labor unions

You've never worked for a crappy company that abuses it's workers. Everything is relative.

Green Witch- No one is obliged to work for a crappy company that abuses its workers. IMO, the unions, which were valuable in earlier days, have outlived their usefulness.

Take the auto industry. One of the reasons that American auto manufactueres are failing is because of the unions. The workers are paid so much more than the foreign companies, that they are unable to compete with the foreign manufacturers.

In addition, we could mention the corruption that is rife with the union higher ups.

are you asking me a question

i haven't worked for a "crappy company" but i dont believe their going to abuse me if i do.if so i would just go kung foo on their butts.

I have no more sympathy for power crazed unions than I do for power crazed CEO's, but a union can be helpful for workers to negotiate with their employers. American unions, like the UAW, have become a form of mafia, but I still think workers need to be fairly represented in order to form a balance of power with a corporation. Given a chance, I think the mining industry would be happy to go back to the 19th century way of treating workers. I am suspicious of companies that go to great lengths to keep their employees from getting together on their own (ie Walmart) and possibly forming a union. I live in an area where jobs are scare, few people can just walkaway if they are mistreated. Most put up with unpaid overtime, sexual harassment and general abuse. They complain over a mug of beer or at their dinner tables. I think employees need fair representation and a good union can do that, I am not advocating the philosophy of Jimmy Hoffa .

What if you had no other job prospects and a couple of kids to feed, and a mortgage, car loan etc? Come see how quickly you could get rehired in my area where there is one employment agency and they know "the trouble makers".

phoenix wrote :



what union is going to take the blame for the collapse of many financial instituions ?
is there a union for CEO's that can be blamed ?

i doubt that the unions had much say in the design of the gas-guzzling monsters produced by the small 3 .

that there can be co-operation between management und union (even in north-america ; it's really quite common in german autoplants) is shown by the NUMMI production facility .
of course , management AND union both have to get used to co-operation .

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUMMI



.........................................................................
see also :

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4176/is_20050808/ai_n15818134



imo co-operation between management and unions is preferable to seeing each other as enemy .
hbg

What will be blamed for Toyota's huge loss?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/23/business/worldbusiness/23toyota.html?bl&ex=1230181200&en=4637c51b4c895cd8&ei=5087%0A

Toyota is NOT asking to have my hard earned money.

Toyota's losses are not relevant unless they approach congress for taxpayer money.

Toyota's losses are very relevant when someone is blaming Detroit's losses on the unions. It is the the subject of taxpayer money that is not relevant in this instance.

People are blaming the FAILURE of Detroits big 3 partly on unions. GM has been losing money for years. This is Toyota's first loss in 70 years.

Toyota will survive as a company.
GM will not.

The difference is partly unionization.

It is not and only people with a vested interest in ******* over labor spout such bullshit. Take you for instance, You are a guy who works in the financial market, and deny the facts about how much workers cost in your industry while wailing on about labor unions. it' s deceptive, self serving horseshit.

When one compares how the auto industry and the financial sector are being treated by Congress, the double standard is staggering. In the financial sector, employee compensation makes up a huge percentage of costs. According to the New York state comptroller, it accounted for more than 60% of 2007 revenues for the seven largest financial firms in New York.

At Goldman Sachs, for example, employee compensation made up 71% of total operating expenses in 2007. In the auto industry, by contrast, autoworker compensation makes up less than 10% of the cost of manufacturing a car. Hundreds of billions were given to the financial-services industry with barely a question about compensation; the auto bailout, however, was sunk on this issue alone.

I did not hear a single word from you about forcing your industry to take wage concessions for the $350,000,000,000 you took from american tax payers even though you and your colleagues salaries account for over six times the operational cost of auto workers. and auto workers return over $207 per value for only $30/hour wages, yet you just about rend your garments as auto workers asked for another year to accept concessions that would drive them more than $20,000 below the median income of the American worker.

Toyota may survive, but only on the backs of their workers whom management has already planned to screw by REDUCING wages nearly $17.30/HOUR from the current level of $30.00/HOUR

An internal Toyota report, leaked to the Detroit Free Press last year, reveals that the company wants to slash $300 million out of its rising labor costs by 2011. The report indicated that Toyota no longer wants to "tie [itself] so closely to the U.S. auto industry." Instead, the company intends to benchmark the prevailing manufacturing wage in the state in which a plant is located. The Free Press reported that in Kentucky, where the company is headquartered, this wage is $12.64 an hour, according to federal labor statistics, less than half Toyota's $30-an-hour wage.

