By "voting for someone else", you aren't doing anything particularly ethical. You are simply throwing your vote away.
By voting for someone who I actually don't support becoming president, I'm throwing my vote away.
Think the republicans all like Bush? Not even. If everyone really voted only for people that they actually wanted to see in office, Bush wouldn't stand a chance.
I'm sick of people just voting "no." That's how we ended up with a president we didn't choose last time.
Um, actually, treaties trump the Constitution. It's a clever loophole: Article VI lists them second, but Supreme Court precedent in Japan Line, Ltd., et al. v. County of Los Angeles et al. finds that the Supremacy Clause can actually trump states' rights, if something "prevents the United States from 'speaking with one voice' in regulating foreign trade." This gives Congress the right to enter into treaties that govern activities they are normally forbidden from legislating, and to compel all US citizens and states to comply with them. That's one of the things that makes the WTO so dangerous... if, say, Japan doesn't like California's stringent air quality laws, they can bring complaint against the US at the WTO and the US government has to ask California to back off.
So far, this hasn't been tried on any bill of rights issue that I know of... only in challenging state legislation. But the potential and precedent is there.
If a corporation was hiding information regarding its misdoings which were at best harmful to the public good but not technically illegal, and at worst amounted to downright fraud and deceit, would you care how that information was obtained?
Is it in the public's interest to know the identities of everyone who is HIV-positive? I mean, greater good and all...
It *is* important whether or not the information was obtained legally. These laws protect *everyone*, even the bad guys. If we stop respecting them because we don't like the person using them, they won't be nearly as strong when we need them for our side.
Doctor-patient privilege is no different than the attorney-client privilege.
I wouldn't agree with that statement at all. Sure, they serve similar roles, and perhaps have similar importance, though I tend to think that there's even still a difference between criminal and civil matters for attorney-client privilege. Criminal is more like doctor-patient, because you're talking about liberty, which ranks right after life. Pursuit of happiness might encompass civil matters, but that's a stretch.
But they're not exactly the same. In our society, the accepted norm is to need to see a doctor at least every so often. Many people can go their whole lives and never need a lawyer. When you do need a lawyer, the outcome of the incident generally becomes public record anyway, even if your private communications don't... that would be like if my perscription and surgery records were public, even if what I said to the doctor wasn't. The two privileges clearly occupy different legal and social roles.
The SC has ruled time and time again that when copyright and the 1st Amendment come into conflict that copyright wins. Their opinion is that Art 1 Sec 8 Cls 8 of the Consituion overrules the 1st Amend of the Constitution.
But the legal precedents for freedom of speech are not the same as those for freedom of the press. This is not the same kind of case as a free speech case.
However there's nothing to stop you from voting for the lesser of two evils at that level and going whichever way you want to at lower levels.
Sure there is: my own conscience.
"Anybody but Bush" is a very, very dangerous path to tread. I'll vote for Kerry if I think I wouldn't mind him as president, but if he pisses me off the way Gore did, a minor party will be getting my vote again.
Then again, I'm in California, so it's not like I'm going to lose the election for the Democrats (latest poll shows Bush's chances in California approaching those of Frosty the Snowman in Malibu). Still, it's the whole idea of voting against instead of voting for that leaves us with no good choices.
Now, if we could just get a decent voting system in place, that would be wonderful. Something like Instant Runoff Voting for example. Then there wouldn't be any of this fear about "throwing away your vote" and the whole peer-pressure thing. You could vote for who you *really* want as your first choice, and then choose your backup options if that guy doesn't make it.
Good catch. Thank you.;-) [signed: original poster]
Admittedly it doesn't seem possible to cure the common cold because you'd have to cure it everywhere all at once which is presumably impossible, and we don't even really necessarily know where they come from in the first place.
Well, if the common cold were thought to be a major threat, the first thing we'd do is start being less casual about spreading it around. We'd quarantine people who come down with the sniffles, and burn their bedsheets afterward. That would be a good start at getting it under control.
Just why is it that all these worms people write nowadays just seem so.. nice? I remember the days when 90% of viruses would at the very least format your hard disc.. now they just sit there.
Why is smallpox darn near extinct, but the common cold thrives?
If a worm formats your hard disk, it can't keep scanning for and infecting new machines. For one thing, now you know something is wrong, and are more inclined to fix it.
It's almost a shame, because one good formating worm might finally make people take them more seriously.
And there, you answer your own query. If worms did "real" damage (i.e. obviously interfered with the working of the computer), people would be much more cautious about contracting and spreading them. But how many of you freak out and quarantine yourself if you come in contact with a carrier of the common cold? Same thing...
Ugh, lotta text there, forgive me for not quoting since anything I quoted would either be ridiculously long or out of context...
Unions came out of local movements, by and large. Until the CIO started in on the big auto companies, unions were highly localized and generally craft-based. The AFL and the CIO battled bitterly over the shape unionism in America would take for a long time (before finally throwing in the towel and merging).
You're right that unions behave more and more like corporations. There's a reason for that: they are the mirrors of the corps they bargain with. The reason they exist is to balance corporations, so they end up acting a lot like them. It's not a good situation, but it's not one I have a ready solution for.
