Unions

[skooldem1]

Do we still need them?

[arrr&bee]

Yes we do because management will always take advantage of workers if there's no one to fight for their rights,and what lots of union members seem to forget is that they are the union so they have a powerful voice,yes unions get powerful too so don't let your voice be silenced but unions are still needed more now than ever.

[selbmarsh2000]

Yes we do because management will always take advantage of workers if there's no one to fight for their rights,and what lots of union members seem to forget is that they are the union so they have a powerful voice,yes unions get powerful too so don't let your voice be silenced but unions are still needed more now than ever.

and what's going in in WI is the start of union busting. The right winger have made the unions the boogie man and the tea baggers are lapping it all up. Funny how the tea baggers are working class and support people that want to kill off the middle class.

[jobeterob]

Yes.

Unions have caused decreased productivity in Canada [[and I'm sure the USA) but without them, everyone would be making $5 an hour again, no benefits, starting with Haliburton first.

[selbmarsh2000]

Yes.

Unions have caused decreased productivity in Canada [[and I'm sure the USA) but without them, everyone would be making $5 an hour again, no benefits, starting with Haliburton first.

Unions gave us the 40 work week and weekends. While there are some downsides, in the long run Unions have been good. I've never had a union job, but my brother was a grocery store clerk and the union protected them and he was able to make a good wage with benefits.

[jillfoster]

Absolutely, Rob. If companies could get away with it, they would pay 5.00$ an hour to everyone. Tebaggers keep saying "Let the market dictate wages... if you offer inferior wages, nobody would work for you", the problem is that even in the best of times, when unemployment is at 3%, a metropolitan area of 1 million has 30,000 unemployed, and a certain percentage who are DESPERATE for anything, even 5.00$ per hour. and things like unions and the minimum wage keeps corporations from taking advantage of the desperate in our society.

[stephanie]

Yes we need unions!

[soulster]

and what's going in in WI is the start of union busting. The right winger have made the unions the boogie man and the tea baggers are lapping it all up. Funny how the tea baggers are working class and support people that want to kill off the middle class.

Yup! Strange, isn't it? People voting for ideology and against their own best interest.

[Maria]

The chickens have come home to roost for those who voted for a GOP legislature. Unions Forever!

[soulster]

The chickens have come home to roost for those who voted for a GOP legislature. Unions Forever!

Not really. Busting unions is what they've always wanted. They are just the pawns of big business. A lot of them tea-baggers just haven't figured it out yet. They are too busy watching FAUX news and bashing Obama to notice they are getting played.

[mark speck]

As an employee of one union [[UFCW) and a member of another [[OPEIU), I would definitely say YES!!

The irony is...over 20 years ago, I was a MEMBER of UFCW when I worked cleaning grocery stores and thought 'what am I paying dues for? What do I get out of this except a couple bucks less in my paycheck?' Now that I wound up working for the union [[in a very roundabout way), I'm able to see just what it is they do to protect the hard-working people of the major grocery stores and drug-store chains...and we do a LOT for them!!

Best,

Mark

[juicefree20]

I worked for the Postal Service for 20 years, while watching Reagan/Bush/Bush try to dismantle & sell off the most profitable parts to their mailer buddies [[most former Poastal Management). What other business would actually GIVE AWAY their most PROFITABLE product, while allowing their competitors to make inroads on their business?

Yet that is EXACTLY what Postal management did, when it decided that it no longer wanted to be bothered with parcels, a product that was their MOST PROFITABLE one.

Imagine working in an industry where while touting automation, telling employes that that mechanization WAS NOT intended to replace them, but rather to help them & to make their jobs easier. Imagine a few years later, being told that your job was being abolished because guess what...the automation that wasn't going to replace you is poised to do exactly that.

Not once, not twice, but for some of us, on 3 separate occasions.

Imagine a business that tries to circumvent the union by pitting junior workers against senior workers, by violating a negotiated contract & inducing those junior workers to bid against their own jobs & senior workers by offering them packages that contained weekends off & the opportunity to work days, as opposed to nights.

Imagine working somewhere for 10 or even 20 years, setting up your household schedule based upon your work schedule, only to have your job one day tell you that you're being excessed & within 30 days OR LESS, you have to transfer & transfer anywhere within a 75 to 150 mile radius. Oh, and by the way...if you can't find a babysitter, or an apartment within that time, you'll be terminated.

Imagine a job where they violate NEGOTIATED CONTRACTS which spell out what work belongs to certain crafts, use even supervisors to pick up the slack & do work that should be done by employees, thereby weakening EVERYONE'S position, even that of the supervisor.

Imagine a job where even though the governor AND the mayor of the city can declare an CITY-WIDE emergency because of hazardous travelling conditions, yet when their workers can't make it in, they are threatened with write-ups, disciplinary action taken against them & their pay withheld until the union fights to get the workers paid...

