4OA6Bw25idPYynCnVJHyO


That a pretty normal story, actually. A guy is accused of something, and the higher ups do not trust this man around children. They feel he is a threat and should not be teaching. If that was a non-union job, he would be fired. Since it's a union job, he can't be fired, so he sits around doing absolutely nothing and he gets paid for it. This is how unions work.

Charges were dropped against the guy. Perhaps a more correct interpretation of this story would be "the guy was found not to be a threat by our justice system, yet the school administration refuses to allow him back into a classroom to teach. They're wasting the taxpayer's dollars by paying him, but not having him teach." It appears to me that the union is doing exactly what it's supposed to be doing: protecting their workers from being fucked over - it's protecting him from being fired over unfounded accusations.

Also, it's really nice that you chose the example of the rubber room, ignoring the 10's of 1000's of other teachers in that same union for whom the system is working correctly.

 

[ShawnD1]

hey're wasting the taxpayer's dollars by paying him, but not having him teach." It appears to me that the union is doing exactly what it's supposed to be doing: protecting their workers from being fucked over - it's protecting him from being fired over unfounded accusations.

So in your mind, paying people to do literally no work at all for more than a decade is "doing exactly what it's supposed to be doing"

This solves the mystery of why NYC has major budget problems. How many of the other unions have rubber rooms? Are there dozens of bus drivers getting paid to do nothing because their licenses were revoked and they can't legally drive a bus anymore?

 

[Steeplerot]

Amazing that people "entertain" themselves by getting worked up by a bunch of blowhards making a buck feeding them wild stories that fit the agenda the want to hear. Pretty pathetic really. People with no life filling up the emptiness with bs outrage. My advice? Eat heart smart, those big insurance folks are salivating over the money to be made when beck finally sends you over the edge....heart bypass surgery or massive coranariese are not cheap fear/outrage junkies.

 

[werepossum]

It happeded once in circa 1890 as you pointed out, why would it not happen again? Sure it wouldnt happen over night if unions were outlawed. But maybe in 20 years we'd be right back where we started circa 1890.

In 1890 productivity dictated 12-hour days, children for some work, lousy work conditions. China (though it's rapidly improving) and most third world nations have the same problems. When productivity is so low, there's no room for shorter work days, child labor laws, or money spent for worker safety. Unions do help force up wages as productivity increases, so that resource owners don't pocket all the additional wealth, but they can also force up wages to the point that resource owners are forced out of business and their workers are unemployed. Today however the main guarantor of workers' rights is the government; only a small percentage of workers are union.

 

[NetGuySC]

If unions are so great, why does the union that pickets Publix grocery stores hire non-unionized people to picket?

 

[Red Dawn]

If unions are so great, why does the union that pickets Publix grocery stores hire non-unionized people to picket?

The thing is that they are not all great. Some of sre necessary some are not. The problem is how to you stop people from Unionizing? Can't make it against the law, people have the right to organize. It's up to the companies to decide whether or not they want a Union shop. Of course then they have to deal will all Non Union when it comes to dealing with their vendors employee as. their unions won't let them work with non Union companies.

 

[JeffreyLebowski]

Of course unions are a burden to businesses...it keeps them from treating their workers as little more than cattle. "Right-to-work" is really a misnomer. In these states, unionization is effectively stamped out in many areas, thus removing any leverage that most workers have. The employer-employee relationship is not mutual (despite what libertarians and corporatists say), and is often very one-sided in these states.

Yes because we see that unions only care about one thing. Themselves. People died in NYC because the unionized city workers wanted to act but hurt and not do their job because the city had to cut back because it doesn't have the money. Seriously, most union workers are low intelligence, manual laborers that do a job almost anyone can do.
Why do Garbagemen, sorry Sanitation Engineers, street sweepers, factory workers, ect that barely made it out of high school or didn't, "deserve" to make as much if not more money in some cases, as those that went to school, went to college, and actually had the gumption to better themselves to be more competitive in the work place?
Those that bitch about the evils of capitalism and how unions are great at combating it, don't understand that Unions are as capalist as they come. They are all about screwing the company and end purchaser of the companies products, to fatten the unions bank rolls.

 

[CitizenKain]

Why do Garbagemen, sorry Sanitation Engineers, street sweepers, factory workers, ect that barely made it out of high school or didn't, "deserve" to make as much if not more money in some cases, as those that went to school, went to college, and actually had the gumption to better themselves to be more competitive in the work place?

Maybe you should ask why the people who went to college to be competitive are getting screwed instead of wondering why people in other jobs are getting paid well.

 

[werepossum]

The thing is that they are not all great. Some of sre necessary some are not. The problem is how to you stop people from Unionizing? Can't make it against the law, people have the right to organize. It's up to the companies to decide whether or not they want a Union shop. Of course then they have to deal will all Non Union when it comes to dealing with their vendors employee as. their unions won't let them work with non Union companies.

Unions are only a societal problem where they have no competition, such as forced enrollment states or in government. Otherwise an unreasonable union merely harms its employees as non-union or smarter union shops take their jobs. A corollary would of course be where one union represents all employees within an industry, such as the automobile building industry. In that case unionization played a factor in nearly destroying the American-owned portion, to the benefit of foreign-owned competitors. (Although you can certainly make the argument that unions' abuses merely sped up what management's poor decisions were doing anyway.)

