I like the idea of unions more than the reality. My first job was earning minimum wage working full-time at Safeway. After working there for about 9 months I quit because I didn't want to pay union dues to join the union. I was already only making minimum wage, it wasn't like the union was improving my salary. The required hour long lunch breaks might have been thanks to the union, but I hated having to take hour lon…
I see what you're saying but an "optional" union is pretty much bound to collapse inevitably.
But why shouldn't it? No, seriously. If union isn't providing enough value to justify overhead it creates - it's just a parasite and everyone will benefit once it's gone.
“We had to drag conservatives kicking and screaming” You didn’t answer the question. You agree Obama was a conservative. So is he still? Not “more or less”, you either are or you aren’t.
I don't think Obama was all in all conservative. I think he had some conservative views, gay marriage being one of them. > Not “more or less”, you either are or you aren’t. This is not true. This is both fallacy and a lie. This is also refusal to see worls as it is, insisting on comfortable dichotomy.
This is not true. This is both fallacy and a lie.
Then you and I agree on the exact same point. The OP was wrong to say "We had to drag conservatives kicking and screaming..."
There are no "conservatives", there are "conservative views".
> Extreme power imbalances are seldom (and I'd dare say never) good. I've seen unions effectively bankrupt business during tough times. Please be specific.
Interstate Bakeries. They opened their books to multiple unions and (IIRC), all but one agreed/realized that the money wasn’t there for the demands being made. That one holdout was the coup de grace and IB went bankrupt only to be bought out by some Mexican conglomerate.
The question was directed to fgonzag and about what they had seen. Have you actually seen this happen to Interstate Bakeries or have you read about it in a paper?
I don't see how the union was doing any worthwhile work for me back when I was making minimum wage at a grocery store. All I saw was that they wanted to skim hundreds of dollars off my meager paychecks every year.
You didn't understand what the benefits of collective action against a hostile employer are. That's the fault of the union for failing to explain what they do for members (unions are about much more than just wages). That doesn't mean there's no benefit though.
a union is not an unalloyed good for the employees. I also worked at a unionized grocery for about 3 months. At our shop, it was clear that the union was set up to protect the senior employees at the expense of the junior employees. There were about 10-ish people on the checkout stands during my shifts, 4 of them were employees who had been working there for 10+ years, and 6 of them were people who had been working there for less than a year. The senior employees worked maybe 15% of their shift when it was particularly busy, otherwise they'd have "meetings" in the break room or hang outside smoking. The junior employees were worked hard and burned out and left.
I am very naïve on this, but unions seems to always been portrayed as negative to business and I really don't understand this view. Of course, if you are paying more money from getting the same amount of value from an employer, that is bad for business. But this is not necessarily what can happen, giving more benefits, more stable schedule, better wages, more WLB means being more competitive in the labour market, it…
The issue employers have with unions is much less about wage bargaining an almost entirely about the duplicative work/labor unions tend to lead to. As a hypothetical, lets say you run a widget factory. Line workers at your widget factory spend 6 hour of their shift making widgets, and 2 hours of their shift packing widgets up after they have completed making their widgets. A union comes in and will say "we can have experts in widget making, and experts in packing, these are 2 jobs, people who make widgets do not have the expertise to pack, and people who pack do not have the expertise to make widgets. From now on, we will have 2 separate job roles, widget makers and widget packers, and a packer will never ever be able allowed to make widgets, and widget makes will never ever be allowed to pack widgets". The company, which used to have a staff of 8 people who did both tasks, will now need a staff of 8, 6 widget makers and 2 widget packers. Seems OK right? Well christmas comes around and there are too many widgets to be packed, last year all 8 people were packing widgets 8 hours per day around the christmas rush, and there wasn't much widget making to be done because after christmas is low on sales. The company needs to hire an additional 6 temporary widget packers to pack widget and the 6 widget makers will be either idle or working with reduced efficiency. This increases the companies expenses with no real value created.
I am very naïve on this, but unions seems to always been portrayed as negative to business and I really don't understand this view. Of course, if you are paying more money from getting the same amount of value from an employer, that is bad for business. But this is not necessarily what can happen, giving more benefits, more stable schedule, better wages, more WLB means being more competitive in the labour market, it…
If unions are good for both the company and the workers why don't companies eventually implement the petitions of unions by themselves without any external pressure?
You're making it seem like companies are too dumb to know what's best for them.
I'm in favor of unions but that there's no doubt they can be detrimental to companies and to some of the workers, who maybe prefer more risk and higher rewards.
I agree. So, the question is if you want lower spending etc, who do you vote for? It’s not obvious. Take a corporate tax loophole, is that spending and or a form of economic control? Foreign ownership of US companies compounds this, is it giving money to foreigners or good economic policy etc.
> Take a corporate tax loophole Tax policy you disagree with isn't a loophole.
I mean loophole as in an unintended side effect of tax law.
The classic double Irish with a Dutch sandwich was emergent behavior based on how US, EU, Irish, and Dutch tax codes all intertwined.
> The idea of the republican working class party has always been more of a clever rhetorical strategy than a reality. I tend to agree, but then again I really don't grok the Trump thing, and I can't claim that I saw it coming or sticking around as long as it has. At this point I would not be terribly shocked to see a bit of role reversal between the two major parties.
I've been a conservative since I had a minimum wage job, for one reason: I want the government out of my life as much as possible. I firmly believe nobody will care about my family as much as I do and I don't want the government's golden handcuffs. Leave me alone, let me work, and I'll happily live with whatever happens. I think this is the fundamental disconnect in left-right (economic) politics. The left, as I see…
> The right wants liberty, recognizing that comes with risk.
Why did the republicans bail out the banks then?
The right wants you to think you should be responsible but the guys at the top will happily give and take govt money.
I agree. So, the question is if you want lower spending etc, who do you vote for? It’s not obvious. Take a corporate tax loophole, is that spending and or a form of economic control? Foreign ownership of US companies compounds this, is it giving money to foreigners or good economic policy etc.
Paying less taxes is not government "spending". A person's income is not government property that the government generously allows the person to keep some of it.
That’s at best a semantic argument as refundable tax breaks can result in a net payment by the government. As in you can revive 1,400$ having never paid any money to the government.
A more common example is to pay nothing and also get a rebait to avoid paying taxes in the future.
A single successful effort of unionization at an Amazon facility is more than symbolic: It will encourage -- and serve as a blueprint for -- employees at other Amazon facilities to do the same. Moreover, it will motivate employees at other large companies to try. This has been brewing for a while. It's possible we'll see a generational wave of unionization.
> It's possible we'll see a generational wave of unionization. I fully expect this to happen. Younger folks today are the unlucky beneficiary of years of wage stagnation and home price inflation. They have every right to be angry, and I think they are collectively starting to realize that they have a lot of power to change the status quo. At the risk of veering into politics, I'm also not sure how this will change th…
This is still true for young people in countries with strong unions, So it might be more of an effect of the population pyramid inversion.