Blue...going to answer a few points...your points are in bold..
You have either never been in a Union or you just know nothing about them other than what your grandpa told you.
Experience is how I "know nothing" about them. I did not know my "granpa".
Unions care about their business, yes.. becuase they are a business.
I think it is important to really understand this point. They are a business first and foremost. Above their members welfare...business first. Just like the business owners you seem to be so bitter towards.
If they did not care about the members, there would not be any members.
I don't buy that. I think my best friend would argue differently after losing his union job this past summer. When it came down to it, the 18+ years he had in the union...held no weight for them.
I was a member of the local International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. There was a lot of politics (a lot!)..
Enter the stranglehold. This is the sand in the cogs that slows production and interferes with the day to day business.
but they took very good care of me when I needed anything to further my education.
That's good. Some companies do that without the union.
Some. More should. However, in the end...the comany paid for it.
Care about the memebrs? How about a 70k a year pension for a buddy who retired last year plus other benefits!
That's good. And it is something that should be built inot the companies by their own hands. However, the falacy here is that the union did not pay for it....the company did.
How about health coverage that costs 10 bucks a month for your WHOLE FAMILY no matter how many kids you have! Plus damn near everything medical/dental/vision etc paid in full.
Who do you think pays for that? Do you think the insurance company says "oh...yer a union...okay....you only hav to pay $10 amonth for the benefit"?
Do you know what health benefits cost a company?
I pay $200/mo for mine...and it is better than it used to be...but my company pays another $300/mo for me.
If you want lower health care costs, pinning the expense on the company is not the way to do it. try driving down the ridiculously increasing medical costs at their root.
How about the fact that after I left that Union, they still gave me health benefits for 5 months becuase of an account they opened for me that tossed dimes into it for every hour i worked, just in case i was laid off.
At the expense of the company who struggles to show a profit so that the job exists in the first place.
Stranglehold on companies?? A lot of companies START themselves as Union. My dads a member of the local IBEW as a manager for a commercial electrical contractor that chose to Union becuase they value their employees enough to give them the best.
I got nothing on that....
How about the ability to hire/lay off at will without all the BS?
Jobs over.. layoffs... Company stays afloat because they are not paying people to stand around and do jack S just to keep them happy.
There is a segment...construction..bid type jobs where a union could make sense, but day to day manufacturing and processing is not the place for it. Neither is the grocery store or the bar down the street.
Yeah, lets say a company has less than safe working condition. The Union steps in and makes that right. Does a non-Union company care? HELL NO becuase even if they get sued when there is an accident they will likely have the money to completely F with the person until they give up.
Blue..no offense...but you obviously have never been on the management side of a company. Do you have any idea what workers comp accidents cost a company? What the average cost of a back strain is? What about the loss of use of a hand?
This statement above could be no farther from the truth. Workplace accidents are on the mind of management every single day. The stupid things that people do are evident every single day. union or not..people take risks, even when they are trained not to.
And it costs companies big time.
Not to mention the loss of productivity in having a team member out on an injury, or "light duty", or having HR crawl up your @ss about it, or the boys upstairs hammering you about it, or the fact that you flat out care about the people in the trenches and want them to have healthy productive lives.
Of course then there is OSHA too....
How about the ability to bid and get HUGE multimillion dollar jobs knowing you have a massive work pool to get very qualified workers from?
Wouldn't that be great if those possibilities existed today...
Again...bid-type jobs may make sense....but not the floor people in JCrew at the mall.
Yes, a lot of their practices have become law or common-place.
Boo hoo Wilbur you mean you have to honk your horn now when your driving a forklift and keep first aid kits readily available??
Aw Shat! People at your work need to know how to perform CPR? Un-American!!
We are not union. ALL of our supervisors have CPR certification, defribulator training, training on identifying an impaired person, we constanly train our supervisors and our team members on safety, review safety, we have a team member based safety commitee...the list goes on and on....
We don't need a union to tell us this is needed...or laws....and maybe..honestly..we do it because an injured or dead employee costs money. And momney motivates.
People don't like making 6 dollars an hour? Screw them! We're in it to make ourselves rich, F the little guys. They don't need benefits.
And now we really get down to it....it is about sticking it to the man right? The man who keeps you down....
This is why Obama's legislation is so dangerous to industry (what industry is left) in this country.
Every "entitled-minded" yahoo out there is going to sign a card when given half a chance because they already believe they are entitled to more than what they are being offered. Not that they have actually
earned it...but that they believe they are entitled to it just by breathing.
It is a way for the poor, down trodden, little guy to stick it to the man with all of that bitterness in their (and seemingly your) hearts.
We have ushered in an entire generation of people that believe that each and every single person is special and deserving of the best. The idea of competition, fair, honest work is lost on an entire generation.
There are entire libraries out ther on how to recruit, manage, and keep good players in a generation that feels entitled, who are over-indulged...spoiled.
And that is fukt.
Your electric car runs on coal. Think about it....