Unions


beefche
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To uphold the pro-labour laws? Maybe it's an expression of their constitutionally mandated right to assembly? To provide an effective grievance system against said employers? Because a group of people are always more powerful than an individual?

Honestly, Beefche, there are a million reasons to Unionize. Due to globalization, the union has lost a lot of power (If a group can simply relocate to a place more pliable and less expensive, many will), but that doesn't mean that it should be relegated to the dinosaur dump. It just means that, sadly, the balance of power lies with business once more.

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I have a difference of opinion. I think that minimum wage law allows employers to keep wages low. "Hey we are paying minimum wage". Competition is what drives wages and should. Competition is what drives prices too. More wages are driven up by the "law" the more the cost of goods goes up so then minimum wage needs to go up so cost of goods goes up and it is an endless cycle.

Ben Raines

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I think FunkyTown has it nailed. The labor movement fought long and hard for a better life and it needs to be vigilant that such a struggle need not be repeated. Mormons no longer live a pastoral or agricultural life, so they too currently reap the benefit of the labor movement's suffering.

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Your question holds the answer.

Why are we bailing out the Big Three when the "bail out" ignores the core problem? How can the big three compete with Toyota when the average man hour costs the Big Three twice as much as Toyota due to Unions?

The problem will never be fixed until unions are abolished and the Big Three can play on a level playing field with other manufacturers. Unfortunately congress won't bite the bullet and our next president disagrees (because of a mental illness called liberalism).

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To uphold the pro-labour laws? Maybe it's an expression of their constitutionally mandated right to assembly? To provide an effective grievance system against said employers? Because a group of people are always more powerful than an individual?

Honestly, Beefche, there are a million reasons to Unionize. Due to globalization, the union has lost a lot of power (If a group can simply relocate to a place more pliable and less expensive, many will), but that doesn't mean that it should be relegated to the dinosaur dump. It just means that, sadly, the balance of power lies with business once more.

Help me out here. You said to uphold the labor laws. Don't we have laws and lobbyists? Do you think that the basic labor laws would get repealed and not have the masses in an uproar? Isn't there already a grievance system? People can and do take their employers to court (lawyers are pretty open to filing any lawsuit).

You've got me on the relocation one. I, too, hate seeing our jobs going to other countries because the cost of labor is so cheap. But I would imagine that if a company wants to do that, then they can "shut their doors" or find some loophole and do so. And my observations of unions (granted it's very limited...my dad was in one) is that they simply provide a way for employees to get a salary that is above what other similar companies give and guarantee their jobs. So a company I would imagine would be loathe to have a union and may choose to produce outside the country to avoid them (among other reasons).

I just would think that

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Guest HEthePrimate

Same reasons as when they were first formed. Personally, I'm a little tired of wage stagnation--everything is going up except my wages, and it's really difficult to make ends meet--while corporate CEOs get these extravagant compensation packages, even if they do a bad job. I'd like to see more of the little guys organizing and putting pressure on their employers to make things a bit more fair.

HEP

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Hi just like to say i am apart of a union the LHMU in Australia its quite interesting they are very helpful if you need representation with the employer and they tend tell you what your rights obligations they even have translators but they do have their policies they want to implement \ agenders but i have found them useful for the individual cases that i have been involved in

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I have a difference of opinion. I think that minimum wage law allows employers to keep wages low. "Hey we are paying minimum wage". Competition is what drives wages and should. Competition is what drives prices too. More wages are driven up by the "law" the more the cost of goods goes up so then minimum wage needs to go up so cost of goods goes up and it is an endless cycle.

Ben Raines

The problem with that, Ben, is that there is basically no competition for many minimum wage jobs. Heck, in many cases jobs that open up in traditionally low-interest markets(Such as fruit gathering), the companies will simply hire anyone who is willing to do it, which is why illegal immigration isn't strictly controlled: Many places depend upon these groups.

On the other hand, in Alberta, McDonald's pays basically twice minimum wage simply because the oil fields provide a no-skilled individual a high paying job, so nobody wants to work at McDonald's. Even with minimum wage laws, competition forces wages upwards in areas where there isn't a plentitude of low-skilled workers.