The apprenticeship situation you describe is a feature of only a few union structures, and always craft unions. The entertainment industry is the most heavily unionized industry that I know of. Generally speaking, industries where people move frequently between companies and jobs within the same profession and where high degrees of skill and talent are required are more unionized. Still, not even all entertainment industry unions have apprenticeship requirements. You don't have to apprentice to an actor for a while to become a SAG member, for example (though you do have to get certain kinds of credits under your belt).
The difference between the president representing less than the majority and union representation is the electoral college (and certain shenanigans in Florida). Unions are certified and decertified by a majority vote. If a majority of employees don't want union representation, or don't want *that* union representing them, they can call in the NLRB for a decertification vote and that's that. So there's a bit more to it than the simplistic picture you've painted.
I like the idea that we need better systems, but we need to start with better business systems. Unions are an ad hoc solution to an array of problems with the interaction between business and labor. There ought to be a better way to go about it, I agree... but darned if I know what it is. Worker cooperatives? Employee-ownership? Neither of these seem to work on any large scale. I'm still stumped as to how to balance power in the working world, so I'm perfectly willing to take the ad hoc solution we've got over nothing.
It is easy to do a Google search. It does not make your argument. If you want to use data to support your viewpoint, do the work yourself to find it and cite it properly. Heck, the first hit on that search quotes different percentages than you did, and points out wage disparities between the tug operators and the deckhands they employ.
Without corporations there would be no jobs, unions, etc.
There would be no unions, that's probably true. No jobs? Excuse me? There are plenty of sole proprietorships and partnerships that are not incorporated and still employ people. There would be a whole lot more of them if corporations didn't give people significant tax breaks. These days, if you do *any* work for yourself, you're best off incorporating (even me with my ~$1000 a year freelance income... though I haven't gotten around to it yet).
Is incorporation good for business? You betcha. Is it good for individuals? If they're the ones incorporating, yeah... but otherwise, the reviews are mixed. Does it mean more jobs? Quite probably, but it says nothing about the quality of those jobs. But not all jobs come from corporations, and just because a lot of them do doesn't mean that there isn't something seriously messed about the way the corporate world works. In the meantime, we cobbled together a balancing force called unions.
Are you ready to reform the *whole* f'ed up system? Don't pretend that only the second half has a problem.
Nice. So Wal*Mart is pushing its labor costs on to the taxpayers?
Am I missing something here?
No, you've got it right on the money.
Also keep in mind that their employees mostly can't afford the company health insurance, and qualify for state-sponsored health care (i.e. MediCal in California). So, more costs being pushed onto taxpayers.
I don't like corporations, I don't like the idea of corporations.
Yes maybe they were important at one time, but right now they are nothing more than organizations which try to perpetuate themselves.
I see too many exmaples where a corporation wants more, simply because a contract has expired. Is the company doing better? No. Are the workers more productive? No. Has the price of goods gone down? Yes, but not as much as the corporation is demanding.
Demand, demand, demand.
It's a two-way street. Unions are the corollary to corporations. Neither is the best solution, but getting rid of one without getting rid of the other is a bad idea.
BTW, for your tugboat dispute... what did they get in their last contract? How does it compare to the cost of living? Are they making any other concessions? There's a whole lot more context required to determine if the demand of 17.5% over three years is unreasonable. They could be making up for a lower rate of increase the last time the contract went through, or for giving up other benefits formerly available. Also, just because a comparable settlement was a lower rate of increase, how do their wages compare to other comparable industries? Can the 17.5% be an attempt to catch up?
They may very well be out of line, but you certainly haven't provided enough information to demonstrate that conclusively.
Does that mean we threaten to take down a company's network with a virus unless they unionize? That seems to be the way unions act when they don't get their way.
Er, excuse me? The Justice for Janitors campaign's actions included things like large marches through Downtown Los Angeles and Century City, which might have peripherally caused some road rage from blocked traffic, but were not violent. One of their more clever moves was "crashing" some swanky party at one of the buildings that contracted with non-union janitors, and having a unionized cleaning crew sweep through and clean the place up (as a demonstration of how well union labor can get the job done). That one made it into the semi-documentary "Bread and Roses." Check it out sometime... not violent, just embarassing for the building owner.
I've never heard of a union strike that did not involve some amount of violence.
Well, the five-month supermarket strike in Southern California did have one violent incident. Some idiot punks got drunk and attacked some of the picketers late one night. However, it's not clear that it was motivated by anything other than the fact that they were there.
Our five-week mechanics' strike at MTA here in Los Angeles had no violent incidents, in spite of the half a million people who couldn't get where they were going because the bus system shut down.
There is often a lot of animosity involved in strikes, but they're not necessarily violent things. Just because you've never heard of a strike that didn't involve violence doesn't say much... you probably haven't been involved in a great many strikes (most of us haven't).
If you're self-employed and do 8 hours work, you charge for 8 hours work. If you do 10, you charge for 10. If it takes you to 10 hours to do 8 hours of work, well, that's your fault.
If you're full-time employed and this month there's only 20 hours a week of work to do, you still get paid for your regularly scheduled time. If you're self-employed and this month you only have 20 hours a week of work to do, your salary gets cut in half and you have trouble paying the rent.
There are both advantages and disadvantages to self-employment. It's best if you can be in a household that mixes both types of incomes.
