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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.
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.
The union did not give up on IBM, IBM gave up on America. The union is just not interested in protecting foreign workers rights, or at least knows that Chinese and Indian peasants do not have enough money for it to be worth their time taking some of it.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
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.
Did they get tired of the union, or the constant pressure from management to not join or support it?
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
They are very interested in organizing globally, but 3rd world countries outlaw it.
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.
right or wrong, people got tired of it (especially the "union" part) and left.
Left what, exactly? The union never fully formed. The summary plainly states that, and goes on to say that the union is giving up on organizing for IBM workers.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Try to organize a union in China and see what happens to you. You go to prison. It is a police state with unlimited surveillance powers where it is illegal to unionize. While your at it start a Falun Gong club.
The union did not give up on IBM, IBM gave up on America
No, America gave up on America. IBM is just doing what makes economic sense: moving labor out of uncompetitive locales to competitive ones. There's nothing "magical" about US-based workers, not factory workers (as we've seen by the wholesale transfer of factory work to China) and not knowledge workers.
When factory work was being outsourced on a mass scale to China, the drum-beat from knowledge workers was, "if you can't compete, deal with it. It's nobody else's job to support your failing business model". Well, now the shoe is on the other foot. What happened to factories can happen even easier to IT workers, because it's easier to move those jobs than to build entirely new factories to take advantage of lower labor costs.
There exists no such thing as a "right" to a job. I'm sorry that you aren't living in a competitive locale, but that's no one else's problem but yours. Your society wanted perks that other societies didn't demand, and as a result, you became more expensive. Because you were more expensive, it made less and less sense over time to employ you when others could do the work cheaper.
This is economics 101. It sucks for displaced workers, but nobody OWEs you a job. You must provide enough value to be worth your cost, or the jobs will go elsewhere. Try to pass laws to stop that? Guess what, economics doesn't care about your laws. That'll make your entire country even more uncompetitive and entire industries will uproot and move elsewhere. This has happened before. It can happen again.
The only way you can recover from this situation is to be economically competitive. That means structural changes to your society. It will mean a drastic reduction in your salary, which means you won't have that nice 3 bedroom house in the burbs and a luxury car. But you are competing with people who don't have those things and are not paying for them, so they can work for $2/hr where you demand $50/hr, because they are living 8 people to a tiny inner city apartment and own no car at all, nor big screen TV.
So go ahead. Whine, cry about how it isn't fair. You're right, it isn't! Nobody ever promised life would be fair, or kind, or care one bit about your problems. It's down to a simple reality: compete, or don't. People buying the latest plastic widget don't care if it's made in China or USA, they care if it costs $2 for the Chinese one or $65 for the American one. Same deal with IT. You are competing with people all around the world. Deal.
They closed down in America, a place where it is legal and you are under basically zero danger running a union, because of a drop in the dues coming in. It does not matter what laws exist in China, it never would of been a profitable enough a venture to begin with. The only reason they want a foothold in foreign soil, is to gain more leverage over companies so that they can benefit the real members who make enough to pay them. But without enough American members, they have no use for the foreign leverage.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
I guess if you consider workers' rights and environmental protections to be perks, you must be happy living in a shack near a coal powerplant.
What the First World should do is tax products that are produced in factories that don't have equivalent labour and environmental protections in place, regardless of country of origin. If multinationals can export their abuse and pollution to corrupt countries, they should be charged appropriately, otherwise it's a rigged system. I'm all in favour of a competitive free market. This isn't one.
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
See, I had always heard that IBM was a great place to work, and that they often went out of their way to make their employees happy. That's why it puzzles me that someone was trying to unionize IBM. Sure, it would have made a big splash for the pro-union movement if they had managed to unionize the largest tech company in the world, but it sounds like there was no real motivation by the rank-and-file to unionize at IBM. Sounds like the union's motives may not have been pure.
Restricting workers rights to organize is a very communist thing to do :-)
Yes, knowledge workers are still strong in America, the corporations just don't realize this. They think that just because a foreign company claims to be able to do everything they ask for that it will actually happen. IBM is expanding world wide because it is also much less technical than it used to be. It no longer needs as many real knowledge workers. They don't need the best workers anymore they just want the cheapest ones because they think that 4 workers for the price of one is a good deal.
