Terminalcoffee discussion
Helping You To Know The News
>
Look for the Union Label
date
newest »
newest »
sounds like the Post Office. I work with a guy who has been fired and got his job back 4 times. Two summers ago, a customer filed a sexual harassment complaint against another carrier and actually took him to court. He was suspended without pay for about a year and then one day he shows up bragging how he beat the rap and got all of his back pay. This guy is a total sleaze and hits on anything with boobs. I wish our union was as tough at holding people accountable as they are in protecting worthless idiots. But I guess that is management's job. :(
Unions... Feh. Worthless as tits on a nun.
Clark wrote: "Unions... Feh. Worthless as tits on a nun."Agreed!
In my experience there are unions and then there are unions. Some have corrupt leadership, some are doing great things for people like clerical workers who don't have much power. Depends on who is in charge. I worked with a lot of union bosses when I canvassed for Citizen Action. Some of them were tools, some of them were saints who would do anything to make the workers' lives better.I have heard a little about the efforts to unionize Wal-Mart workers and my hat is off to those folks. Pretty thankless job, trying to get something for the workers from Wal-Mart management.
Mmmmm, well, my only experience with unions is that my grandfather was in the Iron Workers Local something-or-other my whole life. They were pretty great to my grams after he died, held her hand through any financial transaction she needed, lots of luncheons with the old folks, paid out gramps pension to her until she died. I don't think she would have been as comfortable financially if gramps hadn't been in the union and had it all set up for her like that.
The one thing that did aggravate me was that she would go to the union hall before every election so they could tell her how she should vote...GAH!!!!!
While I agree that unions can help those that don't have a lot of power, in my experience it takes away incentive to work hard and to show initiative. You can bust your ass, and get paid the same as the guy who barely gets by. It never seems to work as an incentive for the slacker to work harder, it works as a disincentive for the hard worker to stop busting ass. I know that there are exceptions, but for the most part it seems to kill work ethic.
Jim wrote: "While I agree that unions can help those that don't have a lot of power, in my experience it takes away incentive to work hard and to show initiative. You can bust your ass, and get paid the same ..."
Well put, Jim.
Well put, Jim.
I think in Gramps generation they pretty much all busted ass and those that didn't they wouldn't rely on the union to get them to...they'd take care of it quietly all on their own. :)
They started off great. The concept behind them is worthy, but much like everything failed because the people at the top became greedy and corrupt with power.There are exceptions. I would LOVE if Walmart employees got a union. Walmart is trying to change their image by going "green" but it's still a deflection from how they treat their employees.
Have any of you read The Jungle?
Don't want to. Too depressing. I get enough of that from the news.Terrible of me, I know.
Never read Grapes for the same reason.
I normally don't either. Funnily enough, GoW is one of my favorites and I've read it several times...I was forced the first time though (school). It just seemed to fit in with the thread, I was wondering if anyone had read it. It's actually a really good book, but you are right, not much of a "feel good" kind of story.
Yeah, I feel slightly guilty for not reading both.
Bun, I was pretty sure you had. I think you were the only one who had read Tales of the Alhambra...even if we didn't agree on it's greatness. :)
Oh...wow. I wonder who that was then?
I hated that book. Someone else LOVED it.
I hated that book. Someone else LOVED it.
Oh, I would love to see the actual Alhambra!
I think I'm pretty much in agreement about unions being a mixed bag. My grandmother, 96 years old, has been treated great by the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union and its successors (I think it's now UNITE), who have helped her out with supplemental health costs, etc. And they still keep in touch with her, which given her age and the length of time since her retirement is pretty impressive.
On the other hand, years back when I was working in construction, having to deal with union carpenters was something I truly dreaded due to their combination of low skill level and egregious bad attitude. It was just an absolute nightmare, like something out of "The Sopranos."
I'm sure, however, that there are still great unions and union members out there, even if I may not necessarily be aware of them. It's sometimes easy to focus on the worst offenders and then judge the group on that basis.