Why should the drone next to me get the same rate of pay just becasue he has the same time in as me?
Why should you make more than him just because your kids go to the same school as your boss, or because you worked out that the person making the decisions has a weakness for certain See's Candies?
Seniority is used because it is objective. I think it sucks, personally, but the fact is that it's difficult to objectify a lot of other measures. Education and experience, however, can be compared objectively, so you can offer pay differentials based on those factors.
This may work in non-skilled work (or minimal skill), but where the work requires special skill or talent, then individual contracts are better.
No wonder SAG, the DGA, and the WGA went under! Oh, wait....
It is in the occupations with the highest skill requirements or greatest talent needs that unions are most successful. This has always been the case. In large part, that is because those workers are more valuable to begin with; if they strike, the employer has an enormously difficult time replacing them.
Yes there can be hard times (as it now), but when the industry was booming there were NO talks about unions and the such.
Very astute point: when labor is a seller's market, people are less concerned about protecting their jobs. Let's have a +1 Obvious for that.
Yet the poeple who are skilled (and managed to locate the right companies, think non dot.com) are still pulling in top dollar.
Some are, some aren't. If you simply decide that any company that laid people off wasn't the "right company" you can make your own statistics. But frankly, I don't think that Turner Network Television Original Productions was something I should have thought would go under in the dot-com bust. Yet I lost my job when they closed the division. Plenty of people have lost their jobs as a result of the various scandals, bankruptcies, and misdeeds in big corporations. Lots of non-dot-com companies have cut back because the stock market went down a lot. The job market still sucks, and not just for no-talent hacks who only wanted to work in dot-coms.
People value is based in demand, availability, and skill. Unions break this and create artificial constraints on the law of supply and demand.
No, it's broken to begin with by the way the labor market is structured. There are relatively few buyers of labor, and there is always an oversupply. Even in "good times" when unemployment drops below 5% and the average time out of work is only three weeks. This means that the balance of power is pretty much always held by the employers.
There is a further item in the equation that you have left out altogether: cost of living. Demand, availability, and skill don't account for how much money people need to make in order to survive, or to maintain a certain standard of living. Your three variables treat labor exactly the same as any other resource, but this is not how it really works. After all, if oil prices drop, oil doesn't risk bankruptcy, homelessness, or starvation. So the other aspect of people value is how they value themselves, which is affected by their level of education, self-esteem, and experience, but is even more shaped by how much it costs for them to achieve a certain lifestyle. The role of unions is to allow people to exercise this element, and negotiate prices for labor based on what they consider their own worth to be.
Your theory that if we lower wages enough that somehow employers will employ the maximum amount of people, is absolutely baseless, has no history to it, and no evidence.
Well, actually...
It is true that lower wages increase number of people employed. In countries with very low standards of living and wages, jobs are accomplished by throwing lots of labor at them. In countries where workers make more money, employers are more inclined to make capital investments that will lower their labor costs. Generally, employers will make the trade-off between labor and capital based on the price of each; when labor gets more expensive, capital looks more attractive. That's why Wal*Mart is the largest employer in the country... they teach their employees how to apply for food stamps, and get by with paying them $7.50/hour on average (supposedly company-wide... including management and executives). If they had to pay more, they'd probably find ways to cut labor, because it would no longer be the cheapest way for them to get things done.
Which isn't to say that lower wages are somehow good for people because they create more jobs. Underemployment is, in many ways, worse than unemployment... you have to work, but you *still* can't make ends meet. When there's a growing disparity between what people can earn in a full-time job and how much it costs them to live, you wind up with all kinds of economic problems.
Yes it will, because a "living wage" is an arbitrary concept that has nothing to do with the value of the work.
If it's imposed by government regulation, this may be true.
If it's negotiated by a union, however, it has everything to do with the value of the work. Think about it: if consumers decide not to buy from a company because their pricing is unfair, is that about the value of the product? It is to them. Similarly, if workers refuse to work for a company or in a particular job if they think the wages are unfair, it also has to do with their perception of the value of their work (and the difference between their perception and that of the employer).
Your fallacy probably comes in not allowing workers to value their *own* means of production (labor). The value of work, in your eyes, is how much you can sell it for, and how much a company can make from it... not what the individual who has it thinks it is worth. Yet, companies set prices for their products based on their ideas of what those products are worth... why shouldn't individuals and organized labor do the same thing?
You have to remember the people who worked there were aganst the union,.... Then the store became a union shop per the demand of the union.
Er, not legal under US labor law.
Unions must be certified by the bargaining unit (the employees). If a union comes from outside to organize a shop, they (1) usually need someone inside to do the organizing, because it's only employees that have those rights (the union organizers who are not employees do not necessarily have the right to distribute literature, organize meetings, etc.); and (2) have to hold a certification vote where a majority of employees vote to bring in the union. There are cases where bargaining can become recognized without a successful certification vote, such as:
- The union presents signed union cards that represent a majority of the employees (proof that the employees *would* vote for the union). This is not usually done, though, because people want their anonymity protected until the union is certified.
- The shop is purchased by a company with an existing union contract, and the acquisition defaults to union status.
