Myths of Organized Labor
In 1914, Ford shocked the world, announcing a wage increase from $2.34 to $5.00 per day. The increase was paid as a bonus to men who met Ford’s standards for sober living as verified by Ford Motor Company’s Sociological Department and Harry Bennett’s spies. Henry, meanwhile, would quietly putter up the Rouge from Fairlane in an electric motorboat, docking at a secret staircase in the mansion he built for a young stenographer who joined the company in 1909.
Obviously Ford was no saint. He raised wages out of pure self-interest. His factories were terrible places to work. The new assembly line was mind numbing, backbreaking drudgery. Hundreds lost fingers or limbs in presses and stamping machines every year. Factories were noisy and dirty and the line moved brutally fast, with no breaks. Supervisors had stopwatches. No wonder there was a 10% absentee rate and a turnover rate as high as 370%. In 1913, Ford Motor Company hired over 52,000 men to keep 14,000 employees, something a business model based on productivity could not afford.
The $5 wage stabilized Ford’s workforce. What’s not widely known is that at the same time Ford also shortened the workday. An eight hour day meant the plants could run three shifts, 24 hours a day, speeding production and reducing costs. In 1922, Ford shortened the workweek from the industrial standard of 50 hours, including half a day on Saturday, to a five-day, 40-hour week. That way, with overtime, he could run full shifts on the weekend and keep his plants busy 24/7/365. I’m sure that if Ford had known that safety increased productivity, Henry would have made the plants safer.
Even concerning safety and working conditions, unions’ benefit to non-union workers is somewhat exaggerated. Once again, one can never underestimate the power of selfish interests. E.I. DuPont started a gunpowder mill on the banks of the Brandywine in 1802. He faced some of the same difficulties Henry Ford did in attracting and keeping workers. It was dangerous work. DuPont did something as clever as Ford’s $5 a day wage. He told his employees that if they were killed on the job he’d support their families, perhaps inventing employee life insurance. Then, instead of one large mill, he built several small mills with three stone walls and a fourth of wood facing the river, each designed for one stage of production. In case there was an explosion the wooden panel would blow out towards the river, leaving the walls standing and keeping the explosion from spreading to the entire operation. He also trained his employees to be very, very safe. To this day, “safety first” is DuPont corporate culture. Like Ford, DuPont was no saint, making his fortune from war. He stressed safety because mills were expensive to rebuild, and widows and orphans expensive to support.
Ford and DuPont didn’t act out of the goodness of their hearts. Neither did unions, whose primary accomplishment has been giving individual employees economic leverage, not making the world a better place.
I don’t owe unions any more thanks than I owe Hank and E. I.
$70.hr. UAW worker cost is by no means debunked. Suggest you take a cost accounting class. Otherwise an OK article.
The fact is that business actions taken out of altruism are not sustainable unless they incidentally result in increased productivity. If one employer in an industry were to significantly raise wages or improve working conditions, it would not remain competitive UNLESS those changes resulted in greater production. In the auto industry, we can thank the UAW (along with management that agreed to their unsustainable demands) for the pay, benefits and working conditions that are threatening to put the so-called “Big Three” US automakers out of business. In our area, we had a unionized grocery chain that eventually went broke, throwing hundreds out of work, because it couldn’t continue to compete with the non-union grocers. States with Right to Work laws now enjoy a substantial competitive advantage over those that have union shop rules – but the unions would like to do away with that advantage. In a global economy, having wages, benefits and working conditions that are out of line with productivity just won’t cut it for long. You may be able to hold on awhile if the government starts bankrolling your operation but even that “fix” will only temporarily delay the inevitable.
Risk/Reward ratios are not spoken in this article. I suggest the author approach his thoughts from a different perspective.
Would he argue that soldiers are treated unfairly? How about slaves: Got a problem with them?
Perhaps he should read Durkheim’s “The Division of Labor in Society” for a tune-up of ideas and thoughts.
Bob, Very well said. The “holy grail” that we should keep our eyes on is productivity. Have you seen the picture that hit the net recently of the UAW contract? It’s hundreds of pages long. There is no way that the work rules embedded in that document can be sustained. None. My personal experience with UAW includes a near grievance for moving a pc from one floor of a building to another. And while we’re at it, we should be repealing many labor laws which favor unions at the expense of management. Doubt we’ll get that from an Obama administration, but we can hope for a change in the Congress in 2 years.
To point out the obvious: read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand for a full exploration of the idea expressed by Bob in comment #2.
As a former union member and official, I know that not following all union dictates makes you an enemy of the union. After my first union experiences, I tried to stay non-union whenever possible.
Union philosophy sounds, at first, good and practical, but is always used to overpower the company and throttle its subjects. Unions apply the “pay to work” philosophy that workers have no option to deny. And use union dues for purposes the members might disagree with, but have no recourse. Mafia methods.
The American Postal Workers Union, for instance, has empowered itself to handle grievances in any manner it wishes. If a grievance is too time consuming and/or costly to them, or the person processing the grievance is your ex-wife, they will just drop it at any stage of the process.
Unions are big business and totally political. The labor laws and options available to workers today, enable workers more freedom of choice and protection. Companies and employers know that to stay competitive, they have to stay union free and treat their employees with respect.
RJ: What the heck are you talking about? He’s showing that certain “make-the-world-a-better-place” changes/improvements were made by owners to help their businesses, not because some pie-in-the-sky hippie made a fuss. How do slaves and soldiers fit into this?
Any business that gets a union deserves it. Unions are a business cancer. Run a good business and you won’t have cancer.
“Companies and employers know that to stay competitive, they have to stay union free and treat their employees with respect.”
Well spoken. Unions have long outlived their usefullness and are now merely vehicles for leftist thugs to beat those evil corporations into bankruptcy. I am proud of the senators who stood against taxpayer bailout of this decadent, union-dominated industry. The American auto industry would never have been in this mess had its executives stood firm decades ago instead of peeing their pants when the UAW walked in the door. $70/hr in wages and benefits for a job any dim-witted high school kid could master in a couple of days? What has happened to us?
The Dupont powder mills on the Brandywine have been partically restored, and are an interesting place to visit.
Regarding Ford and the $5/day wage, here’s an interesting (anonymous) letter to Ford from the wife of a line worker:
“The chain system you have is a slave driver! My God! Mr Ford. My husband has come home & thrown himself down and won’t eat his supper–so done out! Can’t it be remedied?…That $5 a day is a blessing–a bigger one than you know, but oh they earn it.”
See my post the automotive century and mass production.
One of the things that unions do is help employed members NOT do the work of the employer but do the work of the union while still being paid by the employer. It starts when the boss needs to talk to the union leader while the union leader is working. The work is either delayed or is done by someone else. This evolves into hiring a person to do the work of the union leader because he is dealing with the boss most of the time. It quickly becomes apparant that the union leader can cause enough trouble, e.g., grievances, safety complaints, peer disciplne, diversity, community affairs, etc. to keep him busy FULL TIME, as a union guy.
Now, expand the concept to a large plant where the UAW says we need one full rime rep for each 50 union members and each rep needs a private area to conduct union business, phones, copy machines, etc.
That’s where the vicious costs are. They are buried in the CBA. When aggregated, the costs associated with these union people raise the cost of the union workers who actually work for the company to $70/hr. On the railroads (before they died) it was called featherbedding.
BTW, all those union folks who worked so hard to get Obama elected? Union stewards on the cpmpany payroll. Management was glad to do it; if they were organizing voters they couldn’t be in the plant causing trouble.
@ Cybergeezer, I used to be in a similar position to you (I was the recording sec. in the workplace), and my experience was similar to yours.
We had problems too numerous to keep track of with our union Local (one step above us), processing and advancing grievances, arguing company policy, etc. The way union structures are designed are just as flawed as company management structures. The union lacked transparency and accountability… decisions to act, or not to act, were often personal, or out of an unwillingness to spend money. Sometimes we wish we could form a union to fight our union.
The best company knows this and should treat its employees well. Your employees shouldn’t even be thinking about forming a union because they should say “no, we’ve already got it pretty good here, I’d rather not get on their bad side.”
Poor companies, always the victim. Unfortunately for you some of us listened to our parents and grand-parents and know what life was like for the working man and woman not so many years ago. Perhaps Ford was a good man or perhaps Ford needed Americans to make a better wage so they could afford his cars, or perhaps both. One example does not make a truth. Try your argument in another fifty years or so when our parents are gone and can no longer tell their stories.
The cost of an employee to an auto company, and to the consumer, is not the per hour wage, but the fully loaded salary, which includes benefits. If you assume the worker earns $38/hour base pay (~$79,000/yr), but the fully loaded salary is $70 (~$146,000/yr) then an astounding $32/hour is paid for benefits and overtime. Presumably, the benefits amount is also paid for all retired employees, in addition to whatever pension they receive. It’s my understanding that, until recently, the auto companies generously footed the entire benefits package. When you purchase a car, guess which amount is included in the price you pay? A huge factor is the number of employees required to do the work vs the number of employees actually hired to perform the work. At these wages things can get out of hand pretty quick when a company over hires. I think this last issue is where the big three fail to compete. The wages may be similar, but the numbers of people being paid those wages affects the bottom line.
people who are anti-union think of themselves as crap, and believe they should be treated that way. your company owner thinks so, too.
workers died fighting the companies for the rights and the demands that gave your fat asses every possible break.
unions are the reason you’re able to leave your desk and use the bathroom.
respect for workers was an ethos created because there are unions.
when american companies went off shore to find the cheapest possible labor, while the ceo’s were gorging themselves on 100′s of millions of dollars, do you think they went for some other reason. if so, you’ve got holes in your head as well as your reasoning.
the american workforce is the most productive, educated in the world. these slob companies, and their Leaders with mutton fat on their chins, would be thrilled to come back if they can pay us $5. a day. you shmuck.
the fact is, the middle class was created by unions because of the demands for a living wage, fringes, benefits and pensions. unions enabled regular folks to obtain credit, and we became the world’s largest consumer market. the combination of our military and our consumption made us the most powerful nation on earth.
oooohhh, but those demaaaands. and, i hasten to add, you might want to multiply the cost of long term unemploymment insurance, inability to pay debts and mortgages, or afford any health coverage thereby increasing our costs exponentially, and lest you forget also add the shrinking of the tax base.
hey, who needs a middle class, anyway. and those union “legacy” demands for retirees. who needs retirees, how about we just kill them.
