John Oliver wrote:
But now the pendulum has swung the other way. Unions have become an
obstacle to success, as we see with the airlines and auto manufacturers.
Ford, GM, airlines... they aren't "greedy bastards holding onto billions
and billions of dollars, unwilling to share"... the market has changed,
and the products they sell and the price they get for those products has
changed. Competition abounds. But the unions haven't changed... they
still demand high-five-figure salaries for line workers, massive benefit
programs, full medical, their people can never be laid off or fired
without Saint Peter and the Lord Jesus Christ appearing in person. The
work that union employees do today can be done much, much more cheaply,
and so it shall... either the unions will be broken, or the
non-unionized companies will eat their used-to-be competitors for lunch.
You are wrong.
The problem afflicting GM, Ford, etc. is success.
They have been around long enough to have a large base of retired workers.
Once you remove pensions and healthcare obligations for retirees, US
companies, like steel mills, often become competitive again.
The correct answer is healthcare and pension costs diversified across
multiple industries so that as one industry is declining another one is
picking up the tab.
However, the same people who whine about unions also whine about
portable pensions and universal healthcare.
IIRC, it was Toyota who recently located a plant in Canada instead of
North Carolina and cited universal healthcare has saving them about
$2000 per worker.
-a
--
[email protected]
http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
