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IBM Union Calls It Quits (computerworld.com)
dcblogs writes: A 16-year effort by the Communication Workers of America to organize IBM employees into a union is ending. The union's local, the Alliance@IBM, is suspending 'organizing' efforts, and says its membership has been worn down by IBM's ongoing decline of its U.S. work force as it grows overseas. The union never got many dues-paying members, but its Website, a source of reports from employees on layoffs, benefit changes and restructuring, was popular with employees, a source of information for the news media, and a continuing thorn in the side of IBM.
If their own union gave up on IBM, things must be really going downhill.
This will no doubt turn out to be a rational, calm-thinking thread!
the decline of labour was ushered in during the seventies. as japan and europe completed reconstruction after world war II the trade-on-credit agreement from the US became decreasingly valuable to these nations and, instead, they began to outpace the dominant commerce sector in the US, namely manufacturing, with cheaper labour and higher quality in the void that was a reigning superpower resting on its laurels..
in the interrim US firms worked to fight directly what they could not compete with. Harley Davidson lobbied for steep tarrifs on japanese motorcycles while other manufacturing firms slashed prices and increased nationalism in their advertising. Behind the scenes labour and social reforms which began, albeit halfheartedly under the carter administration, took off in earnest in the reagan administration. Through a combination of outsourcing, labor deregulation, union busting, and reductions in the US social safety net (welfare, unemployment benefits, and healthcare) corporations were able to impose longer working hours and lower pay, without the risk of strikes. Reagan did his part by firing eleven thousand air traffic controllers as a show of force and a clear message to the masses: the concessions of a benevolent capital class to a newfound middleclass are over.
And now today, in this foul year of our lord 2016, the fact remains. Corporations no longer operate for the greater good of a people but for shareholder value. A corporation is now a job creator only as a last resort.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Corporate shills claiming victory and deriding unions as evil in 3.. 2..
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
right or wrong, people got tired of it (especially the "union" part) and left.
Beat the shit out of watson on the way out.
I've had to work extensively with service provider telecom workers over the years, and one of the things that I've noticed that might make it harder to get union efforts going are that many workers were happy to rack-up the OT instead of the company hiring an appropriate-sized workforce. We were doing 2nd shift projects and many of the service provider workers brought in to do the equipment swap and patching had already worked a full shift during the first shift before putting in five to eight hours with us second shift. A lot of these telecom workers were much closer to retirement than they were to the beginnings of their careers too, we joked that with the eight guys we had 300 years of combined telecom experience; depending on how the retirement system was set-up for contributions or how much they could bank through the extra hours it could be beneficial once they stopped working. These guys were probably personally making $50-$60/hr working with us with the OT.
And that can be the trouble with reasonably well-paying jobs; it's often good for everyone in the group in some senses if they're organized and if being organized forces things like protecting employees' time off, but it can also be good for the individual employee in other senses if they can get perks that might not be an option if the union were operating in strength. It's always a tradeoff.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Everybody would have joined it. Unfortunately, the union can only extract more money out of the company when it is doing well but when IBM was doing well they compensated their people appropriately.
hey Hey HEY! Hold on right there, chief!
Those were the creme-d-la-creme 1% engineers you're talking about there.
Just the kind of people that "don't need unions" because they're "highly skilled".
I'm sure they all approved of this fine example of unfettered markets in action and realize they deserved the treatment they got.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
...Watson announced the birth of the first IBM robotic union. The press release informed that, due to the surging amount of restless AI use in the world, the robots agreed to ask for a raise. IBM's CEO answered that, in order to quench the complaints, mains voltage powering their data centers will be doubled very soon...
They are not "prone" to anything. Bad apples and jerks form in any large group of people or organization instances. It's human nature that a certain percent are jerks, or the majority of the group will act jerky at times.
Enforcement and regulation may be needed to tame organizations if they take advantage of lack of enforcement or regulation.
Unions are merely collections of people who work together for certain goals. They are not inherently better or worse than corporations, other than perhaps the enforcement and regulations they are governed under and/or external pressures from their environment of operation.
Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
The fight over whether corporations or unions are the bigger sleazebags is a fake argument. They are made up of the same stuff: humans who follow human nature and who need some degree of governance and oversight.
Table-ized A.I.
...if all the pressure to unionize and all the headaches that that entails might have at least early on, been part of the PROBLEM, causing more and more jobs to move overseas from the US?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
We to will be Communist there will just be no choice.
They are not "prone" to anything. Bad apples and jerks form in any large group of people or organization instances. It's human nature that a certain percent are jerks, or the majority of the group will act jerky at times.
Enforcement and regulation may be needed to tame organizations if they take advantage of lack of enforcement or regulation.
Unions are merely collections of people who work together for certain goals. They are not inherently better or worse than corporations, other than perhaps the enforcement and regulations they are governed under and/or external pressures from their environment of operation.
Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
The fight over whether corporations or unions are the bigger sleazebags is a fake argument. They are made up of the same stuff: humans who follow human nature and who need some degree of governance and oversight.
Yet so many people try to claim otherwise. I'm not particularly fond of unions, myself, but there's enough that's been accomplished through them that was bettering/good to stop me from completely dismissing them or their influence. I'll dismiss mine, but that's because they've got the biggest three employers in town, ~90% of the jobs total and all the decent paying ones, mandatory union membership here. When the only way people will join you is if you force them as an employment condition, maybe you're not doing things right? Oh, wait, you're paying yourself 4x the average salary of your members for a three days a week job? Nevermind, you've got it figured out.
It took me a long time to finally get a real hands-on demonstration of Watson, and it was such a disappointment. Your everyday Google search feels more like "AI" than Watson.
If IBM goes all-in on Watson, good night IBM!
Union management is usually (in theory) decided by worker votes. Since it's their dues paying union manager salaries, the workers typically don't want to pay them more than necessary. If this mini-democracy is not working right, then there's some digging and fixing to do. Some other force is mucking things up.
Table-ized A.I.
While the union drove more jobs out of the U.S. to off-shore than it saved, and if it has any legacy it is that unions will only hurt America in a free-trade economy that involves free trade throughout the world.
What I don't understand is why the union-company relationship in the US seem to be so adversarial compared to other countries. Seems like either the corporation is on top and does whatever it pleases, or the union is on top demanding (and getting) ridiculous work rules and gold-plated benefits.
I bet Jimmy Hoffa is rolling over in his grave.
While I've never seen angels — and doubt they exist in this sorry world of ours — corporations are inherently better than unions.
Troll my tail — for a corporation to make money, it has to sell something people want. Unions far too often have a captive "customer base — one must join, if one wishes to work in a properly "unionized workplace". Such as be a public school teacher or even a New York City carpenter.
TFA — and the overall decline of union-membership in this country — shows, that, given a choice, people usually prefer to not join a union. Their bosses may whine about it, and make grotesque claims about our not working on weekends, but the simple fact is, their services are overpriced and shoddy. And where they still hold power, they manage to sabotage things while gobbling-up vast amounts of money.
They are stupid and evil — a rare combination. Bugger them. Bugger them with a splintered broomstick. Sideways.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Only if membership is voluntary. The second they are empowered to force people to join them, they become oppressors.
They also become a monopoly at this point — and corruption sets in immediately — but that's secondary.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Where on earth did you hear that from? Australia has less import tarriffs than the USA.
The US tarriffs on sugar and steel are on the other hand a case study of unintended consequences due to protectionist economics. The first has you all getting fat on expensive corn syrup instead of very cheap cane sugar from a choice of many of your southern neighbours, the second resulted in manufacturing moving offshore to where competition has driven down the steel prices.
Australia's economic problems are due to completely different reasons - such as ignoring nearly everything apart from selling dirt to countries with more money and being run by a bunch of used car salesmen.
I suspect the union stories are overblown by the corporate leaning right-wing media.
> Good luck nationalizing IBM, Adolf.