If the companies, with the support of their senators, can wipe out or greatly weaken the UAW, they will be free to implement their plan.

$12.64/hour comes out to $26,912/YEAR. That is barely a living wage and about one half the median income for a working American. It sucks, especially when that auto worker is producing $207 of economic value/hour. Divided by the $2.64 wage/hour, the worker produces 16 times the economic value for every hour of he earns IN WAGES from his labor.

If you are delivering the same economic value to your financial instition as an auto worker does to his company and making $100,00/year, you are producing $1,600,000 in economic value. and I bet that you don't. So stop bitching about the wages of a guy who produces more economic value, AND who each minute labors under incredibly more difficult and dangerous circumstances than you do.

$12.64? Not going to happen.

Destroying What the UAW Built
By Harold Meyerson
Washington Post
Wednesday, December 17, 2008; A17

In 1949, a pamphlet was published that argued that the American auto industry should pursue a different direction. Titled "A Small Car Named Desire," the pamphlet suggested that Detroit not put all its bets on bigness, that a substantial share of American consumers would welcome smaller cars that cost less and burned fuel more efficiently.

The pamphlet's author was the research department of the United Auto Workers.

By the standards of the postwar UAW, there was nothing exceptional about "A Small Car Named Desire." In its glory days, under the leadership of Walter Reuther, the UAW was the most farsighted institution -- not just the most farsighted union -- in America. "We are the architects of America's future," Reuther told the delegates at the union's 1947 convention, where his supporters won control of what was already the nation's leading union.

Even before he became UAW president, Reuther and a team of brilliant lieutenants would drive the Big Three's top executives crazy by producing a steady stream of proposals for management. In the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor, Reuther, then head of the union's General Motors division, came up with a detailed plan for converting auto plants to defense factories more quickly than the industry's leaders did. At the end of the war, he led a strike at GM with a set of demands that included putting union and public representatives on GM's board.

That proved to be a bridge too far. Instead, by the early 1950s, the UAW had secured a number of contractual innovations -- annual cost-of-living adjustments, for instance -- that set a pattern for the rest of American industry and created the broadly shared prosperity enjoyed by the nation in the 30 years after World War II.

The architects did not stop there. During the Reuther years, the UAW also used its resources to incubate every up-and-coming liberal movement in America. It was the UAW that funded the great 1963 March on Washington and provided the first serious financial backing for César Chávez's fledgling farm workers union. The union took a lively interest in the birth of a student movement in the early '60s, providing its conference center in Port Huron, Mich., to a group called Students for a Democratic Society when the group wanted to draft and debate its manifesto. Later that decade, the union provided resources to help the National Organization for Women get off the ground and helped fund the first Earth Day. And for decades after Reuther's death in a 1970 plane crash, the UAW was among the foremost advocates of national health care -- a policy that, had it been enacted, would have saved the Big Three tens of billions of dollars in health insurance expenses, but which the Big Three themselves were until recently too ideologically hidebound to support.

Narrow? Parochial? The UAW not only built the American middle class but helped engender every movement at the center of American liberalism today -- which is one reason that conservatives have always held the union in particular disdain.

Over the past several weeks, it has become clear that the Republican right hates the UAW so much that it would prefer to plunge the nation into a depression rather than craft a bridge loan that doesn't single out the auto industry's unionized workers for punishment. (As manufacturing consultant Michael Wessel pointed out, no Republican demanded that Big Three executives have their pay permanently reduced to the relatively spartan levels of Japanese auto executives' pay.) Today, setting the terms of that loan has become the final task of the Bush presidency, which puts the auto workers in the unenviable position of depending, if not on the kindness of strangers, then on the impartiality of the most partisan president of modern times.

Republicans complain that labor costs at the Big Three are out of line with those at the non-union transplant factories in the South, factories that Southern governors have subsidized with billions of taxpayer dollars. But the UAW has already agreed to concessions bringing its members' wages to near-Southern levels, and labor costs already comprise less than 10 percent of the cost of a new car. (On Wall Street, employee compensation at the seven largest financial firms in 2007 constituted 60 percent of the firms' expenses, yet reducing overall employee compensation wasn't an issue in the financial bailout.)

In a narrow sense, what the Republicans are proposing would gut the benefits of roughly a million retirees. In a broad sense, they want to destroy the institution that did more than any other to raise American living standards, and they want to do it by using the power of government to lower American living standards -- in the middle of the most severe recession since the 1930s. The auto workers deserve better, and so does the nation they did so much to build.

A few things:

1) My company did not receive ANY money from the financial sector bailout. Zero dollars. None.