Imagine a job where even the supervisors are screwed-over by guys whom have NEVER WORKED on a workfloor, telling them what SHOULD be done under PERFECT circumstances. Then taking away employess from them & expecting them to do even MORE work than they'd be able to do, even if they were adequately staffed.

Imagine being in South Carolina, California or New York & a guy in Washington or New York punches up your social security number, the machine that your working on & checking to see if your machine is idle, then sending out a report to your facility which questions why the machine was idle & if the employee was using the bathroom, why didn't they use the bathroom during their break.

That's how the Postal Service works & the list of violations goes on & on & I know this as fact because I still have the reports that I used to do when I was working in the Logistics office.

The point that I'm making is this...

If these types of things can be done on a unionized job, exactly what do you believe goes on in the private sector, where no protections for the workers are in place?

We've seen what the private sector has given us, as well as what they've given themselves.

The private sector has given us endless outsourcing of American jobs, constant downsizing of American jobs. And this is not because Americans WERE NOT doing their jobs...it was & is always done in order for them to increase the profit margin...profits that they had ALREADY BEEN MAKING!

The private sector gave themselves 'golden parachutes', million dollar bonuses to their 'elite'...billionaires milk cash-strapped cites by resorting to basic blackmail & extortion in order to receive public funded stadiums & arenas, when those dollars could better serve those cities by utilizing those monies for education, repairing infrastructure, hiring policemen & firemen, supporting programs for school children, supporting programs for the elderly...something...ANYTHING other than making a bunch of greedy-azzed billionaires even richer off of the sweat & backs of the American working class.

Any American who is against unions have to out of their rabbit-azzed minds.

Or has been brain-washed by the Tea Party.

[juicefree20]

People need to look up the history of Labor, back in the days before there were unions.

One thing that I neglected to post while writing about the Postal Service, were the times when we used to come to work early, OFF-THE-CLOCK, because there were things that we had to get done & had to make sure was done for our customers.

Times when we worked through breaks & lunches because there was a problem on the workfloor & in order to satisfy the needs of our customers, we had to leave that office, climb into trucks containing pallets of mail & dirty, filthy sacks & get the job done.

Or like 9/11 & the Anthrax scare, in which 2 of our fellow employees perished, when we worked off-schedule, because mail couldn't be flown in & truck schedules, as well as orders from Bush, etc. were changing constantly.This wasn't done for extra pay, it wasn't done for altruistic reasons. We did that because it had to be done & there was no time to be talking about what our job descriptions were. We got out of that office & did what we had to do.

And for that, there were no special luncheons, no special commodation cards, no bonuses...none of that. What most of the folks got were swift kicks in the asses, upper management from Washington telling them that no matter how productive they were, it simply wasn't enough & putting the pressure of unreleastic expectations of their supervisors, while stripping them of their power & workers.

Others received letters informing them that their positions were going to be abolished & some people were excessed.

THAT'S the thanks that folks received & that really sucks when you think of how these folks are always asking people to go above & beyond what they have to do, always expecting folks to turn their lives upside down, as they say 'for the good of the service'.

Funny how the service never seems willing to do anything for the GOOD of the employee.

As I said, if this is what they do to a job which offers union protection, what chance has anyone who doesn't?

[skooldem1]

In 2011, What rights do non union people have that union members dont?

[skooldem1]

How many working Americans are union members and how many are not?

[soulster]

In 2011, What rights do non union people have that union members dont?

The right to be mistreated and fired without any representation!


How many working Americans are union members and how many are not?

Why does that matter?

[splanky]

They aren't perfect and they do have downsides like everything else man-created on this planet but the fact remains for
so many people they provide the only protection many employees have against abuse by bad employers, not to forget the
fact that many people working non union jobs also either don't have or are struggling with the cost of their health care.
I've been on both sides of the fence over my life and though I'm not crazy about the local I'm in now I can remember when
I'd been on a job for over 7 years and was fired over a minor vechicle accident that involved no injuries or profit loss, just a
scratch on a ceiling beam, in ONE DAY. No hearing, no representation, wasn't even allowed to disgust the matter, no severance pay, nothing. The main problems I have with unions is that no matter how hard a worker I am , no matter how
much I bust my ass, the jack off who bullsh*ts around most of the day in my same title is going to get the same pay and
I will never see a raise until the union and city agree upon it in contacts annually negotiated in the media. Some years, they freeze salaries and I understand this will be one of those years...

[soulster]

Not all unions are created equal, nor are all the same. Some are good and really take care of their members, some are rotten, and are only concerned with politics. Republicans act like they are ALL bad.

