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Aussie Techs Threaten Chaos
tintinaujapon writes "The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that NCR staff with key responsibility (among other things) for fast food & supermarket chains, banking ATMs, schools and baggage handling at Sydney airport are preparing to walk off the job next week, in industrial action aimed at resolving a pay dispute. NCR's general manager thinks few people in the general community will care about the plight of the palest workforce, but the union claims potential disruption and financial losses could be huge. The strike could last up to a week and is the most significant action yet taken in Australia by the techie workforce."
Without labor unions we wouldn't have ever gained a 40 hour work week or an end to child labor.
You're absolutely right. And without the stagecoach and the carbine rifle we'd never have won The West, either. But -- funny, ennit? -- every time I see a covered wagon in Manhattan with some guy on the buckboard picking off Indians on the corner of Spring and Broadway, I am overcome with a great feeling of "WTF?"
Unionized tech workers? Wow. Do they have to wear powdered wigs, too?
Back to the subject:
This is the more reason why a monopoly MUST not be accepted under any circumstances. What would happen if Microsoft threatened the same action? I understand they're yet to solve their differences with the EU. Right?
Unions are "bad" because they free the individual of responsibility. The union mindset is similar to liberals with their reliance on government and on others to support them. An individual should study hard, work hard, and acheive their goals on their own merits. Your compensation should be based on work ethic, productivity, and position, not on political pressure and scare tactics.
The world is divided into two types of people: the competent and the incompetent. 90% of real work is done by competents. 90% of the population is made up of incompetents.
While the competents look benignly upon the incompents, the incompetents hate and fear the competents. The incompetents of this world have one goal in life: to use the power of numbers to make the competents spend their time slaving for them. Unions, credentials, and bureaucracies are their tools in this regard.
The closer a profession gets to engineering (and the more male a profession is), the higher the percentage of competents employed by it. For tech workers, the percentage of competents may reach as high as 30% or 40%. The competents, rightly, look upon unions as a tool of their oppressors (the incompetents).
If they'd just remove the cap on foreign worker visas like Gates tells them to do they wouldn't have these problems with uppity geeks trying to destroy civilization by demanding enough money to attract a decent mate, reliably pay a mortgate and have a couple of kids they can afford to send to college.
Seastead this.
Having said all of that, one thing that a lot of self-styled libertarians seem to gloss over is the inherent advantage that government confers upon corporations, specifically corporate personhood and all of the stuff that falls out from that, and the fact that corporations exist without fear of any kind of real punishment for criminal acts.
Ah, but unions are genuine, legal, corporations. In theory, they're "not for profit", but can anyone deny that the union doesn't exist for the purpose of increasing the income of it's members?
And don't forget that union corporations have plenty of exemptions that business corporations don't. Things like anti-trust laws and anti-monopoly laws don't apply to unions.
And recently, Former Governor Davis in California near the end of his term actually signed into law a limit to union liability for damages. A union corporation can only be liable for up to $100,000.
and the fact that corporations exist without fear of any kind of real punishment for criminal acts.
LOL. The association between unions and organized crime is well-known.