- An unsuccessful certification vote is held, but it is determined by the National Labor Relations Board that actions of the employer tainted the results, and further, that any re-vote would suffer from the same taint, such that it is not possible to have a fair election. The NLRB can then require the employer to recognize the union. (This is VERY rare; usually the NLRB requires the employer to remedy the actions that tainted the election, then holds a new election.)
- The employer can choose to recognize the union without a vote. This is very risky for the employer, though, since they could be accused of installing a company union, which is an unfair labor practice. Further, the employees have a right to hold a decertification election if they don't actually want to be recognized. (This is the only way the story you tell could have happened, but since the employees could have voted out the union, it seems very unlikely.)
So, um, where are you getting your "facts?" It sounds like you're getting a garbled version of the story from someone who was very much against this unionization campaign. Do you have a news article or something with more concrete information?
If you get fired because you won't do work that you wouldn't get paid for, sue.
If you're classified exempt from overtime, and your job duties haven't changed (they just take more than 40 hours per week to complete), then you *can* be fired for not performing your job duties by simply refusing to work overtime without pay.
That's what this story is about: who has protection from being required to work overtime? (It sort of sounds like "more people than used to" from the articles, but it's hard to say.)
Maybe it would be more palatable if you did not call it a union. Call is an "association" like the doctors (AMA) and the lawyers (ABA) do. It does not seem so low class when you call your union an association. After all the people in unions drive chevys people in associations drive BMWs.
And people in Guilds (Screen Actors' Guild, Directors' Guild of America, etc.) have someone else to drive the limo for them...
First, auto workers, airline pilots, factory labour, etc. tend to work for a small number of companies with high fixed costs. There are IT people in every company, making negotiations and organization difficult.
When my husband worked as an usher at a movie theater, he was a member of IATSE.... and there are a LOT of movie theaters.
More and more IT is being outsourced. Think about janitorial work: every building has people in there cleaning it. But do they work for the building? Sometimes... but often, they work for a cleaning company that is contracted by the building or individual offices within it. The Justice for Janitors campaign in Los Angeles was quite successful at pressuring building owners to contract with unionized janitorial companies. IT workers could easily be unionized under the same circumstances.
Second, IT is a very diverse group. Tech support, code monkeys, developers, systems analysts/architects, network admins, management that still does code reviews/coding, etc. It's difficult to lump those positions together, or draw distinctive lines between all of them.
Which is why there are no hard-and-fast rules about how the bargaining unit is defined. It depends a great deal on the particular business. In general, there are two main ways of distinguishing bargaining units: craft units and industry units. A craft unit groups workers with the same type of job, and sometimes crosses companies within one bargaining unit (think the entertainment industry, airline pilots, or construction). An industry unit groups workers who work in the same industry (and usually the same company) together, regardless of their particular job; this became popular with the unionization of auto workers.
When a union authorization vote happens, people decide who will be included in the bargaining unit. If the employer disagrees about who should be considered together, they can take it to the National Labor Relations Board for a judgement. There's quite a bit of case law from them already, mostly about what constitutes a supervisor, confidential employee, or other areas that are exempt from union protections.
Third, skill as a programmer depends a lot on natural talent, and there's a lot of ego involved. There are lots of really gifted individuals who would rightfully object to being grouped in with people who took a six month course at the local community college.
And again, think of the entertainment industry... where IATSE rules state that "costume designers" are not allowed to sew and "costumers" are not allowed to draw. A grip is a guy who carries heavy stuff. He's just as unionized as an Academy Award(r)-winning cinematographer, though they're in different bargaining units. In cases where job qualifications are very different, there's probably good reason to have different bargaining units, and so they would.
No. The last thing professionals need is a union interfering in their ability to negotiate their own employment terms.
Actually, most professionals suck at it (especially IT professionals) and don't much have the time for it anyway.
So it probably would be of significant benefit to a whole lot of folks. Maybe not you, but then, you could just avoid working in a union shop, or you could make sure you live in a right-to-work state. Unions are put in place by a majority vote of the employees, and can be removed exactly the same way... so if there's a union, it's because *most* employees think there should be. Sorry if that interferes with your own personal agenda, but it's not always your decision to make.
Overall, people in equivalent jobs earn more and have better benefits if they're represented by a union. If that's not true for you, congratulations... you're the exception.
Back on topic: of course there's going to be bad eggs in unions and some of them probably have got out of control. Guess what - there's employers like that as well.
More to the point, unionization is the corrollary to incorporation.
Corporations exist for one purpose: to protect and increase the profits of their shareholders. Unions exist for one purpose: to protect the jobs and compensation of their members. NEITHER has any direct interest in the consumer's environment; they only will improve things for consumers to the extent that such actions help achieve their primary goals.
Yet, somehow being profit-motivated is darn near sacred in this country, while unions are evil because they raise wages (and therefore cut into profit margins). I think there should be a better solution, but we haven't found it yet... so for the time being, I definitely support unions as a countermeasure to corporations. (Which doesn't mean I support every union's every action blindly; people make bad decisions. There are also corps that do *good* things, though.)
Ah, wait, I see where you got that $21k number... that's the *per capita* income (actually it's $21,587).
That's how much money is earned for every *person*... man, woman, child. NOT how much is earned on average by employed people. Besides which, the average isn't what determines when you're "making more than most Americans," the median does.
