QUOTE(Castle Rock @ Sat 12th July 2008, 6:00pm)
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QUOTE(dtobias @ Sat 12th July 2008, 7:15am)
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I don't have a high opinion of labor unions myself; my mental image is of fat, lazy jerks who refuse to do any work unless it's in their narrowly-construed job description, but who will stand in the way of you doing anything for yourself by insisting on rigorously enforsing silly union work rules. Like "Sorry, you can't plug anything in that electrical outlet yourself... only members of the Electricians Union are allowed to do it. I'm in the Technicians Union so I can't do it either... you'll have to call a Union Electrician and wait for him to get here, then pay him time and a half overtime since it's 5:02 PM and his shift ended at 5:00."
Given the rampant and horrific human rights abuses that unions helped to end I think that is an acceptable alternative. Also do you enjoy your weekends, holidays off, and forty hour work week?
He probably does, if he
has a job. But if he's "on the clock" blue collar, the chances are growing increasingly large that he doesn't. So then, if that's you, you don't have to worry about weekends and holidays off;
all your days are off.
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Your industry found labor costs so high that they outsourced them all to someplace with more reasonable unions, or else none. The union bosses knew this was happening, but they didn't care, as their jobs were the last to go. In fact, they probably still have good salaries, representing those last few guys in the US rust belt. Whose job it will be to turn out the lights, when they punch out for that last time.
Yes, collective bargaining and unions are the scars of bad management. And yes, in any large company, management is always bad. So how to fix this? It's always harder to do it while there are a lot of people halfway around the world who are willing to work 11 hour days with no benefits, for $1.50 an hour. One can be protectionist, but without fundamental changes in how we see development, that's a very hard cartel to make work.
Since some of my own living comes from intellectual property in the form of inventions, I see at least some of the problem in terms of IP theft. Developing countries do very well by stealing IP ("information wants to be free!") while at the same time working with a desperate labor pool. So now the question: why should the US teach India or China how to make a state of the art manufacturing plant, using labor of people with crappy health care and in the middle of the most horrendous polution and working conditions, in order to build a complex to undersell everybody on the world market? What exactly are WE going to sell, if all we have to offer is know-how, and that know-how is being stolen? If we don't figure this problem out, the major thing that the US is good at (innovation) is going to be worthless on the world market. Then, I hope you own your own house so you don't have a mortgage, and are either retired, or else work in a personal-service industry that can't be exported, like flipping burgers or security or medicine, or which depends on copyright (not that this won't be stolen too-- but at least you have a longer period to recover something) . Enjoy. When this country agreed to make patents 20 years and non-renewable, in what has always been a nation of inventors, we screwed ourselves worse than we ever could have imagined.
MR