"power corrupts" Lord Acton
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Keith Hudson Sent: Sunday, September 25, 2011 2:15 AM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, , EDUCATION; Harry Pollard Subject: Re: [Futurework] Unions 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 < [email protected] <mailto:[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 _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2012/08/ _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework -- ****************** Henry George School of Social Science of Los Angeles Tujunga CA 90243 (818) 352-4141 ****************** Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com/2012/08/
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