[chidrummer]

Unions gave those of us who grew up between the '50's and the '80's the good lives we had. In my case, my parent's union jobs provided us with our own home, good food in the house, access to great primary education and later college and graduate studies. Because of unions I and my siblings never worried about health care, our parents were home every night and all weekend, we took vacations around the country, bought pretty much whatever we wanted and have everything that we needed.

I've always thought one of the biggest mistakes unions made was not organizing the millions of office workers in America. The effect of that mistake is so clearly evident this very day. Today most office workers can be fired without reason or recourse. They've been handed the responsibility for their own retirement without having also been given the knowledge of or how to use the proper tools to insure that retirement. The carrot of success and riches was dangled in front of office workers who, in actuality, had a better chance of earning their own gold record before they'd ever get "the American dream".

We need unions now more than we've ever had. What's going on in Wisconsin is the harbinger of Death. What Governor Walker is doing is nothing short of blatant union busting. If he succeeds, it will be open season on unions all over the country. Why? Because the Right knows that's were the Democrats get their greatest funding. The strategy is quite simple, destroy unions and that will destroy the Democratic party.

If we all had any sense, we'd be in the streets demanding more union representation and complete campaign finance reform nationwide. Otherwise, we're going to bear witness to the Right's continual and relentless attack on what will become the mythical memory called, the American dream.

[juicefree20]

Splanky:

As a unionized worker who busted his ass from Day One, I understand what you're saying about workeres who are 'stiffs'. With that said, I have to say that the stiffs were far outnumbered by those who dilligently busted their butts.

On the other side of the coin, I can see how people whom had busted their behinds became disenchanted after years of being hard-working, model employees, only to get a swift kick in the teeth from management. I can understand how many of them began to feel as though the 'stiffs' & the lazy workers had it right all along.

What did all of their hard work mean when management gave them the shaft mid-way or near the end of their careers? When one plays the game the right way & when management has spent years talking about how we were all "family" who should pull together, only to turn around & dog the workers at a whim, what good does any of that hard work mean? One usually expects that their hard work should be their own reward.

After all, isn't that how the big shots justify THEIR OWN million dollar bonuses?

Bonuses which were earned off of the hard work of their workers, as well as their constant down-sizing which made the remaining workers have to do the same amount much more work, if not much more, with far less resources & far less compensation & protection.

[juicefree20]

Piggybacking on what ChiD posted, a simple observation of how times have changed...

When I was a kid, we were told that all one had to do to achieve the 'American Dream' was for one to work hard, keep their nose clean, ya-da, ya-da, ya-da. And we were always told, even decades afterwards that the American Dream, was not only desirable, but was obtainable.

Within this last year, all of a sudden, I've read reports from the big-wigs which states that not everyone should expect to achieve that dream, nor should all of that hard work necessarily guarantee them one.

Whcih suggests to me that these folks believe in nothing less than a class system.

Just like all of these idiotic politicians who seem to be suggesting that unemployed people who are collecting their benefits after paying into to the fund for years, feel as though they're 'ENTITLED" to collect some of that money that they had to pay into that fund, whether they wanted to or not.

That type of thinking is just a small part of why America is in the shape that it's currently in & that kind of thinking only ensures that if things will only get far worse, rather than better, should these people have their way.

Yet, they've somehow managed to convince a lot of Americans that unions, as opposed to their OWN greed & sense of entitlement is to blame. More incriminating, is the number of working-class folks who regurgitate it as though Moses had brought it down from the mountain.

Go figure!

[soulster]

Here's something to think about: It is being said in the media that those tea-baggers in office right now don't care about being re-elected in a couple of years, but you can't tell me that more than a few of them just may want to keep their free ride into politics. If the winds of change doesn't go their way, they decide to eventually back off their agenda and play ball. We shall see...

[mark speck]

Chi--There IS an office union [[OPEIU)...my office, which is an office for another union, is represented by them!

Best,

Mark

[chidrummer]

Thanks for that Mark, but OPEIU represents 125K workers. There's an estimated 70 million people who work in an office in this country. What if OPEIU even represented half of those people? What would this country be like then?

[jillfoster]

Labor ALWAYS needs representation. Just yesterday, I was in the vestibule of our store, and I overheard one of our customers telling a friend of hers that her son in law was just let go from IHOP, and was told by the manager that the location was closing, and they had just worked the last two weeks for free, that were not getting their final paychecks. She was upset because her daughter was in the middle of chemotheraphy, and this was going to put him in a big financial bind. I went over to her and told her in no uncertain terms that it was illegal for them to not pay wages for time worked, and that if he had any trouble, to file a complaint with the Missouri department of labor. She seemed skeptical, like I didn't know what I was talking about, then I took off my coat, showed her my uniform, told her I was a department manager here in the store, and she believed me then, and seemed reassured. The absolute greed and audacity that people employ, playing on people's fear and ignorance, tactics of intimidation... it makes me sick. HELL YES, we need more unions, not less.