Bush is going to bail out an industry run a union thugs, but he is going to leave in prison two border guards who were defending our country from drug dealers. His legacy will be leaving the country in tatters ans shame.
RKV,
The $70/hr figure is a myth in the sense that it implies UAW members are getting paid $70/hr for their labor. When you see people saying, as we all have, that autoworkers make $140,000 a year, there’s some serious mythmaking going on.
I’m not anti-union or pro-union any more than I am anti or pro money markets or any of the other necessary evils in a capitalist system. Still, many opponents of organized labor are using the current crisis for their own agendas. That someone would quibble with the one sentence in my essay that is arguably sympathetic to organized labor, shows that we’re dealing with true believers (on both sides of the issue), not people capable of nuance.
I see so called free market conservatives (which I would like to believe I am) calling for government mandated wage ceilings, which is essentially what Sen. Corker has proposed. It’s one thing if a bankruptcy judge orders changes in contracts – that’s the statutory role of bankruptcy proceedings. It’s another for the US Senate to do so. Besides, the notion of pegging wages in a US industry to those paid by foreign owned companies seems, to me, to be effectively yielding control of our industrial policy to foreign interests.
RJ,
As a poster has pointed out, the issue of slavery is a red herring. Ford had no shortage of people wanting to work in his factories before the $5/day wage. While the jobs were not pleasant, necessitating a wage increase to stabilize the wage roll, nobody forced them to build Model Ts. They could, and did, quit in droves. Slaves have no option to quit.
As I concluded the essay, the fundamental value of a labor union is giving individual non-key personnel economic leverage.
My best friend is a labor attorney who works for employers, including stints at automotive suppliers. He has no blame for unions, because they act the way will all do, trying to grab all they can. He has little respect for his own bosses because of how reflexively they cave in to union demands. At the same time, as an at-will employee, he’d love to have the kind of leverage a union gives to prevent arbitrary dismissal.
NC Bob,
Besides legacy pension and health costs, the problem isn’t so much the number of stewards or featherbedding, but rather the work rules in the UAW contract. Those rules make it very difficult to run the plants efficiently.
That being said, there are few unions that are as capitalist as the UAW. Walter Reuther, a fierce anti-communist, said to George Romney “more and more pay for less and less work is a dead end”.
If it’s okay for big Dick, Shelby to represent the interests of foreign automakers, I don’t have a problem with Gettlefinger representing, as he sees it, the interests of his membership.
Saltherring,
“Dim-witted”?? No bias there, no, none at all. Considering most college seniors, including Ivy Leaguers, can’t get a passing score on a standard test of US civics, the fact that someone has a piece of parchment doesn’t mean that they are entitled to a good wage.
One problem with America is that we’ve let our manufacturing base wither to 12% of the economy. People think they are too superior to actually do physical labor. Not only are there jobs many Americans won’t do, there are many Americans who think they are too good to do anything other than push paper. I bet there are fewer autoworkers browsing the web on their employers’ time than office workers.
Cybergeezer, NCBob, Christopher,
You cited legitimate problems with labor unions. One issue not raised is how unions object to two-tier wage systems for existing employees and new hires (something the UAW has agreed to, btw – like I said, the UAW is relatively progressive). My ex and one of my daughters work for Blue Cross and are represented by the UAW, which wanted them to go on strike for something not in their financial interest. It makes no financial sense for existing employees to lose wages in order to protect the interests of those yet to be hired.
As was pointed out, the unions are businesses themselves and often do things that are in the interest of the union hierarchy, not the members themselves.
Meanwhile, the really corrupt unions, those representing public employees, like the SEIU, seem to get a pass in all this UAW bashing. Public employees, both organized and those in the federal GS system are a much bigger drain on our economy than well paid autoworkers.
Perhaps Ford was a good man or perhaps Ford needed Americans to make a better wage so they could afford his cars, or perhaps both.
Did you even read the article? I said nothing about Ford being a good man. In fact I said it was pure selfish interest on his part.
As for the myth that Ford increased wages so his workers could afford his cars, well, I made it clear that the $5/day wage was all about productivity. The idea that an employer can increase sales of his products by paying his employees more money so they can afford the product is not logical. It’s the equivalent of taking money from your left pocket and putting it in your right.
the american workforce is the most productive, educated in the world. these slob companies, and their Leaders with mutton fat on their chins, would be thrilled to come back if they can pay us $5. a day. you shmuck.
So the workforce is productive and well educated, but the CEOs and other managers, well, they’re stupid and greedy. Okee dokee.
As posters have mentioned, smart business managers treat their employees well because it’s in the interest of the business to do so. They shouldn’t treat them so well that the wages and benefits are unsustainable.
As pointed out in the article wages and benefits were rising before most American industries were organized by unions. There was a substantial middle-class in America before the Battle of the Rouge Overpass. The heart of the middle-class are America’s entrepreneurial small businesses, not industrial workers. There are millions of small businesses, but only about 150,000 UAW autoworkers.
Bob – In a global economy, having wages, benefits and working conditions that are out of line with productivity just won’t cut it for long. You may be able to hold on awhile if the government starts bankrolling your operation but even that “fix” will only temporarily delay the inevitable.
What you are really saying is that if we accept “unfettered” Free Trade and Globalization as immutable forces – then productivity is predicated on any worker in a global labor pool somehow having the productivity to “out-compete” a rival in a 3rd world country willing to work for 1/10th the pay, sleep 20 to an apartment flat, with no environmental or health protections.
(Those non-union auto jobs down South only exist because they were created pre-Globalization and “Free Global trade” in goods and labor. Otherwise, the Japs would have been happy to set up the factories in cheaper Filipino and Indonesian and Chinese locales if they knew they still had the US market wide open and free for the taking. Japan was not “out-competed” by non-union American worlers – it reached full employment in the late 70s and saw it’s access to export and go with cheaper Asian labor threatened by countries that threatened Japan that they wouldn’t buy unless goods were built in their native countries that had mass unemployment..)
Otherwise, wages must “levelize”. Which going non-union “only delays the inevitable” as non-union service jobs and industries also “fail to compete” and unprotected ways of making a living go to the unemployed 3-4 billion elsewhere hungry to take them at any wage.
Long term – that means a tremendous, steep decline in the standard of living of the Average American to “be competitive with Bangladeshis, Paks, Indians, Chinese, Nigerians wanting to be the lower cost provider”, while a small Elite here reap great profit from destroying US jobs, technological edges.
And no, Trickledown is a myth, and there are no “exciting miracle technologies” and economic macro sectors that Americans are magically more gifted at, then others in shuttered Russian towns or Vietnamese villages or Bolivian slums can be trained to do…
Nor if we accept free trade and Global bid labor supply, can we exempt on a sustainable basis – whole sectors of our economy from it. Meaning teachers, Marines, doctors, airline crews, truck drivers, miners/foresters/farmers brought in on work visas, legal system people, Government clerks…100s of millions of Asians want those jobs..and eventually they would also have to be open to “competition”.
(Not for the least because working Americans made “wage-competitive” with Pakistanis would need doctors, lawyers, cops, and soldiers also paid at 3rd World rates – they could not afford them at present salaries professionals and gov’t workers get.)
Or we see where “unfettered Free Trade” and Globalization are leading America to impoverishment and ruin and end the record-rate transfer of our jobs, accumulated wealth, and accept we need some measure of Protection before we let an ideology that is not working as promised to destroy what America took 300 years to build – domestic industry, technology, jobs and markets.
After our independence, Europeans wanted nothing more than globalization and “unfettered Free Trade” to keep America from industrializing, building universities. They were the leaders in cost-efficient manufacturing and wanted the US to remain a nation of farmers, producers of raw resources for Euros to add value to…and nothing else.
If scared and concerned Americans are wrong, then the remaining Globalists on Wall Street and Ayn Rand Acolytes need to make a better case of what jobs Free Trade and global low bid labor will create in America. Because right now, the Democrats OWN the meme that has spread in the minds of not just blue collar, but also college-educated and white collar workers in greater and greater numbers:
Free Trade Destroys Good Jobs, Does Not Replace Them.
It’s incredible that in this day and age liberals still evade the most basic facts of economics in their blind belief that unions were responsible for increases in our standard of living – such as Judy above.
The most serious evasion is that it is even possible for unions to increase living standards by coercing businesses into giving their members higher wages. At the heart of this evasion is the childish belief that “profits” are the only thing stopping the worker from getting a pay rise. In the mind of the liberal, all workers could enjoy higher wages if only the “greedy capitalists” would distribute more of their profits to labor.
Yet it is revenue that creates wages, not profits. In a typical manufacturing operation, labor costs absorb between 60-75% of the revenues a product generates. Of the rest, most pays other production costs like materials and transportation, is reinvested into the company and is spent on research and development. After all this, a typical profit margin will stand at around 3-5% (often at the lower end).
The idea that wages – which account for up to 75% of revenues – can be significantly raised by slashing profits – which account for as little as 3% of revenues – is ridiculous. So if unions are responsible for raising wages, then where have these “increases” come from?
Since the only possible way to increase wages is to generate more revenue, it stands to reason that there are only two possible ways to increase wages.
The first way is by increasing the price of the product. This is the only way to increase wages in response to the physically coercive blackmail of unions. If unions have increased wages, it has been at the expense of the consumer in the form of higher prices. When prices rise, the value of wages fall. We have less spending power. Also, if the consumer has to pay more for one particular product then he has less money to spend on other products, whose industries then have to lay off workers. Union pay increases come at the expense of the consumer, of non-union workers and even at the expense of the union worker himself as a result of generally increasing prices.
The second way is by increasing the productivity of each worker. In fact this is the only way in which real wage levels (as opposed to nominal wage levels) have increased since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Technological advances in the means of production are what made each worker more productive and what made higher wages and hence higher standards of living possible. The unions have had nothing to do with this whatsoever – we can thank the entrepreneurs for their continuous investment and the innovators for their contributions to technology.
All of the unions demands have been paid for by the consumer – by ordinary people, by other workers. They have been paid for by revenues, not profits. It’s about time the union-loving left grew up and stopped evading reality. Unions have slowed our economic growth and caused substantial unemployment. They have a legitimate role – to ensure that their workers are paid market rates and work safely. But this is NOT how unions behave. They’ve acted as greedy thugs who want it all but like children, don’t give a damn where it comes from.
I’ve never worked in an union type industry, and I’ve always been treated well.
So I just don’t buy it.
Too late JasonS: We have had a front row seat on main street to the astounding greed on wall street with the players in this drama acting like drunks on a corporate paid free for all, as if the world was Las Vegas and the workers and consumers were their plastic chips. Sorry bub, can’t blame this mess on the unions this time.
