thencrow

I saw this on a website I frequant and thought it was a pretty interesting post about an exchange between Howard Dean and Chris Matthews

If some one can get the same pay/benefits as some one who is in a union I say more power to them. I should not have to be in a union to work.

Ustwo

Translation should be:

DEAN: Because Unions give a lot of money to Democrats.

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dragon2fire

I would say it depends on the union but i know for a fact that some unions are worth every red cent


if you dont want to join the union find a new job

Sparhawk

I wouldn't mind seeing some more context.

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Superbelt

MATTHEWS: Because it’s a free country.

Sure, but this is also a republic. And workers of that facility decided at some point to unionize and wanted everyone to be part of the union to make the working bargaining rights stronger.

I can't say I don't want to abide by some rules the federal government set up, but I still want to be part of the country.

If you want to work for some place that is unionized, join the union. Otherwise take your skills somewhere where others money and efforts didn't give you a job as well as they have it.

tricks

Why would a non-Union worker in a Right-To-Work State get the same benefits and pay as someone in a Union? The reason there are few Unions in Right-To-Work States is because employers hire non-Union workers for a fraction of the cost of Union workers. They are under no obligation to hire anyone at any specific wage other than minimum wage laws.

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nofnway

unions, as they presently exist, secure jobs, benefits.....etc. for one group at the expense of all others. If they force the price of labor up to a high level it means less jobs total. Anyone that cannot provide that level of value is forced out of a job and the incentive for those that remain to increase productivity is lost as that will force the loss of more jobs.

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Superbelt

Or it just cuts into the massive profits that the executives would otherwise use to... say throw lavish birthday parties with company money on mediterannean islands with hula dancers and ice sculptures of penises that serve vodka.
...And using company money to buy umbrella racks for $500,000


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Hopefully you all get that reference.

Conclamo Ludus

Didn't get the reference but still laughed my ass off. What's it from?

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Liquor Dealer

At one time in this country unions played a very important role - over the years greed, corruption, and power happy unions have taken away from the employer his ability to run his own business - when one cannot run his own business he either gets out, or takes his business elsewhere. The last I remember hearing unions were bemoaning the fact that many union jobs no longer existed because the business had relocated to somewhere else. Looks to me like you should't bitch about something being gone when you were the one that ran it off!!!

Everyone has a right to be paid what they are worth for the job that they do - but when those demands exceed an employer's ability to pay they become blackmail. Unions in most parts of the country have blackmailed themselves out of existance, or are in the process of doing so.

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Superbelt

CL, Tyco's chief executive did just that. The party in the mediterannean cost, I think 2 million dollars. It was a birthday party for his wife done using company funds.

Same with the umbrella holder.

It was just sick.

Look it up on google.

'Tyco scandal'

Superbelt

http://abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s679070.htm

Sardinia is the second largest Italian Island.
Kozlowski defrauded the company for 1 billion dollars. You think that might be enough for the Union to disperse some benefits and pay raises?

Conclamo Ludus

Wow, vodka-spewing ice penises. I could never imagine something like this. Amazing! I give the sick bastard credit for coming up with something so bizarre.

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Superbelt

Not just any penis either. Michaelangelos David.


I'd like to see the guy hung by his testicles over the Brooklyn Bridge. He deserves it.

Right next to Ken Lay.

onetime2

And transfers that ability to the union chiefs. I'd say it's as prevalent if not more prevalent in unions.

There are plenty of examples of this:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp...&notFound=true

http://www.iww.org/~iw/mar1999/stories/Porkchop.html

And it goes on in virtually every union across the nation.

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Peetster

I support Railroad Coal Shovelers 202 and Local Candlemakers 409. Damn diesel engines and lightbulbs.

Ustwo

What does Tyco's wacky former CEO have to do with corrupt Unions?

Nice straw man.

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Sparhawk

Come on now, just as not every corporate executive is guilty of crimes like Tyco's CEO, neither are the leaders of every union guilty of crimes like that of that Teacher's Union executive.

Superbelt

I think executives, like Tyco, Enrons, and Worldcoms who blow company money show that there IS plenty of money in these companies. Even the straight ones. Money that could easily be used by Unions for wages and benefits. And that unionizing will not bankrupt a company or force it to cut back on employees.

That's why I brought it up. Not a strawman. Pointing out the availability of funds.

onetime2

There is far more oversight to corporate actions than union actions. Is it an accident that the mob has been tied to so many union organizations? Nope. There is little oversight, lots of power, and plenty of cash. I'm sure I stepped over the boundary by saying "every" union but I still believe it is far more prevalent in unions than in corporate America.