Another way to fix it is to make it expensive for US companies to have all its workers overseas. Add back in tariffs (which makes free market zealots cry but we can sell those tears for a profit). Promote American made goods to American consumers. Treat any corporation with more overseas workers than domestic workers as a foreign company. Force the corporations' executives to live and work in the country where they have the most workers. Promote unionization in other countries, promote environmental laws in other countries, promote workers rights in other countries, and the desirability of moving operations overseas will dry up. Create free trade with countries that have good treatment of workers and restrict free trade with countries that exploit their workers.
...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...
Workers' rights and environmental protections are not perks. But companies that are doing good by their workers and the environment should not be punished. A union in such a company basically funnels cash from the company to the union leadership. That's not productive. (A union in such a company also pits workers against managers, reducing both moral and productivity. "There's the bell, I'm putting down my wrench and leaving, even though this bolt needs one more turn to be properly tightened. I don't give a shit about my work, my goal is to stick it to my boss." That's not cool.)
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.
This is economics 101. It sucks for displaced workers, but nobody OWEs you a job. You must provide enough value to be worth your cost, or the jobs will go elsewhere. Try to pass laws to stop that? Guess what, economics doesn't care about your laws. That'll make your entire country even more uncompetitive and entire industries will uproot and move elsewhere. This has happened before. It can happen again.
You are half right. If you step back a bit and look at the situation from a different point of view, you SHOULD see that what you said is only half the reason. What would you do to make you look good in your resume if you are a CEO to come into a big corporation? Of course, just cut cost and make the company book looks good while you are in the position. How to do that? Yes, reduce the cost by moving jobs to somewhere else that cost the corporation much cheaper as long as the quality is OK. Competitive work? Yes, the cost is competitive, but that does not mean the quality is as good as it used to be but rather just good enough. Many big corporations are doing the same thing because those few CEOs jump from one job to the other.
Have you ever worked for IBM in the US lately? Do you know that they work you like a dog and expect you to work at least 60+ hours a week. If you don't show your hours high enough, they will cut you (or lay off) because they said you are being lazy. If you don't show that you are improving yourself ALL the time, you are out as well. You are in there running non stop just to keep your job. You have no time to breath. If you have a family, then prepare to kiss your family good bye if you want to keep the job. Though, if you are very high up, it may be a completely different life quality in there. Yes, you just lay off workers and get a big bonus at the end of the year.
Add back in tariffs (which makes free market zealots cry but we can sell those tears for a profit).
The Australians do that now. The result is not higher paying jobs for Australians, it has done little to improve their overall income.
What it has achieved there is to raise the cost of goods to 60% above what everyone else pays. Everything made in Australia is hideously expensive, but the import tariffs run 50%, or the imports are outright blocked by crooked regulations. At the end of the day, Australia is a case study in why protectionist economics is a disaster.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
IBM offers both options to customers. US based, or offshore. Some must use US because of regulation.
Guess which one our customers take when given the option?
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
...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.........
It really comes down to your manager.
I have had several really good managers. I have had a couple of bad ones.
Bad ones are REALLY bad. Most don't last as their key people move out of the team and they are unable to deliver.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
We to will be Communist there will just be no choice.
Try to organize a union in China and see what happens to you. You go to prison ... it is illegal to unionize.
Unions are not illegal in China. Many foreign-owned factories are unionized, and unions are allowed at any private company. They are not generally tolerated at state owned factories, but, in theory, they are not needed there since the government already represents the interests of the proletariat.
What the First World should do is tax products that are produced in factories that don't have equivalent labour and environmental protections in place
Then those countries will immediately retaliate with tariffs on American goods, and everybody loses.
Remind me again how many of the monumental number of televisions manufactured in the vast factories of America are exported and sold in China?
Unions can actually alleviate tension, by coordinating disputes.
Without it, people just whinge all the time and do no work.
Hmmm....air quality in Beijing and other parts of China are piss poor. New Delhi is blanketed by smog. Indonesia is burning their rain forests.