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By "voting for someone else", you aren't doing anything particularly ethical. You are simply throwing your vote away.
By voting for someone who I actually don't support becoming president, I'm throwing my vote away.
Think the republicans all like Bush? Not even. If everyone really voted only for people that they actually wanted to see in office, Bush wouldn't stand a chance.
I'm sick of people just voting "no." That's how we ended up with a president we didn't choose last time.
(not even a treaty, which is the 2nd highest)
Um, actually, treaties trump the Constitution. It's a clever loophole: Article VI lists them second, but Supreme Court precedent in Japan Line, Ltd., et al. v. County of Los Angeles et al. finds that the Supremacy Clause can actually trump states' rights, if something "prevents the United States from 'speaking with one voice' in regulating foreign trade." This gives Congress the right to enter into treaties that govern activities they are normally forbidden from legislating, and to compel all US citizens and states to comply with them. That's one of the things that makes the WTO so dangerous... if, say, Japan doesn't like California's stringent air quality laws, they can bring complaint against the US at the WTO and the US government has to ask California to back off.
So far, this hasn't been tried on any bill of rights issue that I know of... only in challenging state legislation. But the potential and precedent is there.
If a corporation was hiding information regarding its misdoings which were at best harmful to the public good but not technically illegal, and at worst amounted to downright fraud and deceit, would you care how that information was obtained?
Is it in the public's interest to know the identities of everyone who is HIV-positive? I mean, greater good and all...
It *is* important whether or not the information was obtained legally. These laws protect *everyone*, even the bad guys. If we stop respecting them because we don't like the person using them, they won't be nearly as strong when we need them for our side.
Doctor-patient privilege is no different than the attorney-client privilege.
I wouldn't agree with that statement at all. Sure, they serve similar roles, and perhaps have similar importance, though I tend to think that there's even still a difference between criminal and civil matters for attorney-client privilege. Criminal is more like doctor-patient, because you're talking about liberty, which ranks right after life. Pursuit of happiness might encompass civil matters, but that's a stretch.
But they're not exactly the same. In our society, the accepted norm is to need to see a doctor at least every so often. Many people can go their whole lives and never need a lawyer. When you do need a lawyer, the outcome of the incident generally becomes public record anyway, even if your private communications don't... that would be like if my perscription and surgery records were public, even if what I said to the doctor wasn't. The two privileges clearly occupy different legal and social roles.
The SC has ruled time and time again that when copyright and the 1st Amendment come into conflict that copyright wins. Their opinion is that Art 1 Sec 8 Cls 8 of the Consituion overrules the 1st Amend of the Constitution.
But the legal precedents for freedom of speech are not the same as those for freedom of the press. This is not the same kind of case as a free speech case.
However there's nothing to stop you from voting for the lesser of two evils at that level and going whichever way you want to at lower levels.
Sure there is: my own conscience.
"Anybody but Bush" is a very, very dangerous path to tread. I'll vote for Kerry if I think I wouldn't mind him as president, but if he pisses me off the way Gore did, a minor party will be getting my vote again.
Then again, I'm in California, so it's not like I'm going to lose the election for the Democrats (latest poll shows Bush's chances in California approaching those of Frosty the Snowman in Malibu). Still, it's the whole idea of voting against instead of voting for that leaves us with no good choices.
Now, if we could just get a decent voting system in place, that would be wonderful. Something like Instant Runoff Voting for example. Then there wouldn't be any of this fear about "throwing away your vote" and the whole peer-pressure thing. You could vote for who you *really* want as your first choice, and then choose your backup options if that guy doesn't make it.
A. They did release the photos.
In response to a Freedom of Information Act request. Not of their own initiative, and against their internal policies.
B. The photos were not of Iraqi war dead. They were of the Columbia space shuttle astronauts.
*Some of* the photos were, apparently a lot of them. But not all. (According to your source, anyway.)
And the photo that got a woman fired from her job as a military contractor in Kuwait was definitely of Iraqi war dead.
It was a point, son, you missed it.
;-) [signed: original poster]
Good catch. Thank you.
Admittedly it doesn't seem possible to cure the common cold because you'd have to cure it everywhere all at once which is presumably impossible, and we don't even really necessarily know where they come from in the first place.
Well, if the common cold were thought to be a major threat, the first thing we'd do is start being less casual about spreading it around. We'd quarantine people who come down with the sniffles, and burn their bedsheets afterward. That would be a good start at getting it under control.
But we're getting closer to knowing where it comes from, so look out viruses!
Just why is it that all these worms people write nowadays just seem so.. nice? I remember the days when 90% of viruses would at the very least format your hard disc.. now they just sit there.
Why is smallpox darn near extinct, but the common cold thrives?
If a worm formats your hard disk, it can't keep scanning for and infecting new machines. For one thing, now you know something is wrong, and are more inclined to fix it.
It's almost a shame, because one good formating worm might finally make people take them more seriously.
And there, you answer your own query. If worms did "real" damage (i.e. obviously interfered with the working of the computer), people would be much more cautious about contracting and spreading them. But how many of you freak out and quarantine yourself if you come in contact with a carrier of the common cold? Same thing...
Ugh, lotta text there, forgive me for not quoting since anything I quoted would either be ridiculously long or out of context...
