Unions. What say you?

[Supafly]

Unions were extremely important during the years, especially once the industrial age started.

Now they still are really important, as companies and politicians try to squeeze every little bit out of workers.

Look at the car-builders, as an example. First japanese building companies started this, but european and american companies soon followed this:

Shorten building step spans, limit time and working crew. Not only do the cars get unsafer a lot, because, obviously, errors will happen more often, but workers cannot endure this for so long. And if the pay would get increased, well, we could talk about it, but, hell no, pay gets lowered, too, just by not raising it, inflation does the trick.

Unions, we keep on needing them.

Plus: Anybody who is not in a union shpuld not get ANY pay raise the unions fought for.

Do you agree?

I guess you would not agree.

 

[Shifty]

I don't think it's a Yes / No question.

 

[Supafly]

I don't think it's a Yes / No question.

I agree.

Unions have gotten outta hand. But that's what all organizations tend to do.

The concept still is necessary.

If we would shut down organizations due to corruption, there wouldn't be any political parties left in the country to vote on

 

[Sam Fisher]

Labor Unions

Although labor unions have been celebrated in folk songs and stories as fearless champions of the downtrodden working man, this is not how economists see them. Economists who study unions—including some who are avowedly prounion—analyze them as cartels that raise wages above competitive levels by restricting the supply of labor to various firms and industries.
Many unions have won higher wages and better working conditions for their members. In doing so, however, they have reduced the number of jobs available in unionized companies. That second effect occurs because of the basic law of demand: if unions successfully raise the price of labor, employers will purchase less of it. Thus, unions are a major anticompetitive force in labor markets. Their gains come at the expense of consumers, nonunion workers, the jobless, taxpayers, and owners of corporations.

According to Harvard economists Richard Freeman and James Medoff, who look favorably on unions, “Most, if not all, unions have monopoly power, which they can use to raise wages above competitive levels” (1984, p. 6). Unions’ power to fix high prices for their members’ labor rests on legal privileges and immunities that they get from government, both by statute and by nonenforcement of other laws. The purpose of these legal privileges is to restrict others from working for lower wages. As antiunion economist Ludwig von Mises wrote in 1922, “The long and short of trade union rights is in fact the right to proceed against the strikebreaker with primitive violence.” Interestingly, those who are expected to enforce the laws evenhandedly, the police, are themselves heavily unionized.

U.S. unions enjoy many legal privileges. Unions are immune from taxation and from antitrust laws. Companies are legally compelled to bargain with unions in “good faith.” This innocent-sounding term is interpreted by the National Labor Relations Board to suppress such practices as Boulwarism, named for a former General Electric personnel director. To shorten the collective bargaining process, Lemuel Boulware communicated the “reasonableness” of GE’s wage offer directly to employees, shareholders, and the public. Unions also can force companies to make their property available for union use.

http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/LaborUnions.html

 

[Trident1]

The only unions I support are the pilot and flight attendant ones. Screw the rest of the unions.

 

[El Perro Mayor]

I guess Sam, just like the big business first GOP, wants the US to have the same working conditions that they have in China, India and other third world nations. Make the employees work eighteen hours a day. You need to go to the bathroom? Eff you! You hungry, want a lunch break? Eff you! You need safety glasses? Eff you! You don't want to breath lead or asbestos, you ask for a protection mask? Eff you! You don't like this job? Ok, I'll go get a woman or 12 year old to do this job, and pay them less even.