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Sparhawk

I don't even know where to start with this one. Anyone care to help me out?

Superbelt

I seriously doubt that. But if you find one, a study on the averages would be welcome.

But, it is easier for employees to depose their union leadership than it is to get rid of a corrupt CEO or CFO.
And there is no ten million dollar severance for a deposed union leader.

onetime2

What about the links to the mob? Accidental? Of course not.

Even when unions are put under the strictest oversight they get out from under it.

http://www.house.gov/hoekstra/32698.html

How many corporations, after being put under orders to clean up the financials and being overseen by an Independent Review Board continue with the same practices?

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apechild

Unions cause unemployment.

I say again, unions cause unemployment. 'Nuff said.

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Superbelt

Everything was linked to the mob from the 1930's through the 1980's

You ever hear of MARTIN'S food stores? They are the parent company of GIANT supermarkets.
That company was started by the mafia.

When you get to something as big as Teamsers, yeah there can be better chances for opportunistic people to take advantage of it. But the same happens at corporations all across the country. The minimal damage a union does pales in comparison to the tens of billions of dollars of defraudment that goes on every year by the corporate offices. Enron was a huge player in Californias crash, tens of billions of dollars in damages easily, Tyco 1 billion.

Teamsers? 17 million.

Unions, by far, create employment and create a better quality of it too.

apechild

Superbelt, are you saying that greedy evil capitalist pig corporations cost us untold billions, while unions cost us only seventeen million dollars?

That's an interesting statistic.

How much do you suppose unions cost in terms of the unemployment they create? Not to mention the inefficiency and waste they create... can you quantify that for us as well?

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apechild

False. Unions cause unemployment. This is a basic economic fact.

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Superbelt

I'm saying specific greedy companies cost us tens of billions of dollars while the largest union in the world was defrauded of only 17 million for a comparison of the relative impact between the two.

A CEO or CFO has far greater ability to manipulate funds than someone in a communal union.

Unions caused huge leaps of employment in this country as their demands for pay and benefits fueled the greatest economy in the world. The opportunities afforded to the common man drew in the best and the brightest from around the world to work here because they knew that they would have a better chance to succeed under our systems.

Unions create jobs. Unions create the best jobs.

Sparhawk

Welcome, to the Desert of the Ignored.

A fact largely missed by many...

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apechild

This premise is flawed on several levels. Instead of deconstructing your quote and addressing it piece by piece, I think we might instead benefit from a quick lesson in economics.

Unions, by design, act in a manner to reduce competition among laborers. In other words, they are anti-competitive. Their express purpose is to create labor market inefficiencies.

Unions accomplish this, in part, through "collective bargaining" tactics, which is much like collusion, except that it is considered legal and therefore unnecessary to keep secret. Essentially, through these means, a controlling majority of the suppliers of a specific good seek to limit its supply or institute and enforce a price floor on said good. In the case of unions, that good is labor. It is similar to the tactics employed by OPEC.

Again, technically it's not collusion because they don't make a secret of their conspiracy. But there's a word for that too. Coercion.

Threats of work stoppages or strikes are other coercive techniques employed by unions.

Again, none of this is opinion - it's plain fact, which union members and their sympathizers freely admit.

Now let's explore how these tactics impact the supply and demand of labor.
Obviously we'll have to keep it simple, as this topic alone could fill a book. Nonetheless, we should cover some basics.

I assume that you are at least high school educated and you know what a supply curve and a demand curve look like (remember - price on the vertical axis, quantity on the horizontal axis). Where these curves intersect is where, in a free market, your equilibrium price will be established. If we're talking about the supply of labor, we're faced with a relatively inelastic supply curve. In other words, one can't simply produce more labor by, say, breeding workers, nor can one easily reduce supply by killing them. So, in the short term (excluding long term demographic trends), the supply curve remains pretty much constant.

The demand curve for labor, however, is much more elastic. It is influenced primarily by output per unit of labor, and the marginal revenue analysis. In other words, the degree to which an employer can increase revenue per additional associated increase in costs of production will impact that employer's demand for labor. Changes in this variable precipitate a movement along the demand curve. This is important, because the marginal revenue analysis is impacted also by the marginal demand of the good being produced. The healthier the economy, the wealthier the consumer, and the wealthier the consumer, the higher the marginal demand for most goods. The higher the marginal demand for goods, the higher the marginal revenue for production. The higher the marginal revenue, the higher the demand for the labor required to produce that good. Basically, this is why a strong economy creates jobs. It's self-reinforcing.