Ronnie Schreiber makes a good point when he says “Meanwhile, the really corrupt unions, those representing public employees, like the SEIU, seem to get a pass in all this UAW bashing. Public employees, both organized and those in the federal GS system are a much bigger drain on our economy than well paid autoworkers.”
The truth is, the UAW bashing represents overall feelings about unions that many Americans feel. Unfortunately, many have seen what thug unionists can do. And what they see, they do not like. Many also see unions like the National Education Association (NEA) that protects incompetents, is always pushing for more & more money, despite grades constantly dropping like rocks, and is so politically active in leftist politics that most feel the NEA should be recognized as a political subsidiary of the Democrat party. (Admittedly, one could also include the UAW, SEIU, NBC, ABC, MSNBC, NPR, CNN, the New York Times, & a host of others, in that political subsidiary group as well.)
Many unions seem to be significantly more active in affairs outside the union, than they are in affairs inside the union. That is especially true when it comes to money. If the average union dues for a teacher is $1,200.00 a year, then based on NEA activities we all see, it looks like over 75% of those dues is spent on partisan political activism issues that do not necessarily relate to anything that benefits teachers or students. And that political activism is almost 95% directed to Democrats. the thought that Republicans are against teachers is a myth that has been sold to many. In fact, union bosses have established strong personal relationships with many Democrats who the union bosses know will go out of their way to accommodate any union demand, no matter how ridiculous. Opposition to vouchers is based solely on union fears that they will not be able to organize private school or even charter school teachers, so the union would miss out on that dues & ability to force those teachers to accept &/or support the radical agenda the unions seem to be pushing. That agenda is definitely a socialist agenda. The free market, when it is taught to kids, is portrayed as evil and controlled solely by greedy corporations. The unions fail to mention their greed, level of control, and the mere fact that many of those corporations are the reason many have jobs at all!
The point is, the bad press unions are getting or the bad feelings many have for unions, is well earned & was earned by the unions themselves. No one had to mount a campaign to tell average Americans that many unions & their leadership is as corrupt as Congress or the United nations, if not more so. “Card Check,” which unions are really pushing Congress to vote into law, will reintroduce many Americans to the thuggish tactics of union organizers. The media will help distort or ignore many stories initially. But sooner or later even the leftist media will have to start reporting actual events of brutality, intimidation, extortion, and direct violence against anyone who happened to decide to sign the card voting “no” for a union. And once union organizers know exactly who is not voting yes, the direct intimidation will begin. Card Check is simply a means for the unions to be able to target anyone who opposes them. Card Check is legal extortion & leftist members of Congress will be making that possible as payback for the huge monetary union campaign contributions. Just like some ultra wealthy folks like George Soros who are supporting all sorts of liberal causes to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, the unions also will want to get something for their investments. They all will want significant control over national policy. The contributors will demand they get a serious return on their very generous investments in politicians. In short, these liberal groups and persons are as despicable and dangerous as any corporation. Perhaps moreso since the goal of these groups is to take apart the very foundational documents & aspects of America, to remake her into a socialists utopian paradise.
The bad press unions are getting is a diversion; an attempt to distract us from the real culprits in this economic mess we are facing. President Bush was 100% right when he said that Wall Street got drunk and they now have a hang over. The finger your pointing at the unions is shaky, and the bail out booze wall street was handed for the hair of the dog is being wasted on those who refuse to take ownership for their mistakes.
I just want to second RKV’s assertion that the $70 wage is a fact — a fact widely debunked by the unions but a fact just the same
Almost all of the US auto industry’s problems can be traced to organized labor. When you pay 50% more for labor than your competitors, you have no choice but to cut corners and produce a product of lesser quality. You produce a product that is basically a cheap immitation of your more efficient competitors, and you try to undercut them on price. That’s what the unionized Big 3 have been doing for decades. In recent years, Ford has made a concerted effort to bring its line up to the same quality level as the foreign makers’, but they are still losing money, not because they have lower quality, but because they pay 50% more for labor than the foreign makers.
The proof of this is that Ford actually made a profit on its overseas operations in the third quarter of 2008. They can compete with the foreign makers on their own turf, overseas. It’s just in the US where they can’t compete, because they must pay 50% more for labor due to the UAW.
So if the UAW puts the Big 3 out of business, my response will be that the UAW was destroyed by their own greed.
23. Lynn:
I don’t really know what your point was, other than to make a futile attempt at linking two separate issues and to act as if I said something I didn’t in my post.
For instance, I did not in any way, shape or form try to blame “unions” on the Wall St mess. But don’t let this stop you from insinuating that I did.
And of course, don’t forget to refer to me as “bub” for added zing.
If you think your are up to the task of sticking to the subject at hand – unions and wages – and think you have something relevant to say on that subject, something which refutes anything I said, then let’s hear it. Otherwise, save your tiresome liberal bromides for another thread.
But incidentally, the root of the current financial crisis was government interventionism in the form of the Federal Reserve – if you really want to go there. Wall St will always be “greedy.” Greed is a good thing – if humans weren’t greedy for more, for better, then we would still be living in caves. Bankers and brokers will always seek to make a profit – welcome to the real world. But the free market, left to its own devices (i.e. the free decisions of people acting in their best interests), will always punish bad decisions and reckless greed. It’s only when the Fed creates illusory conditions of false prosperity by creating fountains of easy credit and restraining interest rates artificially do bad decisions magnify unchecked. The Fed was largely responsible for the crash of ’29 and it’s largely responsible for this one too. None of which, of course, has to do with the topic of discussion which is unions and standards of living.
Ronnie Schreiber: Your response….“Dim-witted”?? No bias there, no, none at all. Considering most college seniors, including Ivy Leaguers, can’t get a passing score on a standard test of US civics, the fact that someone has a piece of parchment doesn’t mean that they are entitled to a good wage.”
….to my previous post seems to indicate you envision me to be some utopian, elitist doctorate-holding nerd. Nothing could be further from the truth. I am a retired, apprentice-trained machinist who chose to continue his education and become a mechanical engineer, and later, project manager tasked with designing and building submarine training equipment for the U.S. Navy. My criticism of auto industry assembly-line worker wages/benefits is centered on the fact these jobs, unlike journey-level tradesman positions, require very little knowledge, ability or critical thinking skills. Most below average high school kids could master these repetitive jobs in a matter of hours or at most, a few days.
Your following comment……”One problem with America is that we’ve let our manufacturing base wither to 12% of the economy. People think they are too superior to actually do physical labor. Not only are there jobs many Americans won’t do, there are many Americans who think they are too good to do anything other than push paper.”…….is right on. The majority of our spoiled younger generations, particularly the city-dwelling and suburban ones, wouldn’t think of getting their hands dirty doing trades work. The very best engineers I recruited and hired grew up on farms. They had more common sensel and were willing to work much harder.
If free trade destroys good jobs, then we should emulate North Korea or (what used to be) Albania. I don’t thinks so Quicksdraw.
Global trade has been around at least since the time of the Romans (can you say Silk Road?). It’s not a bad thing for countries to make the best of each other’s comparative advantage. Both benefit. The economy (both national and global) is NOT a zero-sum game as some would hold. Mercantilists and their ilk got disproven by Adam Smith and others – they were wrong then and wrong in their current paleo-conservative incarnation.
Statements like “After our independence, Europeans wanted nothing more than globalization and ‘unfettered Free Trade’” are false. Actually it was our countries founders who wanted free trade, and anyone who had a basic knowledge of American history should know this. Mercantilist British trade restrictions under the Navigation Act were a major issue for Revolutionary Era Americans. As per usual, the poster above has got it exactly backwards.
Otherwise, the Japs would have been happy to set up the factories in cheaper Filipino and Indonesian and Chinese locales if they knew they still had the US market wide open and free for the taking.
Another myth. While companies chase after cheap labor, other factors are in play. Isaac Singer set up factories all around the world. Eventually it makes sense to build in the market rather than export to it. If S Class cars sold as well in the US as SUVs were selling in the 90s, big Dick, Shelby’s pet Mercedes plant would be making big sedans.
They have a legitimate role – to ensure that their workers are paid market rates and work safely.
I think they have a more fundamental role. Unions protect workers from arbitrary dismissal.
Rubicon,
Ironically union political activity has resulted in things like OSHA that help to reduce the need for unions.
paulnashtn:
I just want to second RKV’s assertion that the $70 wage is a fact — a fact widely debunked by the unions but a fact just the same
It’s not a “wage”. It’s the cost of labor. Those aren’t the same thing. You want to make it seem like greedy UAW members make $70/hr, which they don’t. Is their contract unsustainable, absolutely. Are UAW members making $70/hr? Hardly.
Judy: no, I think of you as crap.
My Fellow Contributors: You are all FACIST CAPITALISTS!!! If not for strong unions our modern way of life would have cesaed to exist 70 years ago. It was the unions that kept the factories running to fight Nazism. And without Unions today the average worker would be slaving away 90+ hours a week and .50 cents and hour with no overtime and no mid-morning, 10 minute snack breaks. Think about that; how in the name of that spiritual being we we get along without the union mandated 10 minute morning snack break?
$5/day doesn’t sound like much to us, but those were GOLD dollars. After a forty-hour week, you could take your $25 paycheck to the bank and cash it for 1.2 troy ounces of gold coin, with a melt value of $1000 today. That’s $52,000/year TAX FREE, because only the super-rich owed income tax in those days.
RKV – Statements like “After our independence, Europeans wanted nothing more than globalization and ‘unfettered Free Trade’” are false. Actually it was our countries founders who wanted free trade, and anyone who had a basic knowledge of American history should know this.
Incorrect. You do not understand American tariff policy that was rapidly put in place to not only get revenue for the new government, but create industrialization so America was not dependent on more efficient European manufacturers.
Jefferson: “The government of the United States, at a very early period,when establishing its tariff on foreign importations, were very much guided in their selection of objects by a desire toencourage manufactures within ourselves.”
Hamilton also agreed with Jefferson. In his “Report on Manufactures” Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton proposed a far-reaching scheme to use protective tariffs as a lever for rapid industrialization. The two only differed on the extent tariffs were needed to grow American industry in the tariff rate. Hamilton wanted a higher tariff, Jefferson and the agrarians did not one so high Europeans went with alternate sources of cotton, tobacco, fur goods from Russia, Turkey, Egypt and India (latter 2 for cotton).