Last we heard, these were very competitive places to set up business. Could you please move there and let us know how you like it? Postcards will do, try to get some action photos of the pollution in these business havens, we like that sort of thing.
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!
Remind me again how many of the monumental number of televisions manufactured in the vast factories of America are exported and sold in China?
China imports aircraft, CPUs, capital goods, movies, and billions of hours of services from America.
Australian GDP growth has remained steady over the last 40 years. What are you basing your assertions on?
GDP growth has been steady. While it may not be perfect it clearly doesn't result in what you're describing.
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.
LOL... if they have a union, they'll spend half their time whinging about the boss, and the other half whinging about their union leadership. Fuck unions.
Restricting and filtering all internet communication is in the interest of proletariat?
Have you fucking seen the goddamn smog over many parts of China? No? Obviously not.
Problem is that there's not enough local goods for local consumption. US used to be much more self reliant. Then we started getting cheap ass plastic goods from China. So who knows if today we can be self reliant anymore.
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.
The problem with this like of thinking is it doesn't mean the quality is worse, either. I'm old enough to remember when US blue collar types would pooh pooh Japanese products for their low quality.
Once the jobs are in China (or India or wherever) the expertise will follow. Eventually they will be able to compete on quality.
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.
That's a good point. You'd think they'd be more likely to try organizing Amazon or Disney.
Add back in tariffs (which makes free market zealots cry but we can sell those tears for a profit).
The Australians do that now. The result is not higher paying jobs for Australians, it has done little to improve their overall income.
What it has achieved there is to raise the cost of goods to 60% above what everyone else pays. Everything made in Australia is hideously expensive, but the import tariffs run 50%, or the imports are outright blocked by crooked regulations. At the end of the day, Australia is a case study in why protectionist economics is a disaster.
This.
However trade tariffs and restrictions have been slowly been eroded over the last two decades and its resulted in prices dropping from 60% or more above other developed nations to "price in Hong Kong plus shipping" for many items. Drop shipping has been a huge boon to Australians (and the retailers smart enough to figure out which way the wind was blowing... not you Dick Smith).
Cars are a huge sticking point. Whilst free trade agreements have made things like Toyota Corollas pretty cheap, manufacturers like BMW, Audi and others have realised they can charge a huge premium in Australia because we cant import their cars privately. A 235i is A$30,000 more in Australia than the UK or US price. The car import ban was meant to protect a failing car industry in Australia and guess what, the factories are still closing their doors because the government turned the public money tap off. Protectionism is an abject failure.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
The problem here is that corporate officer jobs have been gaining upwards of 4,000% compared to the plebes. Are they not also subject to the same market forces? I wonder what between these two extremes is different (if you think corporate boards don't operate as protection for the wealthiest, you haven't been paying attention)?
While certainly no one owes you a job, no one owes any business a market either. The fact of the matter is that laws have been bought and sold against labor (the TPP being the latest round) while at the same time workers have been told they don't need to organize when they have labor laws. And here we are.
Slash and burn economics isn't viable either, and eventually those chickens will come to to roost as well, often with bloody results.
Are you maybe confusing Australians with Austrians? Australia is a free market economy and has almost no trade tariffs. For example, import tariffs on foreign made cars is only 5%. An example of a high tariff nation is Japan, and you'd better hope that if you're going to waffle on about the impact of trade tariffs that nobody with a clue wanders in this thread. Tariffs are complicated. Its not as simple as "abolish them and everyone gets richer".
"Benefit" which is to say extort the American workers. Most of unions are extortion rackets, and the employees are the victims.
He did say in theory.
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
Restricting and filtering all internet communication is in the interest of proletariat?
It is in the interest of the communist party ruling class, and since they constitute the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, and personify the interests of the workers, it is clearly in the interest of the proletariat as well. At least that is the theory.
Remind me again how many of the monumental number of televisions manufactured in the vast factories of America are exported and sold in China?
China imports aircraft, CPUs, capital goods, movies, and billions of hours of services from America.