My Grandpa's union the Longshoreman's Union, was fuckin awwesome. Not sure if the same level of devotion exists today. The Garment Workers Union is also the bomb, thank you Jonathan.
All these unions were wonderful when they started. When they were by the people for the people. Now the management is The Man.
But they gave us the 40-hour work week!
I'm a member of CSEA. I work with uneducated people that are smarter than some with doctorates. I work with some people that enjoy a free ride. I work with some people that are loyal and work their asses off. I'm glad I'm in a union.
Cynthia wrote: "But they gave us the 40-hour work week!"I know I agree with you! The movement to start unions was a glorious thing!
Unions are a necessity. Altho I think the teachers' is crucial, there are some major problems that they need to fix.
The teamsters are a joke.
Carol, what's CSEA?
Carol wrote: "I'm a member of CSEA. I work with uneducated people that are smarter than some with doctorates. I work with some people that enjoy a free ride. I work with some people that are loyal and work their..."Boo-Yah! Carol Look for the union label!!
Yeah and who was it said there was need for unions?
I actually meant to say no need for unions.
CSEA - Civil Service Employees Association. It's nearly 100 years old, and affiliated with AFSCME and AFL-CIO.
Clark wrote: "Jim wrote: "While I agree that unions can help those that don't have a lot of power, in my experience it takes away incentive to work hard and to show initiative. You can bust your ass, and get pa..."exactly Jim!
I think unions have been historically important but now have become a big business on their own; the percentage of good they do has changed over time...at least with schools/teacher unions, I would say the ratio is about 80% bad to 20% good, in my experience, depending on how you feel about contributing to insurance, etc. My main complaint is the protection of shitty teachers.
Exactly RA - there was a horrible K teacher at Jake's school, every single parent each year complained about her but the principle couldn't do a thing.
Without the labor movement, the middle class in this country would have been much less populous over the past 50 years. Capitalism has often shown itself to be highly contrary to the expansion of a middle class. The decline in unions since the Reagan era has had a definite negative impact on the growth of wages for working people as compared to executives, and the overall pattern of wealth in this country.
Mod
Good point.
Mod
I keep hearing liberal bloggers saying this, but I'll believe it when I see it. I just have such a hard time imagining this happening in America, where lower class people are still willing to join the Teabaggers because government is all up in their grill, and they still believe anyone can become rich (I'm not saying that can't happen, just the odds are increasingly against it). We're not really a nation prone to large scale, bottom-up social upheavals. Our lower/lower middle class's natural inclination is not to form mobs and take to the streets.
Actually, the fjords in Norway make the weather milder than you'd think. Temperate. Not unlike Seattle! That's if you live on the coast. A guy from Norway told us this, we almost moved there because he had a tentative job for R that came to nothing.
I was thinking about this a while this morning. I think this is a particularly dangerous time because some unions have made some greedy, shitty choices but at the same time I agree they're of pivotal importance in an era when companies are claiming that they have to erode pay and benefits from front-line workers in the name of survival. Harley-Davidson comes to mind, but I doubt they're the only example. HD has a CEO making millions and received state aid so they could keep jobs in Wisconsin and then threatened to leave anyway until the union made massive concessions (wage freezes, changing the nature of some jobs to "seasonal" and "casual" so they're cheaper and easier to eliminate) in a close vote. This quote summarizes the dominant local reaction to the CEO saying HD ran into problems because of growing labor costs and bad union contracts:"Something is definitely wrong when the CEO of a troubled company makes more than $6 million a year and then whines about how out of control workers' wages have become," said Frank Larkin, spokesman for the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, which represents some Harley workers in Milwaukee.
Here's the article from which I took the quote...the article summarizes most of the controversy:
http://www.jsonline.com/business/1036...
