I think a union is something you earn - not something foisted upon you. If you dont want workers to join a union, treat them well, pay them significantly above market rates, give good benefits.
Workers involved in union activities say Tesla is illegally intimidating them
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Re: Workers involved in union activities say Tesla is illegally intimidating them
#22Unions annoy me. Working conditions 75 years ago were truly deadly, and unions served a major purpose to humanize the work force. Nowadays we have "tax the robots" bills being sponsored by Unions and people somehow think it's "ok" to force someone to join a union to feed their family. When I see articles like this, I know what the right answer is but it's hard to empathetic at the same time.
I don't understand why collective bargain is expected on the employer side and reviled on the employee side. If employers can band together to form a company and present a unified front to the people they pay, why can't the people they pay band together to form a union and also present a unified front? Why do we trash the very concept of unions because bad ones want to tax robots and such, but don't apply the same st…
Collective bargaining is never mandatory on the employee side. The employee is not forced to work for a particular collective. The employer on the otherhand is forced, by law, to only hire people who are part of some government-recognized collective, known as a bargaining unit.
In other words, employees can monopolize the employer's hiring options, using anti-free-market laws inspired by the 'labour' movement and socialism.
Re: Workers involved in union activities say Tesla is illegally intimidating them
#23If collective bargaining wasn't mandatory, and employers were free to decide who to hire and fire, the manufacturing sector in the US would be vastly larger, and offer millions more jobs to Americans.
There is very little that does more damage to society than the so-called labour movement.
Re: Workers involved in union activities say Tesla is illegally intimidating them
#24If collective bargaining wasn't mandatory, and employers were free to decide who to hire and fire, the manufacturing sector in the US would be vastly larger, and offer millions more jobs to Americans. There is very little that does more damage to society than the so-called labour movement.
Without the labour movement we'd have Triangle Shirtwaist fires and Ludlow massacres every week. I don't blame you for not knowing that, because our educational system is designed to produce obedient workers, not class agitators. You might want to pick up a history book though.
Re: Workers involved in union activities say Tesla is illegally intimidating them
#25Unions annoy me. Working conditions 75 years ago were truly deadly, and unions served a major purpose to humanize the work force. Nowadays we have "tax the robots" bills being sponsored by Unions and people somehow think it's "ok" to force someone to join a union to feed their family. When I see articles like this, I know what the right answer is but it's hard to empathetic at the same time.
The share of national income going to labor (people who work for a living) has declined ever since capital's triumph over unions. You might not like unions we know what happens without them.
Re: Workers involved in union activities say Tesla is illegally intimidating them
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand why collective bargain is expected on the employer side and reviled on the employee side. If employers can band together to form a company and present a unified front to the people they pay, why can't the people they pay band together to form a union and also present a unified front? Why do we trash the very concept of unions because bad ones want to tax robots and such, but don't apply the same st…
Collective bargaining is never mandatory on the employee side. The employee is not forced to work for a particular collective. The employer on the otherhand is forced, by law, to only hire people who are part of some government-recognized collective, known as a bargaining unit. In other words, employees can monopolize the employer's hiring options, using anti-free-market laws inspired by the 'labour' movement and soc…
Being forced to join a union looks like equality to me. If I want to work at a particular place, I have to join that company. I can't come in on my own, expect to get paid, but not be a part of the company that runs the place. Why should the union be any different?
If an employee doesn't want to work for a particular company, they have to find a different place to work. If an employee doesn't want to join a particular union, they have to find a different place to work. Why is the former reasonable but not the latter?
If an employer really wants to hire non-union labor, they can leave their company and join a different one that doesn't have a union. You're playing an interesting semantic trick here where you use "employee" to refer to the individual, but "employer" to refer to the company. You thereby paint the asymmetry as unfair, when in fact there's no expectation that they should be the same. Let's compare individuals to individuals (laborers to management, say) and groups to groups (companies to unions).
Why do the arguments against unions not also apply to companies? Give me something where if I replace "union" with "company" the result isn't an equally compelling argument against not letting employers organize collectively.
Re: Workers involved in union activities say Tesla is illegally intimidating them
#27If collective bargaining wasn't mandatory, and employers were free to decide who to hire and fire, the manufacturing sector in the US would be vastly larger, and offer millions more jobs to Americans. There is very little that does more damage to society than the so-called labour movement.
Do you think there is some historical example we could refer to to see what it would look like if we had industrial capitalism with no labor rights whatsoever?
Re: Workers involved in union activities say Tesla is illegally intimidating them
#28> Tesla CEO Elon Musk ... promised to install both a roller coaster and free frozen yogurt machines throughout the facility. I had to double-check that I was not reading a satirical website after reading the above statement.
I get an even bigger laugh imagining the same sentence being used in an article about a different industry. Imagine "A nurses' strike today was averted when management agreed to install a rollercoaster and free frozen yoghurt machines"...
Well, in fairness, it does not seem to be the case that that mollified the workers.
Re: Workers involved in union activities say Tesla is illegally intimidating them
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm pretty ambivalent about this. In some sectors you hear the story "he got paid $40 an hour to change light bulbs" but in other sectors (teachers?) workers are still chronically underpaid and mistreated. In short: you can't make black and white generalizations about these things. In some cases a union still makes sense, in others they've become dead weight or obsolete.
The teachers unions keeps terrible teachers employed. In California some school districts have pulled teachers from classrooms because they are unfit to teach, but they can't fire them because of union rules. They are literally paid to do nothing [1]. Many of the teachers I've talked to hate the union, but it's a very strong union and not much can be done about it. [1] http://articles.latimes.com/2009/may/06/local/me…
Uh-huh. All the people who tell me about this think the solution is kids straight out of school teach in charter schools for a couple years and then leave, which it seems to me would not really result in better education.
Re: Workers involved in union activities say Tesla is illegally intimidating them
#30Unions annoy me. Working conditions 75 years ago were truly deadly, and unions served a major purpose to humanize the work force. Nowadays we have "tax the robots" bills being sponsored by Unions and people somehow think it's "ok" to force someone to join a union to feed their family. When I see articles like this, I know what the right answer is but it's hard to empathetic at the same time.
Wages are stagnant or falling in most industries and Tesla and other auto plants have fairly significant rates of injury. I don't see how it's a solved problem.