Harry,
At 19:41 22/09/2011, you wrote:
Ed and Keith,
I remember a long time ago, I was surprised to find that while the
union aristocrats - autos, rubber, steel - were able to make wage
advances, most of the smaller unions were lucky if they could
maintain a living wage.
Things may be different now as the smaller unions have lost even the
lessened power they had and of course, overwhelmingly, most
Americans are not unionized.
However, the modern strong unions are no longer striving to get a
living wage. They are bureaucracies working with corporate
bureaucracies to get a larger piece of the pie from the people they
buy in governments. So, who provides the pie? The non-union workers
who,for example, had to pay an extra $1,500 or so for a car because
of tariffs and other legislation designed to make things extra good
for the union members and their employers.
Another example of union and corporate bureaucracy collusion is the
two-tier system at GM whereby the new worker is taken on at half the
existing workers' wages.
In California, the two major teachers' unions each have sent more
than $1 million to Sacramento. Among the things they bought is
legislation that says that if a city declares bankruptcy because its
unfunded pension costs are killing it, the pension obligations
cannot be touched.
Also, legislation passed that says, in the next fiscal year no
California teacher can be fired no matter how broke the city is.
There's another that I'm not sure has yet been passed that forbids a
city from declaring bankruptcy. A number of California jurisdictions
are in a bad way financially and such legislation that gives them no
way out is placing them in an untenable position.
As someone who worked in industry 40 years ago and lived in a town
where there were eight large automotive factories at a time when the
unions were very powerful I got to know all the various dodges that
went on in order to increase their wages. In the last few years I
can't help noticing that the public service unions were re-inventing
many of the same dodges. In Coventry, union power plus management
incompetency destroyed seven of those factories within a few years.
When, a few years later, Nissan decided to set up a car factory in
England it made sure of avoiding the (ex-)car workers of Coventry and
went almost as far north as it could (Newcastle, in fact) in order to
establish a more sensible culture (where the workers earn sightly
more than the national average wage compared with the two- or
three-fold wages that the Coventry car workers received in their
heyday). Local and central government departments can't go broke in
the same way as Coventry car factories did but economic reality will
find a way of destroying their practices just as certainly in due course.
Of course, it's not just the unions. The corporations get their
pound of flesh too.The politicians are also often pretty crooked.
(Sometimes, they go to far. In Bell a little place of 36,000 people
the City Manager voted himself an $800,000 salary - about twice what
the President gets. He is now in jail.
In this country, most of our city managers are now getting the most
enormous salaries (at least three or four times what they were
getting ten years ago). They say that this is what their job market
indicates, but their job market is what they largely prescribe for
themselves. The elected politicians do very well, too, in many
councils (and in central government also, of course). It's a useful
two-way relationship. The politicians choose the executives and allow
them their high salaries. In turn the executives invent all sorts of
lovely perks for the politicians.
Meantime, the LA council gets about an annual $200,000 apiece. In
order to avoid work, they make arrangements that there will be
enough attending a council meeting to form a quorum while the rest
can take time off. They take turns making the quorum. And so on, and
so on, and so on.
One can understand the desire to support unions and more
particularly to advocate a decent living wage for the so many who
don't get it, but the present corporate union bureaucracies are not
the same as the early unions who were really fighting for better
conditions for a deprived class.
Yes.
Keith
Harry
//////////////////
On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 11:16 PM, Keith Hudson
<<mailto:[email protected]>[email protected]> wrote:
Ed,
Of course, unions aren't "evil". They've been natural claimants for
the prosperity that the industrial revolution produced. In my time
in industry in a large factory (at Massey-Ferguson where we produced
more tractors than anywhere else in the world at that time -- about
1,500 per day if I remember rightly) I noticed that the workers
nearest to the end of the assembly track (that is, nearest to the
customer) struck more often and were paid more than those elsewhere
in the factory (and roughly three times as much as average wages
outside the automotive industry!). In these days of increasing
automation, and when the mass of jobs are being dumbed down
(increasingly able to be done by any 14-year old), then unions will
continue to lose the power they had.
Actually -- to refer to the other thread -- exactly the same will
apply to the overpaid FIRE sector. In the way it could manufacture
credit (building on government methods ever since the 1920s) it,
too, was pretty near the customer and could thus exercise power. Its
personnel, too, will be increasingly slimmed down by automation. In
the last ten years the new high-speed algorithm methods driven by
super-computers now carries out well over 80% of stock market
transactions automatically. This is bound to spread into the bonds
and futures markets in the coming years as the credit crunch gets
sorted out. (One big advantage of this in due course is that
"instant" world-wide balance sheets will be possible. At the present
time no-one knows just how much real debt lies in governments, banks
and off-balance-sheet 'vehicles'.)
Keith
At 21:41 21/09/2011, you wrote:
Are they still of any consequence? Maybe not. I watched the TV
yesterday evening. On the CBC's "Lang and O'leary exchange",
arch-capitalist Kevin O'Leary referred to unions as "evil" and said
they should be abolished. On "Connect with Mark Kelly", a guy held
an "On Strike" sign up and asked passers-by to tell him what they
thought. A lot of them said that they didn't care for unions at
all. Then came the CBC news. It seemed that Air Canada's flight
attendants and the airline had reached an agreement -- no
strike. Had they not agreed, our government had back to work
legislation ready to go. One has to wonder if unions still have
any real significance and whether there still is a collective
bargaining process.
Ed
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