Tariffs helped America grow and become world leader in most industries from 1789 to post-WWII. They averaged 20% on foreign goods, and we barred foreign service providers from doing professional services for Americans on top of that. After WWII, we began to rely on corporate and personal income taxes to replace taxing foreign goods – never anticipating that 3 billion new labor competitors would use modern transportation and communications to invade the US market and take away more and more jobs.
Consevatives and free trade are like liberals on the social causes of crime. So rooted in hoary dogma they fail to see the obvious. Ricardo’s “Comparative Advantage” was predicated on European labor supplies where rough wage parity prevailed…and due to slight differences in optimum locale and natural worker talents, Portugal had an advantage in making wine, England finished wool products.
Ricardo never considered what would be the consequence of Portugal had 20 times the people of Britain, with wages 10 times lower and no worker “overhead costs”.
If Ricardo had examined such a situation, he would say that for a long time, Portugal would have comparative advantage over all manufacturing. Until with only a slight raise in Portugese jobs and many, many unemployed still begging for jobs from the new wool factories transplanted from Britain, the horrific fall in British wages to a level 6-7 times lower than previously existed, set up “Levelization of Labor Cost”. With this catastrophe for British workers finished – again other factors of Comparative Advantage would then in play again, and perhaps Britain could reclaim what it lost.
Ricardo would also say that in the transition of manufacturing displacement, owners and investors would make a killing selling lower cost goods to British consumers until their savings and credit were exhausted and they had to live within the means of their new, vastly lowered wages. Which creates a strong incentive for wealthy Elites to want just such a disaster to happen…the British workers pain would be their joy.
Or, as was the case and is still somewhat the case in the EU today, and in lands like Japan and Korea – they will protect their domestic market and jobs from catastrophe from the 3 billion elsewhere wanting those jobs and markets to sell their cheap labor to.
25. Lynn:
Blaming the unions for their part in the auto industry crisis is not “diversionary.” Indeed it could be said that you – and others like you – are continually trying to divert attention away from the damage that unions have caused the auto industry by changing the subject to the wider financial crisis.
The two are really separate issues. With or without the financial crisis, the “big 3″ would be unable to compete long term with foreign auto companies. The reason for this, first and foremost, is the labor costs that unions have imposed on them.
What you’re insinuating is that unions are somehow sacred and should never be held accountable for their actions. They’re just another of the left’s politically protected “tribes” who are apparently exempt from any kind of responsibility.
James. Grow up. Learn some economics. And some history. Unions were bought off by FDR for votes, and have been bought by the Democrats ever since. Now they got themselves into a hole – they’ve raised the price of their labor (including benefits) to the point where they’ve bankrupted an industry. GREAT JOB! /s
33. Ronnie Schreiber:
I think they have a more fundamental role. Unions protect workers from arbitrary dismissal.
There is no such thing as “arbitrary dismissal.” If a worker is dismissed, it is for a reason. They’re either not working to the required standard or are not required. Neither reasons are “arbitrary.”
If a worker is not required by a company, why should they be kept on? This is another fact of reality evaded by the supporters of unions – that jobs should not and cannot exist “just for the sake of it.”
Far from unions protecting workers from “arbitrary dismissal,” they actually impose “arbitrary employment” on businesses.
There is a deeper issue to be considered here – that of the fundamental property rights of a business owner. He should be able to employ and dismiss people for whatever reason he likes. He owns the business and should have complete freedom of choice as to who he does or doesn’t employ. If he does not wish to hire union workers for example, that is his right.
37. James:
I guess being a teenager just isn’t worth it if you don’t get the chance to scream “FASCIST!” every once in a while!
Perhaps you would like to explain how our “modern way of life” would have ceased to exist without unions. The unions were not required to “fight Nazism.” And no, workers would be not “slaving away” at 90 hour weeks on low pay without unions. Slave labor is actually a highly inefficient means of production. Workers who work 90 hour weeks and are exhausted do not work to a very high standard. It was advances in the means of production that made workers more productive that enabled them to work less hours for more money – not the coercion of unions.
On second reading, perhaps your post was a spoof.
Yes, dear readers, James neglected a /sarc tag.
Note to James, perhaps the sarcasm was a bit too subtle for some.
There is no such thing as “arbitrary dismissal.” If a worker is dismissed, it is for a reason. They’re either not working to the required standard or are not required. Neither reasons are “arbitrary.”
You’ve obviously only worked for saints. In the real world supervisors and managers are human and do all sorts of arbitrary things, sometimes to the detriment of the companies’ well being. I lost a very good job in part because when they brought in a new supervisor for our group he reassigned me and I told him it was a bad use of company resources i.e. my skills. He even accused me of insubordination. When I asked him to produce a single example of my refusing to do assigned work he couldn’t. He just didn’t like being challenged. I was doing IT support at the time and told him that he wanted me to be smart when I was fixing desktop or network issues but be stupid when he made a mistake. I said that I’d do what he wanted but that it wasn’t insubordinate to do so kicking and screaming that it was a bad idea. The Kelly ‘temp’ they hired to do my former job actually cost the company more money than I did. In time my immediate supervisor agreed with me, but he couldn’t buck his boss, the jerk.
One of the best supervisors I ever had told me that everything but satisfying your immediate boss is outside of your control and unfortunately sometimes your immediate boss is an a**hole. One of Detroit’s problems, which Mulally has worked hard to eliminate at Ford, are all the little fiefdoms ruled by petty tyrants.
The organs of the body were arguing over who should be boss. The brain said that it should be boss because it makes all the decisions. The eyes said they should be boss because they give vision. The gastrointestinal tract said it should be boss because without nutrition the host would die. Then the a**hole piped up and said it should be boss, and they all laughed at him. So he went on strike and closed up. Soon, the GI tract got queasy, the eyes dimmed and the brain became confused, so they made the a**hole boss. That just goes to show that you don’t have to have brains, vision or intestinal fortitude to be boss, just be an a**hole.
Far from unions protecting workers from “arbitrary dismissal,” they actually impose “arbitrary employment” on businesses.
In some cases, true. In other cases they provide due process for dismissal.
There is a deeper issue to be considered here – that of the fundamental property rights of a business owner. He should be able to employ and dismiss people for whatever reason he likes. He owns the business and should have complete freedom of choice as to who he does or doesn’t employ. If he does not wish to hire union workers for example, that is his right.
I’m not a fan of closed shops, but there a things called social contracts. Also, there are laws that protect workers from being dismissed for things that have nothing to do with the job. Do you think that private sector employers should be able to discriminate based on race, religion or gender?
a little-addressed point in this discussion, here and at large is that, basically, US cars suck. i’d never want one, unless it was a jeep wrangler and unless i was 10 years younger. whatever else they do – break up the unions, pillory management, collapse – they should also send the designers to the coal mines and start over. for serious.
37. jamthe;
Again I thay, you are a blind fool. Are you on Obamath tranthition team or Cabinet?
Apparently you have enough educathion to uthe a key board, but from under what rock in which ghetto are you, bro?
Obama ith our thecond black Prethident, and thecond miracle worker; Whatth he going to do that no one elth hath already? Exthept really thcrew everything up?
Thorry, if you can’t underthtand my keyboard impediment.
Mr. Schreiber;
Thank you for this great article; As you can see, unions have had vastly different effects on the workforce.
A friend of mine has said that the powers that exist in the U.S. are trying to create two classes of people. That statement haunts me to this day.
What are “We the People” to do to stop this accomplishment? Or do you think the current U.S. citizens would be happy with that arrangement?
Ahh so much fodder and such little space.
To start out, unlike many (most) of the posters here I am a factory worker. Have been for a couple of decades. I have worked in both union and non union shops. for 13 years I worked for one of the top 3 aluminum producers in the world. I am not IT I actually work the floor and get my hands dirty.
I was also a member of I.A.M. union for a few years.
To the points.
#21 Ummm no. If the plant is spending more than 17 – 20% of its gross on labor it is seriously bad management and cannot survive. Labor is usually #3 on the expense sheet with supply and overhead above it.
I have worked for places that need union reps and ones that don’t. Places that have unions and ones that don’t. I have seen companies do everything they can to break, bend and go around union contracts. As an incident investigator I have personally saved injured mens jobs because the company didn’t want to take responsibility for the injuries their policies and equipment caused. We’re talking lost digits, limbs and yes LIVES lost to save a buck or a second on the line. The plant I work at now cannot go 2 weeks without a recordable injury. For these places a union is needed.
Lest you believe I am a pro union nut there are many companies that do not need unions. there are a ton of them. My hat goes off to them.
As for the “right to work” issues. There is no “right to work”. It IS a right to fire because they don’t like the (insert race, religion,hair style, etc). I have had plant managers tell the employees at meeting about how they can all be fired if plant practices are reported to OSHA,EEOC etc.
I admit that I don’t know who actually started the 5 day work week, overtime pay, ETC but in actual practice for the industry there is no such thing. The ONLY thing that keeps management from working us 16 hours a day 7 days a week ARE the overtime laws. I am asked repeatedly to work off the clock.Remember up ’till the 30′s those hours were the norm. Who among you volunteers to go back to that?
World free trade is a nice little pipe dream. Share what’s in your pipe please. With other countries paying their employees pennies, China devalueating their currency etc. we need some, SOME tariffs to compensate.
Soon the U.S will have no heavy industry we will be a service industry country. Will we survive?
Mr. Schreiber:
“I think they have a more fundamental role. Unions protect workers from arbitrary dismissal.”
Really?
Gee, would you mind informing the Seafarers International Union of that fact?
I spent twenty years before the mast as a rank and file seaman in that outfit.
Let me tell you something, as soon as you sailed over the horizon, the crew were utterly on their own.
The Union couldn’t care less about us. As long as the man-day contributions were being made to the various Plans, they were happy.
I gave myself at least a $150 a day raise, with much better quality of life and much shorter duty rotations by walking away from those dirtballs.
Unions are wholly-owned subsidiaries of the industries they are contracted with. The Union hierarchy is much more worried with keeping a “good relationship” with Management rather than the workers.
Which is why they don’t HAVE any workers anymore.
BTW, does it strike you as odd that the UAW is frontline for the bailout that would allow the Big 3 to keep their assembly plants in canada and Mexico working?
Odd, ain’t it?
And I wonder what the UAW leadership’s response to GM’s offer to buy out it’s ENTIRE UAW workforce last February.
(GM had plenty of money then, and I notice the Big 3 haven’t stopped buying advertising time on tee-vee).
Even more peculiar, that.