Anyway, the demand curve for labor can also shift (a shift in the demand curve itself, as opposed to a movement along the curve). It can shift whenever a large consumer of labor develops or employs new technologies or methods that reduce the amount of labor required per unit of output. In the eighties, you may recall, labor unions in the automotive industry fought the modernization of assembly lines, which employed new mechanized processes. Laborers feared that this new technology would shift the demand curve to the left. To the layperson, this meant that people would be replaced by robots and wages would fall. Now, what actually ended up happening is that through innovation and growth, laborers found even higher paying jobs at the factories making the robots, but that's another story.

So, before we get too carried away with this lesson in macro-economics, let's get back to the topic of unions. If you're still unclear on supply and demand, please follow this link: http://www.econweb.com/MacroWelcome/sandd/notes.html

Now, unions create a kink in the supply curve in an effort to raise the price of labor, or create a price floor for labor. As we already established, they do so through anti-competitive practices and coercion. The figure below illustrates graphically the concept of a price floor set above the equilibrium price.



You may notice that this graph also depicts a surplus. The surplus in this case is labor. A surplus of labor is high unemployment.

Again, not conjecture, but simple economic fact.

I don't think I need to explain how price floors on labor and the associated increase in unemployment is a bad thing for productivity, profitability, wages, prosperity, and economic growth. It's pretty apparent already.

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Superbelt

It's also similar to the tactic practiced by every large business in the world. Use your percentage of control of a certain market to bargain for a better price.
That is capitalism at work! Thanks.

It's a workers right to strike. An employer COULD just fire them all and hire new non-union workers. But then they gain the ire of the general public, and lose all that experience and skill. Again, that is capitalism at work! Yay for america!

Working on a graduate degree. Basically what you posted is gobbledegook.
In a union, the laws of supply and demand deteriorate. Instead of the employer having all the power, the workers mass together to get collective bargaining power. They begin to dictate some of the supply, since they are what is being marketed to the business.

Again, that IS capitalism.
You want it some other way? Go live in a Dictatorship.

Simple economic fact is, if you create an attractive environment for workers, as Unions have, you will attract the most intelligent, hard working, and driven people from around the world. This will increase your countrys wealth because you took it away from your competitors. As long as you keep the working environment better than your competitors you will have DEMAND for workers.

Ustwo

Oh you might be surprised.

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filtherton

I know as a young child, me and my friends were very unhappy with the way those damn unions made it so we couldn't get jobs anymore. Maybe you could bust out one of those fancy diagrams to explain the effect that ceo and stockholder greed has on unemployment.

Unions, while less than perfect, came about because employers were exploiting laborers. Remeber the 80 hour work week? I'm sure the economist of those days fainted between exclamations of, "how is the economy going to survive a minimum wage?!!!" or "how is industry to remain productive when they have to pay their workers more for working over a certain number of hours?!?!?!"
As soon as greed is no longer a problem in the world, unions and overpaid ceos will no longer be a problem. But don't for a moment pretend that the world would be a better place without unions. The idea that it is thoeretically all right for an employer to squeeze every last drop of blood from a worker before discarding his/her body in the trash simply because the laws of supply and demand allow it is disgusting.

onetime2

How do you come up with the $17 million figure?

From just that article, oversight "...did virtually nothing while the union's net worth plummeted from a value of more than $150 million in 1991 to less than $700,000 in 1997"

They had to RAISE union dues to cover the loss so you can about double that. If you'd like to group all companies together into one unit then the same will have to be done for all unions.

There are far more checks and balances in the corporate world, including investors, stock analysts, auditors, the SEC, and, of course Boards of Directors. Most union bosses rule unilaterally and their elections are quite well orchestrated when compared to how a new CEO is typically chosen. Members of the union who speak out against union leadership see their hours cut, their seniority ignored, and unless they fall in line often end up a casualty of the "concessions" made by the union leadership to the union employers. Stock owners, analysts, and the SEC are not ruled in the same way.

How many of the best and the brightest from around the world have flocked to union jobs? Most unionized jobs are not the ones that the best and brightest strive for.

Without a doubt unions helped to improve workers safety, created benefits for their members, helped to give voice to employees who would never have been heard in the past. But, they are not the sole reason that our economy is where it is.

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Sparhawk

Well said.

onetime2

The labor market now is a far cry from what it was when labor unions were created to fight for worker safety and against abuse. When was the last time you heard legal workers complaining about being forced to work an 80 hour week with no bathroom breaks in deplorable conditions in the US? Unions had a lot to do with the OSHA laws that are in place now to insure worker safety but the contributions they make now are far less than what they were originally created to address.