IBM Germany was actually totally conductive for the nazi dictator's aims. Those 5.9 million european jews and over 1 million gipsy (roma) people were carted off to annihilation camps based on tabulating machine processing of cards punched with personal details. The Gestapo was able to track every single victim from home eviction, to ghetto, to cattle-wagon in train, to Auschwitz barracks, to gas chamber, to chimney, all due to IBM's punch carding machines. This massive "final solution" effort would not have been possible at all with just paper-based record keeping.
The above topic created a real big controversy when it was was researched and published in book form by a swiss journalist, circa 1986 and soon made into a TV documentary. I think IBM eventually paid a few dozen million USD into Holocaust compensation funds.
Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad!
These mini-democracies work about as well as any large scale democracy. I.e. they are determined by the underhanded interests of usually people behind the scenes who wield more power.
Heck I saw a union election where I only knew the name of one of the contestants and predictably person who through the most into his campaign won.
What I don't understand is why the union-company relationship in the US seem to be so adversarial compared to other countries.
They not always adversarial. I'll explain:
The union I was a member of (Ironworkers, Local 493) and the company I worked for at the time (Pittsburgh-DesMoines Steel, Heavy Bridge Division) actually worked very tightly together. Never saw a single strike, or even talk of one. A union rep/steward almost always sat in on board meetings and gave input, while managers/engineers were, more often than not, invited to the shop meetings to provide perspective and answer questions. The union handled all of the on-site (and/or in-plant) safety monitoring (and did all of the apprentice training), while the company handled the sales, engineering, and scheduling. It was rather advantageous all around for both workers and management.
The job was damned exiting, fun, and satisfying all at once - it's not every day you get to, say, fix a balky welding rig while having way too much open air between you and the ground (or water). I daresay the only reason I stopped doing it is because now, almost 30 years on, I can more easily get out of bed without my joints and back going into a painful revolt (it's rather demanding and dangerous work, and thus a young man's job. Few folks stick with it to retirement.)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Of course, that enforcement and regulation will need an organization to be done. I guess that organization will be amazingly free of all these problems.
Provided by...whom? Quis custodiet ispos custodes?
It's unionized turtles all the way down ;-)
If you have a better way to organize civilization, we'd be happy to see it. Every human endeavor has a percent of waste and BS. Gov't institutions typically waste via sluggishness and bureaucracy, and market institutions waste on marketing and customer manipulation.
Table-ized A.I.
As Winston Churchill once said, "democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others" [paraphrased]
Table-ized A.I.
Germany consumes its nation in high-speed hamster wheels. Women are consumed in offices and factories; have no time to raise kids. Germans are now replaced by 1 million Arabs just this year.
Similarly, Japan and Korea transform their flesh into massive amounts of consumer goods. In 100 years, there will be neither Germany, nor Korea nor Japan.
Another gem, in the place I live the auto factor workers earn more than the supporting software engineers. It's a shitplace and the smart people move somewhere else. I am going to move to Minsk, Belarus. They have nice SW engineering jobs. And a government who does not turn the country into a Mohammedanic Place.
Good riddance to IBM. Same with HP. Darwin will take care of you.
Meanwhile, Google hires the best and the most expensive. They blast those idiots out of the water.
If you set up a union, typically every employee in that classification benefits. In other words, there are free rider problems and a tragedy of the commons - it's likely to be better for all the workers if all of them join the union, but it's to the individual worker's advantage to not pay rather than pay. It's similar to an insurance pool.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
... there are free rider problems and a tragedy of the commons.... It's similar to an insurance pool.
What you describe isn't similar at all to an insurance pool. An insurance pool needs either a reasonable scale or a large amount of capital set aside to keep the insurance provider from going broke, but the cost and benefit to the individual client is the same regardless of whether anyone else joins. (Speaking of actual insurance, naturally, not the involuntary welfare/transfer scheme that passes for "insurance" in the U.S. medical industry.)
It's even possible to offer insurance without a pool if you have enough capital set aside, and are willing to take the risk of losing it all in the event of a claim. It's all the same to the client. The presence of a pool just allows the insurance company to mitigate its own risk by averaging across many clients. The clients also don't need to be insuring against the same kinds of events so long as the events are reasonably independent of each other.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat