http://www.startribune.com/stories/535/5183586.html
[Snip] "The union that represents 5,000 supermarket clerks, baggers, and meat-cutters in the east metro area wants store owners to help the union slow the expansion of Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Target Corp., which employ nonunion workers ... Union officials say they will resist any effort by the companies to make workers pay insurance premiums. Local 789 also wants a 3 percent wage increase for all workers, an increase in pension contributions and limits on direct store delivery, which allows vendors to stock shelves instead of union workers ... In the background is last year's grocery industry strike in California. Grocers there, claiming that high labor costs made it impossible for them to compete with Wal-Mart's nonunion workforce, eventually won a two-tier salary schedule that gave younger workers less money and benefits. But that victory came after a bitter, five-month strike." I remember as a 16-year old bag boy at Del Farm Foods on Selby and Western a hundred years ago, how the union rep would have to chase me around the store to get me to pay my monthly union dues so I could benefit from my $3.25/hr, 20 hour/week miserable job. Let me ask a naive question, as someone who has resisted mandatory collectivism since I was a young teen: If the union deal is such a good one, how can Wal-Mart or Target succeed in hiring anybody? And isn't it collusion or worse that several business can band together and petition the government to hurt their competitors? It seems to me that if the union wins, their employers will lose because they will be in an even less competitive position vis a vis Wal-Mart and Target. Dennis Tester Mac-Groveland
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