Listen...if the CEO is going to make six million a year, I agree, it's pretty hard to say front-line workers are killing the company. And in this case, yes, the Wisconsin middle class (this state, I believe, now has more of a stake in manufacturing job than any other, now that Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana have tanked) will suffer when wages and benefits are cut. I don't buy this whole "give our company whatever we want or we'll move/close and that will be bad for everyone" argument. It makes me angry. So the HD employees will make significantly less, and the middle class won't get hurt? In your dreams, motherfucker. This is esp. interesting in Wisconsin right now, by the way, because many in the state see HD as an icon and take pride in the connection to the company. That's starting to lose its luster these days...Clark, did you go through that with the auto industry? So, I guess, in this point I'm all for the union preserving wages, etc. and I believe the vote to accept this contract was very close. So framing unions as all-bad, in other words, allows a hegemonic scenario in which anything a union does to be framed as negative, when that's not the case at all. I'm not saying workers in a collective bargaining context shouldn't ever contribute to the company's recovery or pay more for health care. I'm saying that workers shouldn't be vilified or expected to shoulder all or most of the burden. And I don't trust some leaders to, for example, tie their compensation fairly to performance.
Took me a while to get to that point. Forgive me. It's early.
Interesting article about Obama taking on the teachers' unions....http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics...
There isn’t much question that the wage stagnation of the last several decades is closely tied to the diminished influence of unions, particularly since Reagan crushed the air traffic controllers in the early Eighties. Of course, unions, or some of them anyway contributed to that diminishment through their own corruption and overreaching in certain industries.But workers and the middle class have assumed more and more economic risk and insecurity in the last few decades, as the bulk of that risk shifted from government and business. Wage stagnation reduces savings, a lack of savings that leaves Americans less prepared for and less resilient when there’s an individual crisis or a broader one, such as the recent economic meltdown. The demise of pensions in favor of 401k’s, the extraordinary inflation of costs in healthcare, and higher energy costs squeeze the middle class and working poor very hard. Like health insurance, home insurance costs more and covers less, an important development since for most Americans their homes are their principal asset.
The United States has greater wealth disparity and less economic mobility than other modern democracies, and that strikes me as worthy of a lot of concern. You see it when college becomes less affordable or families need to borrow more, or college is simply out of reach, meaning more Americans remain pretty much where they started. One might claim this as some deserved result were Americans becoming less productive. But to the contrary, they’ve been working harder and productivity has steadily increased. But as all Americans have expanded GDP over these several decades, the rewards of that expansion increasingly have gone to one place: directly to the top (as simultaneously top marginal rates were sliced, the estate tax was all but eliminated and capital continued to be taxed at a considerably lower rate than labor).
While I agree with the vast majority of what you said Ken, I'm not sure that wage stagnation is the leading cause of lack of savings, or Americans in ability to walk by a boat and not have to have it, or a bigger television, or a bigger house etc. For the middle class living within ones means is a bigger cause.
Mod
I’d agree that acquisitiveness plays a large role in American life, and in many Americans economic condition. But that doesn’t diminish the reality of the underlying structural changes. And one seldom mentioned factor when it comes to stagnant median family income for instance is that in the past those families tended to have only one working member. In fact, managing to remain at the previous levels for household income was primarily due to women entering the work place in larger and larger numbers.And of course, acquisitiveness is exactly what American culture is selling. That’s the American dream: more. Every corner you turn and every web page you visit, the American way is to have someone there to sell you something you probably don’t need. And in economic terms, that isn’t insignificant when seventy to eighty percent of our economy is consumer spending.
It's happening here too Barb. Of course plenty of people around here don't clean their own houses either so the bigger size doesn't bother them.
RandomAnthony wrote: "I was thinking about this a while this morning. I think this is a particularly dangerous time because some unions have made some greedy, shitty choices but at the same time I agree they're of pivo..."agree with RA, thanks for speaking my mind!
Ken wrote: "Every corner you turn and every web page you visit, the American way is to have someone there to sell you something you probably don’t need."
Somewhere Billy Mays is spinning in his grave.
Somewhere Billy Mays is spinning in his grave.
Glossary:
"suspended indefinitely without pay" = 30 days on the street then welcomed back with retroactive wage/benefit packet