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apechild

There are anti-trust laws in place to prevent that sort of behavior - to ensure that competition remains in place and that substitute products remain available to consumers. When unions require all workers to join, there is no more labor competition and no substitutes are available to the consumers of labor (employers). This is not capitalism at work, Superbelt. Need I remind you that capitalism relies upon competitive market forces, whereas unions try to remove those competitive forces? No, this is not capitalism, it's collectivism.

Indeed. However, unions are actively trying to take away that ability by requiring all workers to join.

Goobledegook? Good luck with that degree, Superbelt.

Precisely. You just said exactly what I've been saying. Anything that causes the laws of supply and demand to "deteriorate" (in this case by trying to implement a floor on the price of labor through coercive tactics) is, by definition, anti-competitive. Again, it's not capitalism, it's collectivism.

Cute. But there has never been a capitalistic dictatorship. I could, however, name a few collectivist dictatorships if you're interested.

Unions don't create an attractive environment for workers, Superbelt. In fact, without the employers, there would be no environment for workers, period. Unions cause unemployment by raising the cost of labor to a price above its equilibrium. That creates the exact opposite of what you're describing. A better working environment comes about through efficiency and productivity gains, as well as economic growth and prosperity. Unions fight efficiency and productivity, and they tax economic growth and prosperity.

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apechild

Feel free to dismiss my "fancy diagrams." If you want to ignore this free lesson in economics, you may feel free to do so. Further, I am not trying to defend corporate malfeasance, just illustrating how unions cause unemployment.

The world would be a better place without unions. Individuals - employees and employers - must remain free to make mutually beneficial arrangements - free from force or coercion. Anything less would be unfair and dishonest. And spare me you're little drama about squeezing blood out of someone's body and throwing him in the trash. That's just silly. If someone doesn't like his job, he can quit. There are no slaves in this country. But there is ample work, ample wealth, and unemployment benefits for those who lose work. We owe our wealth, our benefits, and our prosperity to the greatest economy in the world - an economy built by free trade, competition, and the profit motive - the very things the unions seek to destroy.

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matthew330

i've been in two different unions and this is absolutely not the case. Laziness was totally rewarded in these settings (or i should say productivity certainly was not encouraged). Half the people I worked with should have been fired 10 times over. They did nothing but complain the only people that had justification for complaining was their employer who couldn't get rid of them. The other crappy thing is when a strike was planned we were all bullshitting after work and i'm like "fuck that - i don't have any problem with this company, I'm coming to work whether or not you guys strike" of course i was threatened afterwards. One time i went through the union and filed a complaint, at the encouragement of my union rep. Nothing was done. Any other time i had a problem I decided "fuck the union - I'm going to management", problem solved (not that this happened too frequently). The union loves you if your a good potential lawsuit for them (i.e. - a minority), and will defend your position whether or not it's justified. Please don't try to twist that into being a racist comment - it is/was an indisputable fact at this union.

wilbjammin

Shoutout to Neil Bush!

While we're attacking all facets of America's economic structure, lets not forget the S&L scandal that we're all still paying off and probably will continue to pay off for many decades.

Since the dollar is no longer based on any standard, and because money works simply because we implicitly agree to use it (if you actually believe in what John Locke says about property), then we're stuck in a system that is dependent on governmental regulation because the government has essentially constructed the economy through its policies. Anything is allowed, out of fairness or greed, and the regulating facets of government is part of this "anything is allowed" system. We are basically stuck with this system unless some revolution happens. Right now unions are not creating a lot of new improvements for workers, but historically they have done a lot. Those changes do stay with us, and for all of us that work and earn our money, we should be happy for the labor movement. Upswings and downswings in the state of labor seems to be quite a pattern in US History.

(Though don't get me wrong, I not exactly what you'd consider to be a William Jennings Bryan...)

The issue with labor is this - we have free movement of all facets of production, but labor does not have mobility. This is why the European <b>Union</b> is actually working well as a (relative to ours) laissez-faire system. Labor is mobile in the EU, there is not much incentive to export jobs from one country to another, the "race-to-the-bottom" isn't as prevalent, and countries are inspired to make incentives for workers to come to (or stay in) their country as well as businesses (instead of just businesses). "What? You not going to pay us shit or give us benefits? We're moving to France." Of course, recessions tend to help the businesses win out over labor. The unified currency does help against severe inflation, at least.

And one more thing -"Because it's a free country" doesn't settle well with me as a good excuse for anything. Things are allowed and not allowed by agreements, "because it's a free country" suggests a system of anarchy that simply does not exist.

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