I’m a college grad who majored in history and have immersed myself in politics for years.
That this article is the first I’m hearing about how the unions didn’t precede some key improvements in the workplace is a testament to the abject failure of Republicans to correct the liberal falsehoods.
Yes, we have an uphill battle. But because of inarticulate or liberal Republicans and an RNC which isn’t dedicated to Conservatism either, these falsehoods take hold.
It’s time things change.
http://www.gopetition.com/petitions/we-demand-true-conservative-leadership.html
Nothing I repeat nothing was given to the ordinary working man or woman without a fight. From slavery, to indentured servitude, to the company store owning your soul, the ordinary man and woman had to fight tooth and nail and crawl their way up so they might have a chance to live a healthy, long life with some semblance of dignity without greedy, selfish captains of industry squeezing every last drop of blood from their worn out bodies while watching their children slog off to work under filthy unsafe conditions. The railroads were built with their blood, the coal mines were run with their blood, the fancy clothes were made with their sweat, the bridges and high rises were built with their blood, and the wars were won with their blood, and all so they could but some food on the table for their families, maybe buy a small house on a handerchief of land and have some small pittance of retirement so they might live their last years with a little human worth.
Anyone who says that the unions have not made a difference in the lives of the ordinary working Americans is a damn liar.
I worked ( one of my contracts) in a mom-and-pop sort of factory ( Actually, being in the fashion trade it’s more mom-and-mom but…*grin*) No union, no hassle, and currently running a 32 hours week. Why? Because the women who work there would rather have Friday’s off, and as the work can get done in four days? It keeps the work force happy, builds in flexability ( when thing get tight it is easy to add another day to the schedule), and seriously reduces employee turnover ( because where are the going to get another job that gives them Friday’s with their kids? ). So no, unions have nuttin’ to do with the shorter work week – people do.
If you go back to the Industrial Revolution, the unions were the main force in getting safer working conditions, overtime pay, ending child labor and obtaining things like workman’s compensation. But it’s a complicated story.
As long as you are in the private sector, the union and management are in the same boat. If labor takes too much, everyone goes down, because it is a competitive situation. But once you get into the public sector, the employer has a bottomless pit for a pocket, and unions there take on a whole different menacing character.
You also have the negative impact of corruption in unions, but since when is anything free of corruption? Then there is entirely separate issue of unions getting involved in politics, which doesn’t benefit the ordinary worker.
Unions in the western world are fighting a lost cause. Throughout the world you have sweat shops and people working under ghastly conditions at coolie wages, and they are making the goods that are sold in western world. At the same time you have floods of illegal immigrants undercutting wages for everyone to benefit of the companies and that is why there is no will to remove them.
It’s not easy to organize a union either. I did it once in Canada and until the moment you post your list on the bulletin board they can fire all of you. I actually took my holidays and was running the event from Louisiana where they couldn’t find me until it was over.
“people who are anti-union think of themselves as crap, and believe they should be treated that way. your company owner thinks so, too.”
– - – - -
I’m very strongly anti-union, and I think of myself as being intelligent, hard-working, skilled, motivated, able, valuable and valued, fair, insightful, and no more selfish than prudence demands.
Heck, those are the very reasons I’m anti-union, most likely.
“In the real world supervisors and managers are human and do all sorts of arbitrary things, sometimes to the detriment of the companies’ well being. I lost a very good job . . . .”
– - – - -
But by what standard should a worker expect to be protected from the stupidity of someone with whom the worker has made an agreement?
If a business makes stupid decisions about where to use the talents of its workers, the business will eventually fail (assuming there’s competition somewhere.) The owners of that business have the exact same right to be stupid that we all have – we can all be just as stupid as we want! If they want to run their business poorly – pay too much for labor, waste talent they have on hand, allow mean-spirited little people to supervise their workers and thus alienate those workers and waste what could have been a great resource – well, they can, and they’ll soon not own their business anymore.
But workers have to be smart, too.
Don’t stay working for a business that treats you that badly. You – and what you can accomplish in your professional/occupational life – are valuable and worthy and, thanks to the same laws that let businesses fire people, you can walk away from any company and deprive them of the value of your services.
But if you stay – because it’s convenient, or you fear change, or you don’t want to move, or . . . whatever . . . then you’re exercising your right to be stupid, too.
This may be the most dishonest article I’ve ever seen. Or, perhaps, the most ignorant historian who ever presumed to write on American Labor History. Have you never heard of the Knights of Labor, the Pullman Strike, the Coal Wars? Do you think the auto industry is the only one in which organized labor played a role?
I’ve seen biased articles before, but this thing is in a class of its own.
51. Lynn
Yea; I remember how the unions created such great working conditions for the Persians, Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians. Where would we be without them?
Seriously; Unions have enabled groups of organized workers to get legislation passed for safety and health. Google U.S. Dept. of Labor and do some reading. Therefore, unions are a political organization; But, try to vote your union out and elect another one like we do other politicians. In other words, these political organizations have been given lifetime tenure. Why do that for any political organization?
I have belonged to 3 major unions in my lifetime. My father thought the union was only slightly below god, but that was a far differant time. The unions when they first formed were all about the workers rights, that is not true today. The current union leadership are into the political power structure and just use the people to push their ideas, which rarely is for the good of the worker. They require a great deal of money to bribe the politicians (Democrats) and they pay the bills by union dues, they provide very little to the worker. The contract nogotiation every couple of years and the cheerleader act the rest of the time. I quit my third union 7 years ago and found no change in my employers treatment of me. I have more money in my pocket and not half the propaganda in my mail, I will never join another union, and yes my father is probably spinning in his grave.
#15 JudyNYC — “people who are anti-union think of themselves as crap, and believe they should be treated that way. your company owner thinks so, too.”
Not necessarily. Any work where the key to advancement is based on the ability to think or create (i.e. the creation of that which is new) can’t be unionised. It stifles the incentive. e.g. much of engineering is invention. You don’t see unions in engineering or sciences, and for good reason.
Unions are applicable only to jobs where what you do is already invented (mature technologies) and you are doing more rote things. Advancement is based on time of service and the assumption is that experience is cumulative. Plumbers are a good example. Materials may change over the years. On the other hand what you know at age 20 applies at age 50.
In science and engineering what you know at 20 is often obsolete and long forgotten by age 50.
I am anti-union for my type of work. I can tell my employer to pay what I require or I’ll work for the competitor. I am pro-union where it concerns the type of jobs where the employees don’t have the power to do this.
Immature technology (creation): anti-union.
Mature technology (implementation): pro-union.
There are plenty of other fields where unions simply don’t make any sense. There’s no reason for reporters to unionise. If you are an ace reporter scooping the competitors on breaking news and have no way to advance over the lazy ones who wait for the boss to tell them to get a statement from such and such, this creates a poor working condition.
Unions therefore are applicable only to that which can and will improve working conditions and provide advancement that may not otherwise be attainable.
The bottom line is that your statement is non sequitor.
James:
I think you are a little too good at what you do.
For everyone else: Let me make one fundamental point: THE HISTORY OF LABOR UNIONS IS COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT!! Suppose I was the absolute best sales person in my company in 2005. Also, suppose that since then I had almost no sales. Should my company keep me employed? Regardless of what good they may have done 60 or 70 years ago, right now, union are not what they once were. Unions are part of the supply chain. Like every other supplier, they want to increase their own share of the market. Unlike every other supplier, they do not have to compete on equal terms with their rivals. The real question that needs to be answered it this: “Should the UAW have a monopoly on supplying labor to GM, Ford & Chrysler?” If you think the answer is “Yes”, please explain how their labor supply is superior to the non-unionized alternative.
I’ve been around various unions for a while. I’ve seen union shill after union shill misrepresent the benefits that unions have done.
Yes, the unions crow about things they had nothing to do with. I’m sure that in some cases, unions were a good thing, but the benefits that organized labor have gained have been squandered by the corruption. For every “pullman strike”, I can point to blatant corruption and abuse, and the union bosses taking care of the unions interests over that of the worker’s they represent. (e.g. the UPS strike of a few years ago).
Unions are a collusion. It’s a price control. Think OPEC, and the lovely things their price fixing has done for you. Closed shops are worse: You’ve got to pay to play, no exceptions. If you’re not a member of the club, you don’t get to work. You’ve got something to work, but unless you kick back some of your wages, you’re locked out.
I get a laugh when I hear the entertainment unions, including sports unions, talk about the Haymarket incident and other reasons why we should all be grateful about unions. That’s like thanking Al Capone for building a library, these days, or ignoring Al Sharpton’s corruption by saying we should remember MLK’s contributions to civil rights.
Management has been awful as well. I’m amazed that a CEO that screwed over a company, say “Home Depot” as an example, gets a 279 million dollar severance package, and is now the boss of one of the big 3 looking for another government handout.
On top of that, the taxpayers have spent billions on bailing out AIG and similar companies, who’ve then rewarded their CEO’s with million dollar bonuses.
I’m disgusted with all 3 entities – Management, Unions, and the politicians trying to buy their votes with MY money.
We have a problem with immigration but also with countries, companies and unions that don’t have the same values and laws (notably environmental and labor) that we do, and don’t have the same accountability that we do in the states.
What I *do* note is that Republicans (I’m a libertarian) can and will call all of the entities to task. Yes, they’re harder on unions than the others – but unions are campaigning for democrats, and against republicans, so what can you expect?
ALL of these things need to be fixed, and fast. We need the government out of the process as much as possible, because all it’s done is foster corruption, inhibit competition, remove accountability, and force unfunded mandates that skew the forces of supply and demand. Unions need to be accountable to it’s workers, and realize that a realistic balance needs to be struck. Coercing, strongarming, intimidating activities need to stop. Sometimes, having the union manage a billion or so in pension money is creating a conflict of interest.
Companies should stop allowing execs to run the company into the ground, while raiding all of the equity in a company, saddling it with debt, and saying they need hundreds of millions in compensation and going-away-presents. It greatly undermines your credibility when the senior execs behave like irresponsible rock-stars while the people who work for you are scraping by. I’m a big fan of merit based compensation, but the current standards and method have resulted in a disgusting fiasco, and has certainly created a huge conflict of interest.
“Where’s the loyalty?” is a question I hear asked by the management of my own company. You can’t reinforce that labor is a commodity, treat people like they’re interchangeable and that they can be outsourced in the blink of an eye, and expect that employees are not going to learn from your attitude of “looking out for number one” when you give them zero reason to trust they’ll have a job next quarter, or that busting their ass will do nothing more than give management a 6 figure christmas bonus.