Unions came out of local movements, by and large. Until the CIO started in on the big auto companies, unions were highly localized and generally craft-based. The AFL and the CIO battled bitterly over the shape unionism in America would take for a long time (before finally throwing in the towel and merging).
You're right that unions behave more and more like corporations. There's a reason for that: they are the mirrors of the corps they bargain with. The reason they exist is to balance corporations, so they end up acting a lot like them. It's not a good situation, but it's not one I have a ready solution for.
The apprenticeship situation you describe is a feature of only a few union structures, and always craft unions. The entertainment industry is the most heavily unionized industry that I know of. Generally speaking, industries where people move frequently between companies and jobs within the same profession and where high degrees of skill and talent are required are more unionized. Still, not even all entertainment industry unions have apprenticeship requirements. You don't have to apprentice to an actor for a while to become a SAG member, for example (though you do have to get certain kinds of credits under your belt).
The difference between the president representing less than the majority and union representation is the electoral college (and certain shenanigans in Florida). Unions are certified and decertified by a majority vote. If a majority of employees don't want union representation, or don't want *that* union representing them, they can call in the NLRB for a decertification vote and that's that. So there's a bit more to it than the simplistic picture you've painted.
I like the idea that we need better systems, but we need to start with better business systems. Unions are an ad hoc solution to an array of problems with the interaction between business and labor. There ought to be a better way to go about it, I agree... but darned if I know what it is. Worker cooperatives? Employee-ownership? Neither of these seem to work on any large scale. I'm still stumped as to how to balance power in the working world, so I'm perfectly willing to take the ad hoc solution we've got over nothing.
It is easy to substitute words. It does not make your argument.
Here is more Information.
It is easy to do a Google search. It does not make your argument. If you want to use data to support your viewpoint, do the work yourself to find it and cite it properly. Heck, the first hit on that search quotes different percentages than you did, and points out wage disparities between the tug operators and the deckhands they employ.
Without corporations there would be no jobs, unions, etc.
There would be no unions, that's probably true. No jobs? Excuse me? There are plenty of sole proprietorships and partnerships that are not incorporated and still employ people. There would be a whole lot more of them if corporations didn't give people significant tax breaks. These days, if you do *any* work for yourself, you're best off incorporating (even me with my ~$1000 a year freelance income... though I haven't gotten around to it yet).
Is incorporation good for business? You betcha. Is it good for individuals? If they're the ones incorporating, yeah... but otherwise, the reviews are mixed. Does it mean more jobs? Quite probably, but it says nothing about the quality of those jobs. But not all jobs come from corporations, and just because a lot of them do doesn't mean that there isn't something seriously messed about the way the corporate world works. In the meantime, we cobbled together a balancing force called unions.
Are you ready to reform the *whole* f'ed up system? Don't pretend that only the second half has a problem.
Nice. So Wal*Mart is pushing its labor costs on to the taxpayers?
Am I missing something here?
No, you've got it right on the money.
Also keep in mind that their employees mostly can't afford the company health insurance, and qualify for state-sponsored health care (i.e. MediCal in California). So, more costs being pushed onto taxpayers.
BTW, for your tugboat dispute... what did they get in their last contract? How does it compare to the cost of living? Are they making any other concessions? There's a whole lot more context required to determine if the demand of 17.5% over three years is unreasonable. They could be making up for a lower rate of increase the last time the contract went through, or for giving up other benefits formerly available. Also, just because a comparable settlement was a lower rate of increase, how do their wages compare to other comparable industries? Can the 17.5% be an attempt to catch up?
They may very well be out of line, but you certainly haven't provided enough information to demonstrate that conclusively.
Does that mean we threaten to take down a company's network with a virus unless they unionize? That seems to be the way unions act when they don't get their way.
Er, excuse me? The Justice for Janitors campaign's actions included things like large marches through Downtown Los Angeles and Century City, which might have peripherally caused some road rage from blocked traffic, but were not violent. One of their more clever moves was "crashing" some swanky party at one of the buildings that contracted with non-union janitors, and having a unionized cleaning crew sweep through and clean the place up (as a demonstration of how well union labor can get the job done). That one made it into the semi-documentary "Bread and Roses." Check it out sometime... not violent, just embarassing for the building owner.
I've never heard of a union strike that did not involve some amount of violence.
Well, the five-month supermarket strike in Southern California did have one violent incident. Some idiot punks got drunk and attacked some of the picketers late one night. However, it's not clear that it was motivated by anything other than the fact that they were there.
Our five-week mechanics' strike at MTA here in Los Angeles had no violent incidents, in spite of the half a million people who couldn't get where they were going because the bus system shut down.
There is often a lot of animosity involved in strikes, but they're not necessarily violent things. Just because you've never heard of a strike that didn't involve violence doesn't say much... you probably haven't been involved in a great many strikes (most of us haven't).
If you're self-employed and do 8 hours work, you charge for 8 hours work. If you do 10, you charge for 10. If it takes you to 10 hours to do 8 hours of work, well, that's your fault.
If you're full-time employed and this month there's only 20 hours a week of work to do, you still get paid for your regularly scheduled time. If you're self-employed and this month you only have 20 hours a week of work to do, your salary gets cut in half and you have trouble paying the rent.
There are both advantages and disadvantages to self-employment. It's best if you can be in a household that mixes both types of incomes.