I don't think it would be moral to make unionization illegal, even where the unions have clearly not benefited society in general and the workers in particular. The only exception might be the federal government, where lack of competition coupled with the federal government's ability to spend more than it takes in makes unions particularly dangerous.

 

[Red Dawn]

Maybe you should ask why the people who went to college to be competitive are getting screwed instead of wondering why people in other jobs are getting paid well.

Well back in the late 90's and early 2000's it seemed like a good idea to get a CS degree, such a good idea that there's a glut of people with degrees in that field. To bad so many of those jobs are being outsourced. But hey they went to school so they are entitled to make more money than a Fireman, Policeman and even a Garbage Collectors, you know, those jobs that are necessary to keep society running.

 

[ShawnD1]

Maybe you should ask why the people who went to college to be competitive are getting screwed instead of wondering why people in other jobs are getting paid well.

It's because college grads can't strike. If the engineers in NYC won't do the job, engineers in Albany will. Do you have a computer with AutoCAD? Good. You can pick up exactly where he left off. I'll email a copy of the files.
People like garbage men and factory workers can strike because they do a job that is right here and cannot be done by someone in another city.

Garbage men also have much larger numbers. The city might have 200 guys doing garbage pick up, so it's hard to fire and replace all of them when they collectively decide to skip work. Your secretary can't go on strike because you can replace her in less than a week.

Another thing is that professionals are often in a spot where they can't randomly burn bridges and piss people off. To get my engineering certification, I need something like 3 years of work experience and a written letter of recommendation from my boss saying that I'm good at what I do. Guess what happens if I fuck around and don't show up for a week. I don't get a recommendation and it delays my certification.
If you work in a factory, who gives a shit if the boss hates you. It's not like you get any kind of certification for making widgets, and it's not like you have a chance of moving up the ladder. If you get fired from this shitty job, you can just get another shitty job somewhere else. You (the royal you) have nothing to lose by collectively screwing your employer and burning all of your bridges.


Basically it all comes down to the fact that unions are capable of existing because strong arm tactics work in those particular fields.

 

[rudder]

I don't think it would be moral to make unionization illegal, even where the unions have clearly not benefited society in general and the workers in particular. The only exception might be the federal government, where lack of competition coupled with the federal government's ability to spend more than it takes in makes unions particularly dangerous.

State Government as well. As the article puts it... "“We can no longer live in a society where the public employees are the haves and taxpayers who foot the bills are the have-nots.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/04/business/04labor.html?_r=2&hp

The main issue I see with unions are that once they get sweet contracts... it is very hard to take those benefits away.. even when negotiating new contracts. A company experiencing difficulties economically is screwed. If it were not for government bailouts a lot of airlines with unionized mechanics, flight attendants, and pilots would be out of business. The same can be said for domestic auto manufacturers. the government bailouts and bankruptcy laws are what saved a lot of them.

 

[werepossum]

State Government as well. As the article puts it... "“We can no longer live in a society where the public employees are the haves and taxpayers who foot the bills are the have-nots.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/04/business/04labor.html?_r=2&hp

The main issue I see with unions are that once they get sweet contracts... it is very hard to take those benefits away.. even when negotiating new contracts. A company experiencing difficulties economically is screwed. If it were not for government bailouts a lot of airlines with unionized mechanics, flight attendants, and pilots would be out of business. The same can be said for domestic auto manufacturers. the government bailouts and bankruptcy laws are what saved a lot of them.

Valid points.

 

[ShawnD1]

Well back in the late 90's and early 2000's it seemed like a good idea to get a CS degree, such a good idea that there's a glut of people with degrees in that field. To bad so many of those jobs are being outsourced. But hey they went to school so they are entitled to make more money than a Fireman, Policeman and even a Garbage Collectors, you know, those jobs that are necessary to keep society running.

Don't bullshit us. If you actually had a soul and cared about the wellbeing of the city, you wouldn't stand behind union workers who intentionally cause the city to shut down and stop running whenever they feel like it.

 

[Red Dawn]

Don't bullshit us. If you actually had a soul and cared about the wellbeing of the city, you wouldn't stand behind union workers who intentionally cause the city to shut down and stop running whenever they feel like it.

I don't stand behind Unions that arbitrarily shut down the city at a whim

 

[Phokus]

What is the point of a union when corporations can simply bypass them for non-union members. And thanks to the advent of IT infrastructure, we can now bypass Americans altogether for non-manufacturing jobs as well.

Even Adam Smith recognized how fucked up this can get:

"It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms. The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily; and the law, besides, authorizes, or at least does not prohibit their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen. We have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work; but many against combining to raise it. In all such disputes the masters can hold out much longer. A landlord, a farmer, a master manufacturer, a merchant, though they did not employ a single workman, could generally live a year or two upon the stocks which they have already acquired. Many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year without employment. In the long run the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him; but the necessity is not so immediate."

 

[Brainonska511]

Themselves. People died in NYC because the unionized city workers wanted to act but hurt and not do their job because the city had to cut back because it doesn't have the money.

If you're talking about the recent snow clearing, please post proof instead of some rumor from the NYPost.