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Well I don't know how they are used in the US - but here if a company abuses the laws, a person has someone to stand by and provide representation, take it to a tribunal etc. Without having to pay anything out they haven't already paid.

Just recently one of out major supermarket chains refused to give someone time off when their child was ill (part of our laws) and the manager of the store tried to push the worker out, a union representative managed to sort the problem out within a week. Another personal one was a person who was about to be made redundant was not being paid their redundancy pay, the union did the work at the time someone couldn't afford a lawyer so they got their money. Or just recently a teacher was suspended for making a student do press ups, despite no complaint being made was reinstated with minimal fuss because of the Union. Or our bus company has some pretty disgusting labour policies the Union is currently fighting to improve the conditions for the bus drivers.

-Charley

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Help me out here. You said to uphold the labor laws. Don't we have laws and lobbyists? Do you think that the basic labor laws would get repealed and not have the masses in an uproar?

Yes. It has. If you don't believe me, ask the Teamsters Union about empty return loads and how that's affected independant contractors. Or look at Canada's laws on work weeks. Since the decline of the union, it is now legal to force someone to work up to 60 hours a week. And they can't say no.

Isn't there already a grievance system? People can and do take their employers to court (lawyers are pretty open to filing any lawsuit).

And those without the money for lawsuits, or who simply want a fair system, or don't have the time to fight the lawyers of big business end up losing. For some reason, legitimate grievances in the US tend to get swept under the rug, but spill hot coffee in your lap and Mickey Ds gives you a cool million. There are literally thousands of wrongful dismissal cases every year.

And my observations of unions (granted it's very limited...my dad was in one) is that they simply provide a way for employees to get a salary that is above what other similar companies give and guarantee their jobs. So a company I would imagine would be loathe to have a union and may choose to produce outside the country to avoid them (among other reasons).

Right. And therein lies the reason that unions have lost power - True globalization means unions lose, simply because relocation costs are often better than dealing with the headache of a union. The long and the short? I'm grateful to the Unions for providing me with the kind of life I live now. Without them, our lives would be far harder at work.

To me, if a company has the choice between having $1 billion/year in profit or $900 million/year in profit and sharing the other $100 million among its workers? I don't feel badly for the company. Thankfully, I work for an ethical company run and owned by someone who was on the other side of the workforce. I'm grateful for that, but not everyone works for Research in Motion.

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IMHO Unions are not good news and don't give anyone an incentive to do a good job. They really are the cause of the big three downturn. You don't see Honda and Toyota with Unions in the U.S. and they are in much better shape. I don't know about the significance in other countries, but they are a nightmare and I am so happy that I don't have to work with one and am not a member of one. To me, unions are just selfish.

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IMHO Unions are not good news and don't give anyone an incentive to do a good job. They really are the cause of the big three downturn. You don't see Honda and Toyota with Unions in the U.S. and they are in much better shape. I don't know about the significance in other countries, but they are a nightmare and I am so happy that I don't have to work with one and am not a member of one. To me, unions are just selfish.

Wait... Wait... You're blaming unions for that and not inferior products and a development methodology that utterly ignores current trends?(IE: Developing huge monster trucks in an economy where gas is expensive and an economic downturn prevents the purchasing of these types of vehicles.)

I think you may be blaming the wrong thing.

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Your question holds the answer.

Why are we bailing out the Big Three when the "bail out" ignores the core problem? How can the big three compete with Toyota when the average man hour costs the Big Three twice as much as Toyota due to Unions?

The problem will never be fixed until unions are abolished and the Big Three can play on a level playing field with other manufacturers. Unfortunately congress won't bite the bullet and our next president disagrees (because of a mental illness called liberalism).

The problem isn't that unions exist. The problem is that there is an incredible distrust between labor and management. When labor and management compete with each other, both will suffer and the product will deteriorate.