Aircraft: yes. Tariff that, and you've just killed Chinas air industry. I guess they could go AirBus instead. They don't import much in the way of capital goods. The movies, they generally just run a "third shift" and press a bunch of extra DVDs: the DVD players don't really care if it's a binary copy of a "content scrambled" DVD, as long as it's an exact duplicate. Not a lot of import there. What services do they import from the U.S.?
It's kind of entirely moot, however, as we are not permitted to tariff China for many things, because they have WTO "Most Favord Nation" status, granted to them by the U.S., which means they can't be tariffed any more than the least teriff on all other U.S. trading partners, even if their factories are being powered by burning babies born to Falun Gong families in their power plants.
Fortunately, nobody does that in the US. USSR — unlike China — was a completely different story. Union membership was mandatory. Their role was kinda-sorta like that of social services here, however. Not really, but that's the closest analogy I could find — they certainly weren't protecting workers' rights.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Citations would be useful here.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
So I guess you will be the first person willing to live out on the decaying streets of a dead country with no medical care, food, or shelter because no one OWES you anything.
FYI, the expectation of society is you either have money, (live in a wealthy family), or you work to make a living. (AKA. Pay your living expenses.) The unwritten rule that goes along with that expectation is: If you don't have money, society must provide you with a job (a way to make money) for that expectation to work. The thing is our society, and any society based on capitalism for that matter, has this expectation as a fundamental component of it's most basic structure. So much so that if this expectation (and the aforementioned unwritten rule that goes with it), is violated or found to be invalid, then that society will unravel at the seams and fall apart.
Examples of this:
1. What happens if you can't afford food and no-one will give you any? You steal it.
2. What happens if you have no home and you have no-where safe to sleep at night? You sleep wherever and are loitering / guilty of living while destitute.
3. What happens if you can't afford to pay someone for security? You run the risk that goes with it. (Death / Rape / Theft / etc.)
4. What happens when you get sick but can't afford medical care? You go about your life while sick, spreading your sickness around to others and getting them sick.
5. What happens when we refuse / cannot afford to pay for law enforcement? The enforcers stop enforcing the law because of the risks involved, and the lack of compensation for taking on those risks.
6. What happens when too many people become unemployed in an area and the remaining working public cannot support those that have no job any longer? The area goes bankrupt because there's not enough money to support the society that lives there.
7. What happens when there's not enough money to support a society in an area? The area's population looses confidence in the used currency and switches over to a new local currency to avoid complete anarchy. (Or get out of it.)
Society needs to provide it's members with means to work within it. If it should fail to do so, that society's members will find ways to work outside of it. In this way, there does exist a "right" to work. It exists out of necessity for our society to function as intended, even if it's not officially recognized. Your complete disregard for this fact because of others disregard for it, is no excuse and will only move us all closer to anarchy. Please support society rather than tear it down.
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.
On a per-capita basis, Americans produce far more pollution than Chinese, Africans, etc.
Eh? per-capita basis? Who cares?! If your government has to close the schools in your city, and tell the old folks that they should do their morning Tai Chi at home, instead of an open park . . . your country is . . . well, let's just leave it at that.
You should try to visit China sometime . . . in a major city . . . and take a deep breath . . . I never knew that New Jersey smelled so sweet!
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
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.
Thinking of a union as a for-profit enterprise where the profit comes from worker dues, means you really don't understand unions at all.
America was a case study in doing protectionism right. For about 150 years under the Hamilton plan the US was the most protectionist country on earth. It worked well too - America became the world's leading industrial nation thanks to that, supplanting Britain who had invented the industrial revolution.
Post world war two those massive industries wanted to expand globally and America abandoned the Hamilton plan to get other countries to do the same so American companies could export cheaply. That worked well for a while. Clearly it no longer does.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Article 23 implemented in you constitution?
http://www.un.org/en/universal...
This is economics 101. It sucks for displaced workers, but nobody OWEs you a job.
That's microeconomics 101.
Macro economics 101 would be the government NEEDs to provide and maintain gainful employment of the population to help the nation's GDP. Getting fired because you suck at your job falls under the former. Mass outsourcing of an industry to cheaper countries falls under the latter.