Why should the drone next to me get the same rate of pay just becasue he has the same time in as me?
Why should you make more than him just because your kids go to the same school as your boss, or because you worked out that the person making the decisions has a weakness for certain See's Candies?
Seniority is used because it is objective. I think it sucks, personally, but the fact is that it's difficult to objectify a lot of other measures. Education and experience, however, can be compared objectively, so you can offer pay differentials based on those factors.
This may work in non-skilled work (or minimal skill), but where the work requires special skill or talent, then individual contracts are better.
No wonder SAG, the DGA, and the WGA went under! Oh, wait....
It is in the occupations with the highest skill requirements or greatest talent needs that unions are most successful. This has always been the case. In large part, that is because those workers are more valuable to begin with; if they strike, the employer has an enormously difficult time replacing them.
Yes there can be hard times (as it now), but when the industry was booming there were NO talks about unions and the such.
Very astute point: when labor is a seller's market, people are less concerned about protecting their jobs. Let's have a +1 Obvious for that.
Yet the poeple who are skilled (and managed to locate the right companies, think non dot.com) are still pulling in top dollar.
Some are, some aren't. If you simply decide that any company that laid people off wasn't the "right company" you can make your own statistics. But frankly, I don't think that Turner Network Television Original Productions was something I should have thought would go under in the dot-com bust. Yet I lost my job when they closed the division. Plenty of people have lost their jobs as a result of the various scandals, bankruptcies, and misdeeds in big corporations. Lots of non-dot-com companies have cut back because the stock market went down a lot. The job market still sucks, and not just for no-talent hacks who only wanted to work in dot-coms.
People value is based in demand, availability, and skill. Unions break this and create artificial constraints on the law of supply and demand.
No, it's broken to begin with by the way the labor market is structured. There are relatively few buyers of labor, and there is always an oversupply. Even in "good times" when unemployment drops below 5% and the average time out of work is only three weeks. This means that the balance of power is pretty much always held by the employers.
There is a further item in the equation that you have left out altogether: cost of living. Demand, availability, and skill don't account for how much money people need to make in order to survive, or to maintain a certain standard of living. Your three variables treat labor exactly the same as any other resource, but this is not how it really works. After all, if oil prices drop, oil doesn't risk bankruptcy, homelessness, or starvation. So the other aspect of people value is how they value themselves, which is affected by their level of education, self-esteem, and experience, but is even more shaped by how much it costs for them to achieve a certain lifestyle. The role of unions is to allow people to exercise this element, and negotiate prices for labor based on what they consider their own worth to be.
Your theory that if we lower wages enough that somehow employers will employ the maximum amount of people, is absolutely baseless, has no history to it, and no evidence.
Well, actually...
It is true that lower wages increase number of people employed. In countries with very low standards of living and wages, jobs are accomplished by throwing lots of labor at them. In countries where workers make more money, employers are more inclined to make capital investments that will lower their labor costs. Generally, employers will make the trade-off between labor and capital based on the price of each; when labor gets more expensive, capital looks more attractive. That's why Wal*Mart is the largest employer in the country... they teach their employees how to apply for food stamps, and get by with paying them $7.50/hour on average (supposedly company-wide... including management and executives). If they had to pay more, they'd probably find ways to cut labor, because it would no longer be the cheapest way for them to get things done.
Which isn't to say that lower wages are somehow good for people because they create more jobs. Underemployment is, in many ways, worse than unemployment... you have to work, but you *still* can't make ends meet. When there's a growing disparity between what people can earn in a full-time job and how much it costs them to live, you wind up with all kinds of economic problems.
Yes it will, because a "living wage" is an arbitrary concept that has nothing to do with the value of the work.
If it's imposed by government regulation, this may be true.
If it's negotiated by a union, however, it has everything to do with the value of the work. Think about it: if consumers decide not to buy from a company because their pricing is unfair, is that about the value of the product? It is to them. Similarly, if workers refuse to work for a company or in a particular job if they think the wages are unfair, it also has to do with their perception of the value of their work (and the difference between their perception and that of the employer).
Your fallacy probably comes in not allowing workers to value their *own* means of production (labor). The value of work, in your eyes, is how much you can sell it for, and how much a company can make from it... not what the individual who has it thinks it is worth. Yet, companies set prices for their products based on their ideas of what those products are worth... why shouldn't individuals and organized labor do the same thing?
You have to remember the people who worked there were aganst the union, .... Then the store became a union shop per the demand of the union.
Er, not legal under US labor law.
Unions must be certified by the bargaining unit (the employees). If a union comes from outside to organize a shop, they (1) usually need someone inside to do the organizing, because it's only employees that have those rights (the union organizers who are not employees do not necessarily have the right to distribute literature, organize meetings, etc.); and (2) have to hold a certification vote where a majority of employees vote to bring in the union. There are cases where bargaining can become recognized without a successful certification vote, such as:
- The union presents signed union cards that represent a majority of the employees (proof that the employees *would* vote for the union). This is not usually done, though, because people want their anonymity protected until the union is certified.
- The shop is purchased by a company with an existing union contract, and the acquisition defaults to union status.