The typical autoworker in the US earns about $28.48 per hour plus benefits. That's about $60,000 per year. It just so happens, that's about what I make with a Master's Degree, and I get all the same benefits the auto workers do.

If we look at Honda alone, in their plant in Greensburg, IN, the typical employee earns about $24 per hour plus their benefits (an interesting side note, this wage is so much more than any other industry in the area that all the industries are increasing wages to compete for labor). In actuality, the wages for US auto manufacturers and foreign auto manufacturers are about the same. All these companies have to make the same Social Security and Medicare payments for their employees, and in all likelihood, healthcare and pension benefits are probably comparable. I suspect is has little to do with how much the companies have to pay their employees per hour, but how much the companies have to pay per car.

The stereotype of union employees is that they don't do as much work as they are scheduled to do, i.e., they get more scheduled breaks. This may be contributing to US Auto Industry being unable to compete. Then there are all the squabbles between management and labor. The Wall Street Journal published an article that explained this situation that developed at Ford

Not terribly long ago, says a Ford manager who must remain unnamed, Ford dispatched a team of welding experts to a factory to explore efficiency moves. The plant's union leaders, fearing layoffs might result, refused to meet with the team, and the effort came to naught. UAW leaders aren't bad people; far from it. But when everything is a negotiation, many things don't get done.

Contrast this with what happened at Honda

Two weeks ago some automation equipment broke down at the Honda factory in Marysville, Ohio, but employees rushed to the scene and devised a temporary solution. There were no negotiations with shop stewards, no parsing of job descriptions. Instead of losing an entire shift of production, Honda lost just 150 cars.

Then you get into the quality issue. US automakers make a pretty crappy product compared to Japanese automakers. In fact, US automakers fell behind back in the 1950's. W. Edwards Deming, who is well known for his work in making production during WWII more efficient, proposed to the US automakers a plan of statistically designed and controlled experiments to improve the quality of production. He was rejected. Deming then took is methods to Japan, where they were adopted, implemented, and almost worshipped. The Statistical Quality Control program gave birth to what is known as Six Sigma today. It wasn't until the 80's that the US really started to recognize the value of Deming's methods. US automakers have been playing catch up ever since, and unions have been fighting change every step of the way.

You might also consider this example:

For all the Pinto's infamy, perhaps no car better captured America's decade-long haplessness than the pug-ugly AMC Gremlin, which debuted in 1970 and died -- mercifully -- in 1980. The Gremlin's shape, fittingly, was first sketched out by an American Motors designer on the back of a Northwest Airlines air-sickness bag. On Aug. 20, 1979, 18-year-old Brad Alty, fresh out of high school in Mechanicsburg, Ohio, was driving his Gremlin to work when the car broke down. He was two-and-a-half hours late to his first day on the job at a new motorcycle factory that Honda Motor was opening in central Ohio.

For the next few weeks, Mr. Alty and his 63 co-workers did little but sweep floors and paint them with yellow lines. Then they started building three to five motorcycles a day. And at the end of each day they would disassemble each bike, piece by piece, to evaluate the workmanship. Mr. Alty hated it, and he kept getting grief from his older brother for working for a Japanese company. "I thought I had made a mistake by going to work there," he recalled recently. "It was like, 'What the heck am I doing here?' "

But Mr. Alty stuck with it, and Honda stuck with him. Honda's real goal was to build cars in America, but the motorcycle plant allowed it to test the mettle of American workers for a modest investment. The workers passed the test. Honda started building Accords in Ohio in November 1982. Ironically, some U.S. Honda dealers actually protested that they wanted to sell only Accords made in Japan. But the quality of the Ohio-made cars was soon confirmed. (Wall Street Journal)

Japanese auto companies expect better work from their workers and expect committed work. They build a better product because of it. In return, it's understood that if the workers build a good product, the company will treat them well. In large part, they've done this without the unions.