2) Where have a denied anything about what is fucked up in the financial industry. I have also been saying all along that there shouldn't have been a bailout of the banks. I am NOT deceptive, nor self-serving. The $800 billion dollar bailout is bullshit. It never should have happened.

3) There should be as much oversight over the financial sector bailout as there needs to be over the auto sector bailout. Congress is ******* this whole mess up; which leads me to believe that the auto bailout is an even WORSE idea, since we can now see how inept our congress is. It doesn't make sense to give the auto companies money just because we gave the financial system money. I do have a belief though that the banking system in this country will at least return to profitability; there is nothing that leads me to beleive that the GM/Chrysler will do the same. GM has been losing money for 4 years, the credit freeze has only really been a problem for 3 months. GM has many problems, unions only being one of them, but the government should not bail out a failing company who is failing because of their own design.

4) All your posteruing about Toyota is speculation. Please bring it up again if it ever happens, but until then it's meaningless. Every company wants to reduce labor costs, the simple fact that they are talking about it is proof of nothing except that they are worried about the profitability of their company, which I would expect them to be. I wish there were more documents from GM along these lines. There is no reason why an auto-worker needs to make $80,000 / year in wages, and over $110,000 / year in total compensation.

5) Now, your comments about my value to my company is pure bullshit. You don't know me, you don't know what I do or what value I provide. There is no need to insult me personally over this issue. I am not some anti-union, right-winger, bat-**** crazy poster that you need to react to like a 2 year old. I have done manual labor jobs. I have worked at a lumber yard, and operated heavy equipment. The jobs are not that difficult.

No they haven't. Joe the transmission installer who's worked for GM for 10 years will NOT be taking a pay cut under any proposal I've seen the UAW give.

Now, Joe's replacement, Bob will make less money, but that won't have any impact to the company until Joe retires in 20 years, it does nothing NOW! And NOW is when the company needs help.

perhaps we should remember that an american , W. Edwards Deming , taught japanese management the value of good manufacturing principles and practices , in particular the principle of "continuous improvement" .

see overview :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming

japanese management started to apply the principles being taught by deming and we have been seeing the results for some time .

american management has been slow in introducing modern management methods .
surely , we can't blame the unions for failed management practices .

i have seen no proof that american workers (and their unions) REFUSED to build superior products .

japanese scientists and corporations realized early on the value of deming's
teachings and established a prize to honour him .

http://www.juse.or.jp/e/deming/01.html

I don't think anyone is just blaming the unions for all of the problems in the auto industry.

All I've heard people say is that the UAW workers need to take a pay cut if they are going to have their jobs saved by taxpayer dollars. And that by taking a pay cut it will help the big 3 become profitable again. Hell, I'd be happy if they just removed that insane 'job's bank' program the UAW has.

Should the same thing have happened to the financal sector? Yes.

Just because it didn't happen in the financial sector, should we give the auto sector a pass? No.

There is little doubt that the industrial capitalism of both Europe and North America of the 19th and early 20th century deserved the unionism it eventually got. However, labor unions that, like so many things in human history, began as the solution to one problem, ended up by solving the original problem and finally themselves becoming the new problem.

All of the major U.S. industries infected by labor unions are failing, or have already gone into oblivion. None of our thriving (if anything is thriving these days) new industries are unionized. The American Labor movement itself is failing. Its largest and strongest elements are unions representing government employees & teachers - not private sector industries. The current head of the AFL/CIO, John Sweeney is the gormer head of the Federal Government Employees union.

Organized labor has experienced very little success in organizing new industries over the past two decades. Indeed their current primary political objective and expected payoff for their financial support to the Democrat Party is new legislation that would eliminate the current requirement for a secret ballot among the employees of a firm targeted for compulsory unionization by organized labor, thus permitting them to go back to the goon squads and ballot box stuffing of the "good old days". (It's a great business - your dues (=revenues) are collected for you by the employer, deducted from the employee's pay before he/she ever sees it, and electronically deposited in your account. Union officials often collect multiple salaries (fron the local, national, and "international" union) and generally retire on full pay & benefits.)

Hamburger's earlier descriptions of the happy reality of the General Motors/Toyota joint venture NUMMI, just down the road in Freemont CA do not fit the reality of it. I know the place well.

In nature successful parasites don't kill their unwitting hosts. Labor Unions, on the contrary, are rather stupid parasites, killing theirs.

The greed of Wall Street financial managers is no different from that of an individual who walks away from a heavily mortgaged home because its market valkue has sunk below his mortgage debt. Labor unions are not an effective remedy for either, and rationalizing their existence on that basis is mere foolishness.