- An unsuccessful certification vote is held, but it is determined by the National Labor Relations Board that actions of the employer tainted the results, and further, that any re-vote would suffer from the same taint, such that it is not possible to have a fair election. The NLRB can then require the employer to recognize the union. (This is VERY rare; usually the NLRB requires the employer to remedy the actions that tainted the election, then holds a new election.)
- The employer can choose to recognize the union without a vote. This is very risky for the employer, though, since they could be accused of installing a company union, which is an unfair labor practice. Further, the employees have a right to hold a decertification election if they don't actually want to be recognized. (This is the only way the story you tell could have happened, but since the employees could have voted out the union, it seems very unlikely.)
So, um, where are you getting your "facts?" It sounds like you're getting a garbled version of the story from someone who was very much against this unionization campaign. Do you have a news article or something with more concrete information?
If you get fired because you won't do work that you wouldn't get paid for, sue.
If you're classified exempt from overtime, and your job duties haven't changed (they just take more than 40 hours per week to complete), then you *can* be fired for not performing your job duties by simply refusing to work overtime without pay.
That's what this story is about: who has protection from being required to work overtime? (It sort of sounds like "more people than used to" from the articles, but it's hard to say.)
Maybe it would be more palatable if you did not call it a union. Call is an "association" like the doctors (AMA) and the lawyers (ABA) do. It does not seem so low class when you call your union an association. After all the people in unions drive chevys people in associations drive BMWs.
And people in Guilds (Screen Actors' Guild, Directors' Guild of America, etc.) have someone else to drive the limo for them...
First, auto workers, airline pilots, factory labour, etc. tend to work for a small number of companies with high fixed costs. There are IT people in every company, making negotiations and organization difficult.
When my husband worked as an usher at a movie theater, he was a member of IATSE.... and there are a LOT of movie theaters.
More and more IT is being outsourced. Think about janitorial work: every building has people in there cleaning it. But do they work for the building? Sometimes... but often, they work for a cleaning company that is contracted by the building or individual offices within it. The Justice for Janitors campaign in Los Angeles was quite successful at pressuring building owners to contract with unionized janitorial companies. IT workers could easily be unionized under the same circumstances.
Second, IT is a very diverse group. Tech support, code monkeys, developers, systems analysts/architects, network admins, management that still does code reviews/coding, etc. It's difficult to lump those positions together, or draw distinctive lines between all of them.
Which is why there are no hard-and-fast rules about how the bargaining unit is defined. It depends a great deal on the particular business. In general, there are two main ways of distinguishing bargaining units: craft units and industry units. A craft unit groups workers with the same type of job, and sometimes crosses companies within one bargaining unit (think the entertainment industry, airline pilots, or construction). An industry unit groups workers who work in the same industry (and usually the same company) together, regardless of their particular job; this became popular with the unionization of auto workers.
When a union authorization vote happens, people decide who will be included in the bargaining unit. If the employer disagrees about who should be considered together, they can take it to the National Labor Relations Board for a judgement. There's quite a bit of case law from them already, mostly about what constitutes a supervisor, confidential employee, or other areas that are exempt from union protections.
Third, skill as a programmer depends a lot on natural talent, and there's a lot of ego involved. There are lots of really gifted individuals who would rightfully object to being grouped in with people who took a six month course at the local community college.
And again, think of the entertainment industry... where IATSE rules state that "costume designers" are not allowed to sew and "costumers" are not allowed to draw. A grip is a guy who carries heavy stuff. He's just as unionized as an Academy Award(r)-winning cinematographer, though they're in different bargaining units. In cases where job qualifications are very different, there's probably good reason to have different bargaining units, and so they would.
No. The last thing professionals need is a union interfering in their ability to negotiate their own employment terms.
Actually, most professionals suck at it (especially IT professionals) and don't much have the time for it anyway.
So it probably would be of significant benefit to a whole lot of folks. Maybe not you, but then, you could just avoid working in a union shop, or you could make sure you live in a right-to-work state. Unions are put in place by a majority vote of the employees, and can be removed exactly the same way... so if there's a union, it's because *most* employees think there should be. Sorry if that interferes with your own personal agenda, but it's not always your decision to make.
Overall, people in equivalent jobs earn more and have better benefits if they're represented by a union. If that's not true for you, congratulations... you're the exception.
Back on topic: of course there's going to be bad eggs in unions and some of them probably have got out of control. Guess what - there's employers like that as well.
More to the point, unionization is the corrollary to incorporation.
Corporations exist for one purpose: to protect and increase the profits of their shareholders. Unions exist for one purpose: to protect the jobs and compensation of their members. NEITHER has any direct interest in the consumer's environment; they only will improve things for consumers to the extent that such actions help achieve their primary goals.
Yet, somehow being profit-motivated is darn near sacred in this country, while unions are evil because they raise wages (and therefore cut into profit margins). I think there should be a better solution, but we haven't found it yet... so for the time being, I definitely support unions as a countermeasure to corporations. (Which doesn't mean I support every union's every action blindly; people make bad decisions. There are also corps that do *good* things, though.)
Ah, wait, I see where you got that $21k number... that's the *per capita* income (actually it's $21,587).
That's how much money is earned for every *person*... man, woman, child. NOT how much is earned on average by employed people. Besides which, the average isn't what determines when you're "making more than most Americans," the median does.