12-03-2003, 06:45 PM | #1 (permalink) | |
Tilted
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Unions
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
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12-03-2003, 06:59 PM | #2 (permalink) |
Pissing in the cornflakes
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Translation should be:
DEAN: Because Unions give a lot of money to Democrats.
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12-03-2003, 07:15 PM | #4 (permalink) |
Dubya
Location: VA
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I wouldn't mind seeing some more context.
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12-03-2003, 10:02 PM | #5 (permalink) |
This vexes me. I am terribly vexed.
Location: Grantville, Pa
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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. |
12-03-2003, 10:05 PM | #6 (permalink) |
Crazy
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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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12-04-2003, 12:44 AM | #7 (permalink) |
Insane
Location: under the freeway bridge
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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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"Iron rusts with disuse, stagnant water loses its purity and in cold water freezes. Even so does inaction sap the vigor of the mind" Leonardo Da Vinci Last edited by nofnway; 12-04-2003 at 12:47 AM.. |
12-04-2003, 04:23 AM | #8 (permalink) |
This vexes me. I am terribly vexed.
Location: Grantville, Pa
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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 ________ Hopefully you all get that reference. |
12-04-2003, 05:22 AM | #9 (permalink) | |
Modern Man
Location: West Michigan
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Lord, have mercy on my wicked soul I wouldn't mistreat you baby, for my weight in gold. -Son House, Death Letter Blues |
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12-04-2003, 05:42 AM | #10 (permalink) |
Super Agitator
Location: Just SW of Nowhere!!! In the good old US of A
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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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12-04-2003, 06:33 AM | #11 (permalink) |
This vexes me. I am terribly vexed.
Location: Grantville, Pa
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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' Last edited by Superbelt; 12-04-2003 at 06:35 AM.. |
12-04-2003, 06:39 AM | #12 (permalink) | |
This vexes me. I am terribly vexed.
Location: Grantville, Pa
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http://abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s679070.htm
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Kozlowski defrauded the company for 1 billion dollars. You think that might be enough for the Union to disperse some benefits and pay raises? |
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12-04-2003, 06:44 AM | #13 (permalink) | |
Modern Man
Location: West Michigan
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Lord, have mercy on my wicked soul I wouldn't mistreat you baby, for my weight in gold. -Son House, Death Letter Blues |
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12-04-2003, 06:49 AM | #15 (permalink) | |
Junkie
Location: NJ
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There are plenty of examples of this: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp...¬Found=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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12-04-2003, 06:55 AM | #17 (permalink) |
Pissing in the cornflakes
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What does Tyco's wacky former CEO have to do with corrupt Unions?
Nice straw man.
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Agents of the enemies who hold office in our own government, who attempt to eliminate our "freedoms" and our "right to know" are posting among us, I fear.....on this very forum. - host Obama - Know a Man by the friends he keeps. |
12-04-2003, 06:57 AM | #18 (permalink) | |
Dubya
Location: VA
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12-04-2003, 07:06 AM | #19 (permalink) |
This vexes me. I am terribly vexed.
Location: Grantville, Pa
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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. |
12-04-2003, 07:09 AM | #20 (permalink) | |
Junkie
Location: NJ
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Strive to be more curious than ignorant. |
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12-04-2003, 07:24 AM | #21 (permalink) | |
Dubya
Location: VA
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12-04-2003, 07:24 AM | #22 (permalink) |
This vexes me. I am terribly vexed.
Location: Grantville, Pa
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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. |
12-04-2003, 07:32 AM | #23 (permalink) | |
Junkie
Location: NJ
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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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Strive to be more curious than ignorant. |
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12-04-2003, 07:58 AM | #25 (permalink) |
This vexes me. I am terribly vexed.
Location: Grantville, Pa
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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. |
12-04-2003, 08:03 AM | #26 (permalink) |
Crazy
Location: Vermont
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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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Skwerl. Its wuts fer dinner. |
12-04-2003, 08:21 AM | #28 (permalink) |
This vexes me. I am terribly vexed.
Location: Grantville, Pa
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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. |
12-04-2003, 08:36 AM | #29 (permalink) | ||
Dubya
Location: VA
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"In Iraq, no doubt about it, it's tough. It's hard work. It's incredibly hard. It's - and it's hard work. I understand how hard it is. I get the casualty reports every day. I see on the TV screens how hard it is. But it's necessary work. We're making progress. It is hard work." Last edited by Sparhawk; 12-04-2003 at 08:39 AM.. |
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12-04-2003, 08:45 AM | #30 (permalink) | ||
Crazy
Location: Vermont
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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. Quote:
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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Skwerl. Its wuts fer dinner. Last edited by apechild; 12-04-2003 at 08:47 AM.. |
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12-04-2003, 08:58 AM | #31 (permalink) | ||
This vexes me. I am terribly vexed.
Location: Grantville, Pa
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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! Quote:
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. |
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12-04-2003, 08:59 AM | #32 (permalink) | |
Pissing in the cornflakes
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__________________
Agents of the enemies who hold office in our own government, who attempt to eliminate our "freedoms" and our "right to know" are posting among us, I fear.....on this very forum. - host Obama - Know a Man by the friends he keeps. |
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12-04-2003, 09:21 AM | #33 (permalink) |
Junkie
Location: In the land of ice and snow.
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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. |
12-04-2003, 10:36 AM | #34 (permalink) | |
Junkie
Location: NJ
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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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Strive to be more curious than ignorant. |
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12-04-2003, 10:40 AM | #35 (permalink) | |
Dubya
Location: VA
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12-04-2003, 10:51 AM | #36 (permalink) | |
Junkie
Location: NJ
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Strive to be more curious than ignorant. |
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12-04-2003, 11:00 AM | #37 (permalink) | ||||||
Crazy
Location: Vermont
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Skwerl. Its wuts fer dinner. |
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12-04-2003, 11:14 AM | #38 (permalink) | ||
Crazy
Location: Vermont
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Skwerl. Its wuts fer dinner. |
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12-04-2003, 11:23 AM | #39 (permalink) | |
Banned
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12-04-2003, 12:56 PM | #40 (permalink) |
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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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