Nissan, Toyota and other Japanese car companies soon started building factories in America, followed by German and Korean auto makers. There are now 16 foreign-owned assembly plants in the U.S., and many more that build engines, transmissions and other components. The UAW hasn't organized many of them, the main exceptions being plants that began as partnerships between a U.S. and Japanese auto maker, where the union was "grandfathered" in. As Detroit's oligopoly was broken, so was the UAW's labor monopoly in the auto industry. The big winner was the car-buying public. (Wall Street Journal)

Isn't it ironic that it's the companies where the management and labor are always fighting that are having the major layoffs? Again, I don't say this to imply that unions are bad. Management is just as guilty of mistrust and abuse as the unions are. What they need to recognize is that they have a common interest and that they need to stop "taking care of their own" and start taking care of each other. Only then will the issues that have plagued the US auto companies for 30 years abate.

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IMHO Unions are not good news and don't give anyone an incentive to do a good job. They really are the cause of the big three downturn. You don't see Honda and Toyota with Unions in the U.S. and they are in much better shape. I don't know about the significance in other countries, but they are a nightmare and I am so happy that I don't have to work with one and am not a member of one. To me, unions are just selfish.

I'm with FunkyTown...it isn't just the Unions. Management is just as guilty. The two sides view everything as a personal attack. They're so divided that you're seeing a result similar to France and England trying to build a foot bridge to connect the two countries: each side thinks the other is trying to rob them, and no one wants the bridge anyway.

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The problem isn't that unions exist. The problem is that there is an incredible distrust between labor and management. When labor and management compete with each other, both will suffer and the product will deteriorate.

The typical autoworker in the US earns about $28.48 per hour plus benefits. That's about $60,000 per year. It just so happens, that's about what I make with a Master's Degree, and I get all the same benefits the auto workers do.

If we look at Honda alone, in their plant in Greensburg, IN, the typical employee earns about $24 per hour plus their benefits (an interesting side note, this wage is so much more than any other industry in the area that all the industries are increasing wages to compete for labor). In actuality, the wages for US auto manufacturers and foreign auto manufacturers are about the same. All these companies have to make the same Social Security and Medicare payments for their employees, and in all likelihood, healthcare and pension benefits are probably comparable. I suspect is has little to do with how much the companies have to pay their employees per hour, but how much the companies have to pay per car.

The stereotype of union employees is that they don't do as much work as they are scheduled to do, i.e., they get more scheduled breaks. This may be contributing to US Auto Industry being unable to compete. Then there are all the squabbles between management and labor. The Wall Street Journal published an article that explained this situation that developed at Ford

Contrast this with what happened at Honda

Then you get into the quality issue. US automakers make a pretty crappy product compared to Japanese automakers. In fact, US automakers fell behind back in the 1950's. W. Edwards Deming, who is well known for his work in making production during WWII more efficient, proposed to the US automakers a plan of statistically designed and controlled experiments to improve the quality of production. He was rejected. Deming then took is methods to Japan, where they were adopted, implemented, and almost worshipped. The Statistical Quality Control program gave birth to what is known as Six Sigma today. It wasn't until the 80's that the US really started to recognize the value of Deming's methods. US automakers have been playing catch up ever since, and unions have been fighting change every step of the way.

You might also consider this example:

Japanese auto companies expect better work from their workers and expect committed work. They build a better product because of it. In return, it's understood that if the workers build a good product, the company will treat them well. In large part, they've done this without the unions.

Isn't it ironic that it's the companies where the management and labor are always fighting that are having the major layoffs? Again, I don't say this to imply that unions are bad. Management is just as guilty of mistrust and abuse as the unions are. What they need to recognize is that they have a common interest and that they need to stop "taking care of their own" and start taking care of each other. Only then will the issues that have plagued the US auto companies for 30 years abate.

Yep! Moe is completely right. The fault of the industry lies in the culture of those companies. In a company that's dedicated to quality, where management and worker work together, everything changes. I know that firsthand in one of the few companies that has consistently grown and continues to grow during this recession.

I drank the corporate Kool-Aid. I'm proud of it. ;)

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And looking at my completely right post ;) I realize that I might not have been clear. I do not advocate the elimination of unions. I just want them to lighten up a little. In the current climate, I don't see management trying to take advantage of labor, and so the union's role is diminished. But I'm not ready to say that it will always be that way. The day may yet come when organized labor is again needed to prevent abuse by management.