There are other ways to recover from this, and that's known as trade barriers. It's also one of the fundamental problems with free trade agreements. You prop up the local industry by preventing import from cheaper goods. It doesn't help your exports but it does help your local situation, something that isn't too much of a problem when you have a massive country the size of America.
Also while we're talking about economics we should also discuss the basic theory of needs. You talk as if the only problem is the TV and the large apartment. How about living in an area where I can drink the tap water, not inhale toxic fumes from local industry, and go to work without the expectation that I may get killed that day?
You are linking the wrong things together.
- Tarrifs don't provide higher paying jobs, they preserve existing industry.
- Cost of goods doesn't depend solely on tarrifs it depends on the price locals are willing to bear.
- Things made in Australia re not hideously expensive. Things bought in Australia are hideously expensive. This can be seen by an example of an Australia manufacturer of backpacks selling the same locally made goods for half the price in the USA as in Australia despite the additional shipping costs.
- Australia isn't nearly as protectionist as you think.
Some of what you say rings true but you're using a completely incorrect example for it. Cost of goods are high? Compared to what? Basic whitegoods are cheaper in Australia than most of Europe. Food depends entirely on local economics (fruit and veg is more expensive in Australia, red meat is far cheaper, specific products also have taxes to prevent their use, and others have exceptions from the otherwise universal sales tax).
As someone who recently moved overseas and had several co-workers leave too we've done the math over and over again. You think you're better of in the states? Yes living is cheap, but so are you. Everyone who moved from Australia to the states working within the same company doing the same job at the same global pay level takes home significantly less money and with less holidays after taxes and healthcare (to keep it fair since our taxes pay our healthcare). So despite your assertion that Australia is highly protectionist, workers mostly break even moving from one country to another. I came out ahead but only because I moved up a pay grade when I moved to Europe.
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.
In my experience it takes one American running around like a chicken with their head cut off to manage two or three offshore. Otherwise the ROI takes a total nose dive. I think the new model model may evolve to onshore contracted developers. they never stick around long enough to matter as employees anyway. The good mature ones do, and they are fine to keep on staff, but your average twenty-something developer totally sucks no matter where they are from.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
"so they can work for $2/hr where you demand $50/hr, because they are living 8 people to a tiny inner city apartment and own no car at all, nor big screen TV."
That is not sustainable. They want the house and car too. The American standard IS where everyone is heading whether you realize it or not.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
On a per-capita basis, Americans produce far more pollution than Chinese, Africans, etc.
Eh? per-capita basis? Who cares?! If your government has to close the schools in your city, and tell the old folks that they should do their morning Tai Chi at home, instead of an open park . . . your country is . . . well, let's just leave it at that.
You should try to visit China sometime . . . in a major city . . . and take a deep breath . . . I never knew that New Jersey smelled so sweet!
I'll stick to things like the smuggled-out videos of the electronics 'recycling' center there, thank you. The only places you can get away with that are ones where you're not financially responsible (even if it's merely an effective immunity) and not even the US has quite been that bad--Love Canal happened because the Niagara Falls Board of Education didn't understand why they were being told that a toxic waste dump isn't a good place to build a school. (Citation; Not the original source I heard about it from, which was a tl;dr summary of what came out long term, and put it as "Chemical company goes 'You want to do what on the toxic waste dump you are insisting on acquiring?' to school board, sells purely because the board didn't get what 'no' means.")
"The only way you can recover from this situation is to be economically competitive. That means structural changes to your society. It will mean a drastic reduction in your salary, which means you won't have that nice 3 bedroom house in the burbs and a luxury car. But you are competing with people who don't have those things and are not paying for them, so they can work for $2/hr where you demand $50/hr, because they are living 8 people to a tiny inner city apartment and own no car at all, nor big screen TV."
One 'demands' 50 an hour because that's what it costs to have a decent life in a developed country.
Yes it's basic economics and that's the way it works - but it doesn't have to work this way, this fast, unless people let it, and anyone who supports allowing this to happen supports the decline of their own civilization.