They all suck. Until we hold *all* of them accountable, as well as recognaize the difficulties they’re addressing, we’re going nowhere but down.
Any group of individuals that joins together for the good of the group whether it be a government, a political party, a club, an organization, a fraternity, an association, and yes a LABOR UNION has the power to do great good or great evil or some of both, which is the case in most cases. Anyone trying to dismiss the GOOD that labor unions have done for the ordinary working man and woman on whose backs this great country was built is not being honest, or is not well read in the history of mankinds inhumanity to man, or even worse, has not listened to the stories told by their elders.
The unions are just one of the ways the common man can play the “game” and come out a little ahead. It’s all about equilibrium.
“Have you never heard of the Knights of Labor, the Pullman Strike, the Coal Wars? Do you think the auto industry is the only one in which organized labor played a role?”
No.
Remember Eastern Airlines? I do. In 1989, the union representing Eastern’s mechanics and ramp service employees called a strike against the company, and the pilots’ and flight attendants’ unions called sympathy strikes, shutting down the airline completely. The strikes continued until Eastern collapsed and was liquidated to pay off creditors. All of the company’s employees lost their jobs permanently.
I found this sequence of events very instructive. Clearly, the union leaders did not do any of this for the benefit of the union members; the members who worked for Eastern all ended up in the unemployment line! No, this was all done for the benefit of the the union leaders themselves. By destroying Eastern, they were able to send a loud and clear message to the executives of every other company they would be negotiating with. And that message was: “Do not mess with us. We can and will wreck your company, and we don’t care who gets hurts in the process.”
So, in answer to your question: Yes, I am aware that the automotive industry is not the only one in which unions have played a role. I am also aware that the role they have played is one of expanding their own power and filling the pockets of union leaders. And they are perfectly willing to sacrifice union members in order to do that.
Lynn:
“The unions are just one of the ways the common man can play the “game” and come out a little ahead. It’s all about equilibrium.”
And just which union are you a member of?
Listen, you are mistaking latter day union corporatists with the early rank and file members who fought and bled to establish the workplace protection laws.
The laws, however, aren’t worth squat if no one wants to enforce them. And from my two decades of experience, the union has a vested interest in NOT advocating for enforcing the laws.
Remembet I mentioned man-days’ contributions to the various plans?
Every day that you work under a contract, the money gets paid into the pot.
Well, what happens if the job sucks so badly that you steal the lifeboat and row away before you’re eligible for the pension?
So long, sucka! And the Plan keeps the dough.
“Anyone trying to dismiss the GOOD that labor unions have done for the ordinary working man and woman on whose backs this great country was built is not being honest, ”
Uhhhh, yeah.
Let’s examine the AFL-CIO’s ceaseless and predictable support for raising the Federal Minimum Wage.
Not many minimum-wagers are union members, but here is MY union spending MY monies to get some non-union schlub a raise.
You think that that’s representation?
Of whom?
Certainly not of me.
I pay your dues and your PAC, you agitate to get ME a raise…not the fry-cook at Mickey D’s, see?
The unions have long since sold out their memberships.
What have they done for me lately?
Step in line Bilgeman: The benevolent King has decided to hear your pleas and decide your case.
After careful consideration I have decided to allow you to move to a right to work state where you will apply for a job and sign a piece of paper giving them the right to fire you without cause. You will be layed-off to boost their stocks and might get re-hired by applying for the job again. You will be offered a health plan that will cost you a mere half of your pay and you may even include your family for a mere two-thirds of your pay. You will be permited to invest in the company which is win win situation: they benefit from money back in their pockets and you with higher stock prices while collecting unemployment. You can rest easy knowing that the company is investing your money by doing kool things with it like sponsoring a race car, buying a stake in a stadium, or using it for a week of rest and rehabilitation in the islands for the top executives and CEO all who flew there in the company’s private jet along with a couple of politicians of course. And I have saved the best for last! A turkey for Thanksgiving and a ham for New Years!
Now off with you!
63.
“Remember Eastern Airlines? I do. In 1989, the union representing Eastern’s mechanics and ramp service employees called a strike against the company, and the pilots’ and flight attendants’ unions called sympathy strikes, shutting down the airline completely. The strikes continued until Eastern collapsed and was liquidated to pay off creditors. All of the company’s employees lost their jobs permanently.”
Your discussion of the Eastern Airlines strike is both illustrative of your ignorance of the causes of the strike itself (Frank Lorenzo’s gutting of Eastern, for starters) and of the nature of organized labor in the airline industry, itself. To describe your post of utter devoid of value would be to elevate.
Frank Lorenzo was in the process of replacing the assets of Eastern, at one time the largest U.S. airline domestically, with debt while placing the assets of Eastern into the control of Frank Lorenzo.
When Lorenzo wanted the employees to provide the leverage for the destruction of their airline, labor unrest ensued.
The fact that you’re blaming the employees for Frank Lorenzo’s greed (greed that resulted in Lorenzo being banned from running airlines, by name) means that you’re either
A. Frank Lorenzo
or
B. His useful idiot.
(GM had plenty of money then, and I notice the Big 3 haven’t stopped buying advertising time on tee-vee).
Actually, GM has withdrawn buying ads for the Super Bowl, Academy Awards and other high profile shows. They’ve cut their ad and marketing budgets way back, including dropping Tiger Wood’s Buick endorsement contract.
The automakers have enough trouble without all the Detroit bashing and piling on that’s going on. There are enough myths pro and con about organized labor (and my article tried to address some of them) and problems the UAW faces (and has caused with mgmt’s complicity) that there’s no reason to distort the truth.
Detroit has a lot of enemies (environmentalists, anti-union folks, competitors, Southerners who still resent the North and its industries) and millions of disenchanted customers. One thing about angry customers. Ask any business owner and they’ll tell you that a good sized fraction of disappointed customers will use that as an excuse to exaggerate, even lie about a company.
But by what standard should a worker expect to be protected from the stupidity of someone with whom the worker has made an agreement?
I didn’t make an agreement with the jerk, but rather with the company.
Most of the people I worked with and for were fine people, very smart and hardworking, but like my old supervisor Chuck Hickson told me, sometimes your boss is a jerk. I pushed back against a jerky boss and that ultimately led to losing my job – though I did give them a bit of rope.
While at DuPont I’d say I had about 8 immediate supervisors over the years, plus group supervisors and line management. The jerks were thankfully rare, only one of my immediate bosses was an a**hole, just one of my group supervisors, and couple of folks in line mgmt weren’t jerks but were a bit corporate in their POV.
One thing I did learn was that corporations aren’t run by greedy MFs but rather by people like you and me. Though I was a pretty low level employee, I did IT support, including directly supporting a Senior VP of the entire company. Nobody’s trying to exploit anyone or rape the planet. The just try to make good products for their customers and treat their employees well.
This may be the most dishonest article I’ve ever seen. Or, perhaps, the most ignorant historian who ever presumed to write on American Labor History. Have you never heard of the Knights of Labor, the Pullman Strike, the Coal Wars? Do you think the auto industry is the only one in which organized labor played a role?
I don’t see Mr. Peabody’s coal company and the UMW asking for help from Washington.
In any case, wages and benefits were rising before most of US industry was organized. As for safe working environments, as I pointed out, E.I. DuPont set up his safe workplace in 1802, long before any of those labor pioneers you cited were established.
It seems as the true believers on both sides of the issue of organized labor are incapable of believing anything that isn’t part of their faiths.
In science and engineering what you know at 20 is often obsolete and long forgotten by age 50.
Are you a scientist or engineer? As far as I know, Ohm’s law still applies, as do laws of physics and thermodynamics. Smart engineers know enough not to reinvent the wheel.
Did you know that the frequency switching that one of the bases for cellphone technology was invented by actress Hedy Lamar during WWII?
Sam Abuelsamid IS A LIAR. He talks about “take home pay” being only $28 /hour ($56,000/year) rather than the $70/hr ($140,000/year) that GM actually pays out of pocket. The difference is medical insurance ($24,000/yr which does not show up as take home cash, medicare and social security employer contribution (not to be confused with the employee contribution – $5622/year), guaranteed overtime and holiday pay ($30,000/year) and $35,000/year which the US government requires GM to pay to the union to be placed in the union run retirement plan. This is money the worker never sees on pay day and which the union uses to buy and sell politicians, newspaper writers and hitmen.
I only make $30,000 a year. I thought I was doing pretty good. But now I will have to work 5 years to pay just one year’s the “barely living wage” on one of them fat, lazy UAW members who built my 10 year old chevy that’s always falling apart. I say the UAW is unAmerican. We don’t need them rich, lazy bums and their broke down cars. Fire them all. Burn down the plants. Plow up the parking lots. Curse the ground. Send them all to Afganistan to fight Obama bin Laudnum.
#70 Ronnie Schreiber — “As far as I know, Ohm’s law still applies… ”
Funny you should mention Ohm’s law. It describes average behaviours, but as you shrink circuit size, no, it doesn’t really apply. Individual electrons tunnel and do all sorts of unwanted, non-average things. Different world. What a circuit designer needs to know today is not what was needed 30 years ago, which is precisely my point.
In the modern job market being adept at x86 assembly language is not a useful skill. It’s largely obsolete, although at one time assembler hackers commanded big money and guru status. The extraordinary amount of time/energy needed to master this is of no use for most people in this era. Modern processors and compilers use software optimizations that preclude any real advantage. Former assembly specialists have had to retrain themselves to be hirable in this era or have moved on to the few remaining jobs that can best use the skill.
There are advances in all fields that obsolete prior skills, but not at the same pace. In engineering you can’t take 10 years off and come back to the world you left and expect to use the same skills and make the same money. Electricians and plumbers by and large don’t really have this problem.
I’m not sure what point you thought you were making. Perhaps you just like to argue?
Lynn (or your majesty)
I wonder how many businesses outside of the retail types can just fire you for no reason at all.
I taught at a non union private school and the conditions for my dismissal were laid out in the contract. Unless I was a child molestor, my job was safe. I have a college degree and experience tutoring. They couldn’t just fire me during the middle of the semester and find someone at least as qualified as I was purely on a whim. Of course, if the school was hit with hard times and had to downsize, they’d lay me off, and that’s perfectly legitimate.
My family shop almost exclusively at Asian ethnic (we’re immigrants) markets where prices are mind boggingly low compared to big American chains. That’s because they operate not unlike Japanese automakers. They hire non union workers, multitask among themselves, and work hard to cut cost for the consumers. The recent supermarket strikes did not affect most of us, because we had these places to shop.
If the business doesn’t prosper, then the jobs will subsequnetly suffer. If you’re not making money but burdened with generous entitlement and benefit payment, how can they afford to keep those jobs, much less hire new people? Last I checked Honda just hired 900 American workers to work in their new plant (in Indiana?) and introduced their first car while big 3 CEOS were asking for a bailout.
Instead of asking for increased pay and benefit from non skill jobs that most able bodied, motivated individuals can perform, why not take steps to secure high paying jobs that can’t be so easily outsourced? Of course, that involoves years of planning and dedication (earning a college degree), and that’s just unamerican for some.
Lynn:
“Now off with you!”
Ummm, not quite. I asked you a direct question.
What union are you a member of?
“After careful consideration I have decided to allow you to move to a right to work state where you will apply for a job and sign a piece of paper giving them the right to fire you without cause.”
You assume that as a Union member I was protected from arbitrary firings and lay-offs.
Your assumption is entirely incorrect.
As to Right 2 Work legislation, it’s a good thing…actually it’s a GREAT thing.
See, if the Union blows off your grievances, you can tell the Union to hit the bricks, but still keep your job.
This makes the Union earn it’s keep, because once enough of the bargaining unit opts out of the union, Management can call a decertification vote.
Happenned at Moran and McCallister Towing on the East Coast. (And if you ever want to have a truly sh*tty job, try being a crewmember on a harbor tugboat). But if the union ain’t going to represent, then why pay the bums their nut?
“You will be offered a health plan that will cost you a mere half of your pay and you may even include your family for a mere two-thirds of your pay.”
This is too funny. I swapped the Seafarers Health and Benefits Plan for Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Pennsylvania with my new non-union employer.
Much more better…I walk into a medical office and show ‘em a BC/BS card and they know what it is. When I’d show my Seafarers H&BP card, they’d look at me like I was trying to pass ‘em funny money.
“You can rest easy knowing that the company is investing your money by doing kool things with it like sponsoring a race car, buying a stake in a stadium, or using it for a week of rest and rehabilitation in the islands for the top executives and CEO all who flew there in the company’s private jet along with a couple of politicians of course.”
Hmmm, actually MY company is building and buying new vessels…I can look in near any shipyard on the Gulf Coast and see US-built ships with job vacancies that will be there for Americans.
Have you seen a US-flag newbuild in an East or West coast shipyard that wasn’t painted Navy grey?
Nope.
And as to the big junkets…you stepped in that one right on up to your chin.
I worked for Tyco’s cableship subsidiary.
(Wave hello to the good union members on the Marshall Island-flagged cableships as you’re driving northwards on I-95 through the McHenry Tunnel in Baltimore.)
Tyco had a CEO, Dennis Koszlowski, IIRC. who gathered notoriety,(and a few convictions), for raiding Tyco’s piggy-bank.
$7,000 shower curtains and million-dollar birthday parties in Sardinia for his wife.
Seafarers didn’t say SQUAT about that, though. Just told the membership how lucky they were to have a job.
And signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Tyco for wages and benefits less than the Standard Freightship Agreement.
“Now off with you!”
Yeaaaaah. I did just that, and I’m happier and wealthier for it.
So aside from smoke and bullsh*t, you REALLY don’t have ANYTHING concrete to counter with in this discussion, do you?
I mean you can’t even claim membership in a union, can you?
(And it’s not like you couldn’t make one up).
Ronnie Schreiber writes:
“Did you know that the frequency switching that one of the bases for cellphone technology was invented by actress Hedy Lamar during WWII?”
Ron, both you G. Alston have valid points about the permanence/impermanence of physical phenomena versus engineering skillsets. But your citation if Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil’s contributions by inventing the concept of spread-spectrum radio is an interesting one. From the above Wikipedia citation:
“Lamarr’s and Antheil’s frequency-hopping idea serves as a basis for modern spread-spectrum communication technology, such as COFDM used in WiFi network connections and CDMA used in some cordless and wireless telephones.[7] Similar patents had been granted to others earlier, like in Germany in 1935 to Telefunken engineers Paul Kotowski and Kurt Dannehl who also received U.S. Patent 2,158,662 and U.S. Patent 2,211,132 in 1939 and 1940.”
It’s a shame that Hollywood is not manned today by such intelligent and patriotic participants in this country’s quest for security. Can you imagine blockheads like George Clooney and Matt “Bad Disney Movie Hunting” Damon offering a slice of their intellect in this arena?
..nor can I, either.
Mr. Schreiber:
“Actually, GM has withdrawn buying ads for the Super Bowl, Academy Awards and other high profile shows. They’ve cut their ad and marketing budgets way back, including dropping Tiger Wood’s Buick endorsement contract.”
That’s GM…I said Big 3.
Did you watch football yesterday? It was larded with Chrysler commercials, including Class-A’s.
But Chrysler is supposed to be the most destitute of the three.
Dude…face it. This bailout and the UAW’s frontline stance in favor of it stinks to high heaven.
You union clowns ruined Detroit with your ridiculous compensation structure and we don’t want your damn cars. I don’t want to pay more damn taxes to bailout you bozos. Cut to a reasonable salary structure like Toyota and Honda or pay the consequences. Go through Chapter 11 like the airlines did and come out better more competitive companies or you all deserve to liquidate. Go get jobs building all of this infrastructure Obama wants.
Union organizing can NOT raise wages. Only increased productivity throughout the economy can raise wages. Unions can only temporarily use their monopolistic power to raise their wages, at the expense of other workers.
If organizing labor into large units was the key to increased efficiency and rising living standards, then the Pharoah’s slave labor would still be the model for the whole world today.
78 paulr — “If organizing labor into large units was the key to increased efficiency and rising living standards, then the Pharoah’s slave labor would still be the model for the whole world today.”
Non sequitor.
I find it odd that the key to *everything* is technology and so few seem to realise this even though they live in a very technology driven world.
Slave labour became inefficient when the horse collar was invented. A horse without a collar eats about what 5 men would. It does about the same work. A horse with a collar, however, can do the job of 10 men. Horses are better economic sense than slaves at that point. There aren’t many slave societies in places with the technology to do otherwise. The horse collar revolutionised agriculture. The population rose accordingly.
Efficiency is a technological concept. Efficiency has sod all to do with organisation (a sociopolitical concept), the intent of which is merely to equalise the playing field a bit. The idea is that the business owner or feudal lord can’t “own” a mining town and pay whatever he feels like. It’s not one sided. Those who do the work want and deserve to be paid enough to live on. In medieval times guilds served this function (among others.) And yes it was indeed the organisation that created the middle class (the merchant class then) as we might recognise it today. It did raise wages and living standards of those times. Unions are not a new concept. They are ancient.
What’s with the biblical references at this place, anyway? Are the middle ages and/or other time periods verboten?
###
Ronnie Schreiber —
I may have come across somewhat cranky earlier (#72). Hurried writing. Apologies. Carry on.
“Frank Lorenzo was in the process of replacing the assets of Eastern, at one time the largest U.S. airline domestically, with debt while placing the assets of Eastern into the control of Frank Lorenzo.
When Lorenzo wanted the employees to provide the leverage for the destruction of their airline, labor unrest ensued.”
Uh huh.
The fact remains that the unions destroyed Eastern and left every single employee of the company unemployed. Please explain to me how this was an improvement over whatever Frank Lorenzo was doing.
It’s likely that Ford was influenced by other Midwestern high tech companies of the day with progressive ideas of how to make money. John H. Patterson, the founder of National Cash Register/NCR (in Dayton, Ohio), was not a nice man in his dealings with executives or competitors, for instance. But he was good to his employees, because he wanted them to stick around. (And because he liked to test his theories on large masses of compliant people, but hey.)
Patterson on Wikipedia:
“In 1893 he constructed the first “daylight factory” buildings with floor to ceiling glass windows that let in light and could be opened to let in fresh air as well… He hired John Charles Olmsted to landscape the grounds of the National Cash Register Company campus in Dayton, with spacious lawns and landscaping with colorful plantings. Olmsted also had a hand in designing the residential community surrounding the plant… Patterson was something of a health fanatic, and adopted one regimen after another, most of which were required of his executives and employees…
“Patterson’s methods influenced United States business for a generation. In the period 1910-1930 it was estimated that one-sixth of United States business executives were former NCR executives….”
(And that’s the rate he fired them at, too….)
“When he died in 1922, unlike his contemporaries, he left no great fortune because of his expeditures on social programs at the Cash, and because he believed that ‘shrouds have no pockets.’”
From Wright State’s NCR collection description:
“In the 1890s company benefits for employees included hot lunches… baths, showers, exercise programs,
and social and professional clubs.”
NCR had its own park and swimming pool for employees, not on the outskirts of the city but right next to the main NCR grounds. NCR provided free or cheap movies on the weekends for employees’ kids, as well as other educational and entertaining programs in the NCR Auditorium. And the pay was very good, and the hours not many. (Did I mention they had and have a zillion employee golf courses? They had so many that Patterson gave one to the public, and sold another to be a private country club — leaving NCR two.)
My contention is that a lot of Ford’s reforms were pretty much copied off Patterson and others, whose companies were pretty obviously not hurting.
Unions have the power to do two things only..
#1. collect dues from members
#2. strike
That’s it. No more. No less. They cannot increase anyone’s wages, nor can they “force” employers to do anything. Those who feel they are like a fairy godmother (ie Judy,NYC) have been either misled or deliberately lied to or are in a position to be paid from the aforementioned dues being collected from employees (could Judy be a union boss?). Now, if Judy, NYC thinks that she herself is unable to speak up and demand her rights assured under so many EOC laws, etc that it would take a forest to reprint, then she must suffer from some sort of inferiority complex. Workers today can demand their rights themselves. Theres a whole group of lawyers out there just waiting for their business (but that’s a story for another day). They don’t need a bloated go-between who only has the power to tell them…”walk out”…when things get rough.
There has always been a see-saw battle between industry, who only want the maximum amount of labor at the lowest possible cost, and workers, who don’t want to be defacto slave laborers with barely enough wages to survive. Check out any history of labor vs industry during the 1800′s — lots of insane amount of violence, especially with the government taking sides with the company owners in some of the more brutal incidents.
It’s always been a give and take battle, but the end result are the 40-hr work weeks with benefits that most take for granted and a right (although not so much with that “with benefits” bit in recent years.)
And Ford’s “generosity” had much more to do with a clever idea to have his workers become customers as well, which wouldn’t work if they only had just minimal subsistence pay.
Bilgeman,
Advertising and other marketing methods are absolutely vital to any business that sells at retail and plenty of other businesses as well. One can debate the value of a particular marketing strategy or advertising venue. I’ve been critical of Big 3 advertising for years. Ford’s campaigns practically beg people to check out their cars. Still, I know from personal experience that advertising is the handle on the faucet. Stop advertising and revenue slows to a trickle.
New Balance may not pay athletes to endorse their shoes, but they do advertise.
And Ford’s “generosity” had much more to do with a clever idea to have his workers become customers as well, which wouldn’t work if they only had just minimal subsistence pay.
I never said Henry Ford was generous but your contention is a myth. It’s possible that indirectly by raising the floor on wages industry wide (his competitors had to match his wages to get employees) the $5/day wage created a larger market for Ford’s cars. However, the notion that you can make money by paying your employees to buy your cars is not logical. You’re just moving money from one pocket to the other. Ford raised wages to stabilize his work force and improve productivity. Everything else was incidental.
Maureen,
I haven’t seen any historical references to any direct connection between Ford and Patterson, but I’m sure that Ford was aware of how NCR ran their business.
Henry Ford’s contribution to mass production was the idea of breaking down assembly to single tasks. The assembly line had been used by other companies, Colt, Singer, before Ford but never for something as complicated as an automobile. The idea of using an assembly line at Ford was the brainchild of Charlie Sorenson, Henry Ford’s right hand man. While it’s said that the idea was germinated from a visit to a “disassembly” line at a Chicago slaughterhouse, as I said, there were other manufacturers who had used the process before Ford.
It’s a shame that modern education is more concerned with multi-culti PC junk than with teaching history, including the history of industry.
Sure; Unions do a great service for manual labor. That’s why all Mexicans report to the first union hall they can find after they jump the fence.
Historical note:
Employer-paid health benefits first became widespread during World War Two due to business competition for scarce workers, and not from any union activity. Wage and price controls kept businesses from competing for workers by offering higher pay, so they instead competed for workers with employer-paid health benefits and other gimmicks.
The labor scarcity was due to the movement of 10-12 million male workers into military service, and enormous government contracts for war manufacturing.
Unions were somewhat responsible for the retention of widespread employer-paid health benefit plans whene the war ended, with the degree of that not being clear, but unions were at least a non-trivial factor.
Unions were definitely NOT responsible for this feature becoming widespread in the first place.
April 27, 1834 Carpenters in Boston jointed go on strike demanding a 10 hour workday.
July 3, 1835 Children employed in the silk mills in Paterson, New Jersey go on strike for the 11 hour day, 6 days a week.
Carpenter wanting demanding they work 10 hours a day, little brats going on strike demanding to work eleven hours a day 6 days a week.
Now do you see why we need unions with those out there that want us to work more than eight hours a day, five days a week. We must join forces and fight them!
I think the children are the worst because by July 1903 they were still demanding to work fifty-five hours a week! We must stop them before it is too late!
To Ronnie Schreiber:
From:
http://www.econedlink.org/lessons/index.php?lesson=NN692
“At the turn of the 20th Century, automakers thought the best way to maximize profit was to build a car for the rich. But Henry Ford had a different vision. He wanted to produce a car that everyday people — like the workers in his factories — could afford. With lower prices, cars would be more affordable to the general public. He also figured that if he paid his factory workers a better wage, more of his workers would be able to afford the cars they helped make. Henry Ford would make a profit by selling MORE cars.”
The auto industry, as practiced by GM/Ford/Chrysler, is still an artifact of the CIO days; unskilled labor on an assembly line, doing the same repetetive task X number of times per how, with breaks, for 8 hours straight time, time and a half overtime, double time after 16 hours, double time and a half on Sundays and hollidays..and so on.
In the looming future, except under certain totalitarian nregimes (North Korea comes immediately to mind), there will be less and less demand for non-skilled labor.
Why would a manager continue to pay what appears to be an FTE cost of over $100000/year, for which he gets value (based on work rule constraints on productivity in the contract) of no better than .8 (more like .6) FTE per 100 large in labor cost, when he has the option of automating his operation, the cost of which, when amortized, will be significantly less that that of carrying the union labor burden? The answer is, he won’t. ALL of these jobs are going away, and the result will be, better, cheaper cars, made in the US by US robots (they don’t even have to take a restroom break, let alone vacation and sick time and, once you buy them, they cost pennies a day in electricity). If I was a UAW line guy, I’d get my ass into a re-training program and aquire some skills with a potential to make a better living (at a job that doesn’t bore you into helpless fury every day).
NAFTA didn’t do this. Staying unskilled in an economy that can replace you with a wind-up machine is doing this.
Re #89 Lynn..”"Now do you see why we need unions with those out there that want us to work more than eight hours a day, five days a week. We must join forces and fight them!”"
Apparently you have no idea that there are government regulations now that deal with work hours/days/vacations/minimum pay requirements etc? I’d also like to know the “them” you’d be fighting against? Your comments always seem as if you’ve not read a newspaper or watched any news outlets in 50 years.
B. Dubya: I thought all the unskilled uneducated labor was sent to Iraq. Isn’t that what Senator Kerry said? Wait a minute, you probably right, after those dum, unedukatd amairican solders cum bak frum Irak thay pobubly git unskiled jobs like build aouttomobiles.
Thinking Person: I don’t read the newspaper. I believe their downfall was due to the fact that to save a buck they started to use cheap ink that gets all over your fingers, aside from the fact that I read for knowledge or relaxation not to be fed a line of bull by reading a line of bull. And p.s. the funnies aren’t funny anymore, although I might have lost my sense of humor.
Mr. Schreiber:
“Advertising and other marketing methods are absolutely vital to any business that sells at retail and plenty of other businesses as well.”
Really?
When was the last time you saw an ad for an illegal drug?
THEIR business model seems to work like a house on fire, without benefit of Super Bowl Ads.
(And BTW, GM bought 11 during the last Super Bowl, at 2.something million apiece, according to the currect issue of The Economist).
If you make a mean steak, the sizzle will take care of itself.
Lynn:
“July 3, 1835 Children employed in the silk mills in Paterson, New Jersey go on strike for the 11 hour day, 6 days a week.”
So…were you one of those little Dickensian tykes hitting the bricks with a wee little sign in your calloused and grubby mitts?
Oh that’s right…that’s Asking the Unanswerable Union Membership Question of you.
In 1988, I sailed 12 or 14 decks below the forward stack of the SS Independence, which was a US-flag cruise ship bopping around Hawaii.
I was also the Engine Delegate,(analogous to a shoreside shop steward), which meant i was spokesman for one of the two largest Black Gangs in the entire Seafarers Union.
At the time I was reading Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle”, you might be familiar with the work…Sinclair reported how the Slaughterhouses and meat-packing plants in 190x Milwaukee and Chicago would keep a large population of unemployed workers who knew the job around in order to drive down wages.
Well, in the course of addressing my guys’ beefs and other “yoon-yun bidness” I’d end up at the Hall in Honolulu, usually about 6 am on Saturday morning, and see the long line of schlubs waiting to get in the Hall to get a berth aboard SS Independence or her sistership SS Constitution.
Milwaukee 1908 WITHOUT union contract, Honolulu 1988 WITH union contract. Not much difference.
Crappy working conditions and minimum 12 hour days to make a living wage.
BTW, you ever been in a steamship’s engine room in the tropics?
Eight hours is plenty more than most would care for. The extra 4 for the overtime wasn’t really worth the additional $8.00 an hour I’d make.
And these ships were launched in 1952…how much is it worth for you to breathe a few lungfuls of asbestos every day?
But see…there’s that Union Hall, and there’s that long line outside it, so if I balked, the Union would readily provide some other schmuck to hand-fire the boilers,(a lost art…like blacksmithing), and I could go and live under a bridge somewhere and join the back of that line, right?
When was the last time you saw an ad for an illegal drug?
Drug dealers use many traditional marketing methods even if they don’t buy ads. They use brand names:
Orange Sunshine Owsley Acid
Purple Microdot
Mr. Natural Blotter
Purple Kush
Blueberry Reefer
plus various brands of Heroin like “Persian” and street brands.
(And BTW, GM bought 11 during the last Super Bowl, at 2.something million apiece, according to the currect issue of The Economist).
And this year they canceled all their Super Bowl ads.
If you make a mean steak, the sizzle will take care of itself.
Product is almost everything, but you still have to let people know how good it is. Nowadays, when the perception of the domestic automakers’ current products is distorted by bad consumer experiences from as long ago as 30 years, relying on word of mouth may not work fast enough.
It’s interesting, though, how Ford is handling their public image now. They didn’t take any TARP money and they’ve gotten a ton of good press over the EPA’s rating of the 2010 Fusion Hybrid at 41mpg, significantly higher than the Camry Hybrid, a fact that the press is picking up and propagating.
Unlike GM, which has never really been at risk of bankruptcy even during the Great Depression, Ford’s survival has been threatened before and the Ford family knows that. Henry Ford lost control of the first Ford car company, which is why he bought out his partners in FoMoCo as soon as he could afford it. Still, he wouldn’t admit that time had passed the Model T by as Chevrolet became the sales leader in the mid 1920s. He had to be dragged, literally kicking and screaming, by Edsel and other associates into developing the Model A. The company then shut down for 6 months switching over, which sort of hampered revenues. Then during WWII, after Edsel died, the old man took over and by then he was senile. The gov’t couldn’t afford to have a major defense contractor managed by a doddering demented old lunatic who was pretty crazy even before his dementia, so they gave Henry Ford II a quick discharge so he could take over control of the company. However, it took a threat by Eleanor Ford (Edsel’s widow) and Clara, Henry’s wife, that they’d sell their stock (Edsel owned 48%, Henry owned 49% and Clara owned the remaining 3% – so after Edsel’s death the Ford women owned 51%) if Henry didn’t yield control to his grandson. It was Hank the Deuce and his “whiz kids” who brought out the first truly modern postwar car, the 1949 Ford.
So I think the Ford family is aware of the risks in the car biz from sitting pat.
Dave…
Ford, GMC and the like, were building big ugly trucks and SUV’s, automobiles that are not preferred by Europeans etc. so it’s not surprising that Ford turned a profit in Europe, since they weren’t selling the cars that they were selling here in the US.
Again…BIG UGLY TRUCKS AND SUV’s.
And toyota didn’t have a truck till a few years ago with the Tacoma.