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Wait... Wait... You're blaming unions for that and not inferior products and a development methodology that utterly ignores current trends?(IE: Developing huge monster trucks in an economy where gas is expensive and an economic downturn prevents the purchasing of these types of vehicles.)

I think you may be blaming the wrong thing.

There was no incentive to create cutting edge cars and high quality. None. You were getting paid regardless, what did it matter? There was no focus on efficiency, Quality Principles - doing things right the first time, and being competitive with foreign companies. It can be looked at this way - loyalty with sports teams. There are just some sports teams that no matter if they are horrible or are fantastic that people are loyal to. The car companies were turning into a fraternity. There was loyalty for the longest time and they took advantage of it.

Buy American was the way they created a nice following among the car brands. But then lemon laws came along and Consumer Reports and consumers demanded high quality. They got it from the foreign car companies, not from Ford, Chrysler or GM. Saturn was the worst company that GM should have gotten involved with. I have a friend who had a Saturn that literally had the door fall off. So, after that, I am convinced that all Saturns are trash. It is great to have a sales philosophy that doesn't pressure you, but if a door falls off of your car and it has a ton of problems, who cares about the selling process? The people doing the work on the cars were members of unions and if they had cared about Six Sigma when Toyota introduced it, then would be even in Quality.

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There was no incentive to create cutting edge cars and high quality. None. You were getting paid regardless, what did it matter? There was no focus on efficiency, Quality Principles - doing things right the first time, and being competitive with foreign companies. It can be looked at this way - loyalty with sports teams. There are just some sports teams that no matter if they are horrible or are fantastic that people are loyal to. The car companies were turning into a fraternity. There was loyalty for the longest time and they took advantage of it.

Buy American was the way they created a nice following among the car brands. But then lemon laws came along and Consumer Reports and consumers demanded high quality. They got it from the foreign car companies, not from Ford, Chrysler or GM. Saturn was the worst company that GM should have gotten involved with. I have a friend who had a Saturn that literally had the door fall off. So, after that, I am convinced that all Saturns are trash. It is great to have a sales philosophy that doesn't pressure you, but if a door falls off of your car and it has a ton of problems, who cares about the selling process? The people doing the work on the cars were members of unions and if they had cared about Six Sigma when Toyota introduced it, then would be even in Quality.

That fault doesn't lies with the unions(Not entirely). That lies with the engineers. American cars are mostly poorly engineered dungheaps.

You can prove this by looking at other vehicles that are made by unions. Ford makes wonderful trucks - And it's the same union workers making those. However, in todays economy, the fact that Ford makes the king of the road truck is irrelevant.

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There was no incentive to create cutting edge cars and high quality. None. You were getting paid regardless, what did it matter? There was no focus on efficiency, Quality Principles - doing things right the first time, and being competitive with foreign companies. It can be looked at this way - loyalty with sports teams. There are just some sports teams that no matter if they are horrible or are fantastic that people are loyal to. The car companies were turning into a fraternity. There was loyalty for the longest time and they took advantage of it.

Buy American was the way they created a nice following among the car brands. But then lemon laws came along and Consumer Reports and consumers demanded high quality. They got it from the foreign car companies, not from Ford, Chrysler or GM. Saturn was the worst company that GM should have gotten involved with. I have a friend who had a Saturn that literally had the door fall off. So, after that, I am convinced that all Saturns are trash. It is great to have a sales philosophy that doesn't pressure you, but if a door falls off of your car and it has a ton of problems, who cares about the selling process? The people doing the work on the cars were members of unions and if they had cared about Six Sigma when Toyota introduced it, then would be even in Quality.

Are you saying it was the unions that rejected Six Sigma programs? And what do you mean Toyota introduced Six Sigma? Come to think of it, what are you saying...that post really left me confused. I'm not sure if you're arguing for or against Unions, and I'm not sure if you're placing the blame for poor quality on management or labor.

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