If you actually want to compete with dirt poor third world workers who have zero benefits, unsafe working conditions, unpaid overtime, seven day work weeks, etc, etc, etc, then, I'm very sorry to have to break this to you, but you are a complete fucking idiot.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
Thinking of a modern union as anything else shows that you've been keeping your head in the sand for the last few decades. Ask any union supporter why unions are still relevant and they'll no doubt prattle on about things unions did 100 years ago. Remember that time unions bilked the MA tax payers out of 10 billion dollars in their big dig scam?
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Unions can actually alleviate tension, by coordinating disputes.
Without it, people just whinge all the time and do no work.
If you're lucky. Get a bunch of dissatisfied workers together and you can end up with violent revolution.
Get this clear: No one owes business anything. The 21st Century business model is almost entirely money-driven to the point that a lot of business is no longer as much about providing goods and services as it is about trading bits and pieces of itself back and forth so that a small number of people can profit off the trading, even if it's at the expense of profitability, long-term viability or of keeping people employed.
The world was not created solely to support an economy. An economy exists to provide for people, and when it fails the people, they can and will do extreme things that will ruin your business a lot faster than any relative levels of competitiveness. So yes, your business does owe people a living, at least until some alternative form of income becomes the standard.
The irony of the False Darwin philosophy is that if it were actually true, you wouldn't be able to step outdoors without being attacked by razor-fanged rabbits and acid-spitting butterflies.
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?
Poor english skills?
Didn't you mean to say poor Chinese skills? Those US workers, all cocky and don't even speak Chinese...
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.
Actually, it shows that you haven't been listening primarily to right-wing propaganda for the last few decades. There's a difference.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
There was one union in Nazi Germany also, and I believe membership was mandatory. Its role was something like a small dog: look cute, and roll over whenever management makes a demand.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
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
No one claimed it was good either. They were just explaining that that action could be seen as consistent in theory, which is technically true.
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
I dont listen to right wing anything. I personally saw hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of brand new equipment and supplies walk off job sites and disappear into the ownership of these union companies during the big dig. I saw white envelopes lining people's pockets, and i saw good workers utterly screwed by the unions that they had trusted to look after them. I had no pull to fight it back then, but today I wont stand for it.
It's telling that you must assume nobody could possibly say anything bad about unions unless they subscribe to some OTHER political ideology. I think you're the indoctrinated one.
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I'm perfectly willing to believe that a member of X group did Y, and I'll accept what you say about unions and the Big Dig. Where I disagree is that I don't think that unions are all the same, so that generalizing from "Unions did some really bad things in the Big Dig project" to "Thinking of a modern union as anything else shows that you've been keeping your head in the sand for the last few decades." (that's a cut-and-paste quote from you) is legitimate.
"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
I'm sorry, cut and paste quote? You still assert that only a right wing listener would complain about unions. What reasons were you a union supporter again? Forgive me if I haven't agreed with any of your points, because you haven't given any.
If anything, when you said "Thinking of a union as a for-profit enterprise where the profit comes from worker dues, means you really don't understand unions at all." flies in the face of my time working at a hospital, when the union i was forced to join in spite of voting to join it gladly took my dues, but never lifted a finger to help me when the management underwent a serious shakeup that led to many people being fired and replaced with out of state cronies of a new boss. At least that hospital went down the tubes a few years later.
I know everything I'm saying is anecdotal, but so are most of the modern unionist articles and astroturfed blogs. Maybe some people really have a great time and a union literally saved their life. It's possible. But i'm a person whose crossed paths with many unions across many fields and not once has any of my personal experiences shown me anything good about them. I may be a rare outlier who by sheer chance only happened to see the bad unions, but then... if you know anything about statistics, that'd be the more absurd possibility to assume, wouldnt it?
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I go to some effort to say what I mean, I do appreciate it when I'm not misconstrued. I never said, nor would I say, that criticism of unions would only come from the right wing. However, the right wing is apparently very certain that there are no good unions.
There are good employers. There are bad employers. There are good unions. There are bad unions. You may have had experience only with bad unions. I've seen at least one good one. Also, a good union isn't going to get nearly the press coverage that a bad one can get.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes