These agreements spanned fifty years? That sounds pretty extraordinary. I'm surprised a company can actually bind future management and shareholders for such a span of time. And get away with it.
You bring up flippant accusation of spurious violence. I refute them. Now it's about good and bad guys? All I see is you trying to paint them as black as you can with anything, never mind the truth value of your claims.
Liquid funds seized and divided by creditors. Property auctioned, profits divided by creditors. Deals and debts made without intention of or capability for paying are paid as far as they can be.
They were making tying themselves to obligations they cannot fulfill? Then fraud.
Some kids vandalised the girls bathroom at the school yesterday, but without proof I'm not blaming the Construction Union.
You put the Girls Bathrooms in out of the way mechanical plant rooms that are not (easily) accessible to many of the buildings users?
The other side of the debate goes without saying. It's obvious. Of course corporations are evil and underhanded. My point is that unions are no better and don't qualify for greater rights or sympathy than their management counterparts.
Consumers don't organize generally, but obviously, a buyers' club is an organization of buyers. It's not typical, but there it is.
Of course not, but it's just another point in my favor. All workers are consumers. Not all consumers are workers. Thus, there are more consumers than workers. From a utilitarian perspective, lower prices are better than higher wages for workers. And of course, workers might get a lower wage, but their money goes farther too. High wages that result from essentially forced contract negotiations are essentially subsidies from the general consumer to unionized workers. Subsidies never make economic sense for the production of normal goods.
Then again, neither is judging the European unions by the American attitudes. Still, your point is a valid one.
I don't think it's an American attitude to suppose that unions, no matter where they are, engage in unfair, coercive and/or illegal behavior. Europe is populated by human beings just like America, and just like in America, European human beings do nasty and vicious things if they can get away with it, whether they're members of corporate management or union organizers. No one ever said that because unions can be bad, corporations must necessarily be good. That is an extra layer you're throwing on all by yourself. If there's a problematic difference, it's that the general public sympathizes more with workers even when they're just as selfish and greedy as corporate management.
A huge part of the union effort here is about safety. That workers should not have to compete in who can do the job with the minimal ammount spent on safety. Meanwhile companies preffer to spend as little as possible on safety
Why not? The choice that many workers face is not "safe job" or "unsafe job". It's "some job" or "no job". The more that management spends on each of its workers, the fewer workers it can hire. Is it fair to bar workers who are willing to take more risks from competing for a job? Generally, these workers are the poorest and least experienced. The rise in unemployment that necessarily follows higher labor costs hurts them the most. Don't you care about the poor?
It's not their demands that are nasty and vicious. It's their methods: destruction of private property, threats against management, intimidation of replacement workers, etc.
Tell that to the big 3 "hey guys. We know you're not selling more cars but if you had more money you would employ more people right?"
Those events are as isolated on the union side as they are on the company side.
Well, it sure isn't the attitude in here. If it isn't American, it's just yours, and that doesn't make it any more commonly accepted.
Maybe the deal is they can't get away with it in here. Whatever the reason, you're calling the model student of the class a bully here.
I didn't see you throw any baseless accusations at the direction of the management, so I figured that was your way of choosing the least of the two evils at least.
Never heard of one of those in the last 60 years in here, and before that most of those turned out to be made up to garner support for employer organised strike-breaker cartels.
No, you don't understand. You should read the book.
It's incredibly atypical. And I don't think there's a widespread car buyers club - if we want to be topical.
I would be surprised to find that the automakers do not coordinate their negotiations with the unions. But even if they don't, that has nothing to do with the fact that workers need to organize in order bargain with a particular company. Just because one union organizes on a larger scale than the corresponding companies do doesn't mean that no workers should be allowed to organize at all. Plus, there's that whole free association thing. American workers organizing is a right.
I wonder where those consumers who aren't workers get their financial support. Could it be the workers? I'm afraid that point in your favor is negative. Lower prices aren't better than higher wages, that's absurd. What workers need is to be able to live on what they earn, regardless of how large the numbers are.
Probably, but how about some supporting evidence? What does an entry-level union worker make, and what does it take to support a family of 4?
You asked for one example, and he gave it. Don't pretend that one example is irrelevant now that he has given one.
---------------EDIT: end wildberry, begin aj --------------------
That hardly qualifies as refuting. And I'm not even making the same argument as Tanooki.
Of course. My main point is not that unions are wrong or bad (relative to management). My point is that there is no reason to tip the scales in their favor with Collective Bargaining. Collective Bargaining does more than guarantee the right of worker's to organize. Read some of my other posts about what Collective Bargaining actually is.
Don't tell me you buy into the widely discredited labor theory of value. You might as well be arguing that God created a flat earth 6000 years ago.
The point is debatable (I'm right, BTW), but it certainly isn't absurd. Wages and prices are clearly two sides of the same coin. A lower wage is not a bad thing if prices are also proportionately low. Since workers are not the only consumers of the products they help make, more people are affected by high prices than low wages. Unions that have the power to legally coerce above-market wages do so at the expense of everyone who buys the products sold by that employer. You have the typical Leftist soft spot for workers, but if you do the math, unions with coercive power do more harm than good (and just to avoid the inevitable strawman I mean misunderstanding, notice that I am not against unions per se, but rather the coercive power granted them through Collective Bargaining- in the legal sense).
It's been given already in this very thread, and you can use Google as well as the next guy, but here you go anyway.
In many cases the person doing the work might not be aware of the danger that they are in, either through lack of skills/training or not being in possession of all the facts.
Again - for the large part American Unions tend to behave very differently to European Unions. This sort of behavior is less common in Europe (though the French unions are pretty extreme sometimes).
He gave me an irrelevant example in the sense of no conviction. I'm sure dead bodies in woods would be really good to be blamed on the Unions as well, but I'm sure he could've done better if the vicious stuff was really their bread and butter.
If you're talking to AJ, why are you quoting me?
onder: Well - I don't have any photographic evidence that it was animal rights activists who beat the **** out of a Huntington Life Sciences exec outside his home either, but I think it's a fair guess.
Yes, but just for that particular reason I would've expected you to produce more clear-cut cases in stead of one where the unions are the prime suspect.
As far as I can tell, he's trying to say that they shouldn't be able to prevent those willing to work in those hazardous climes from doing so. If I read him right, "they" in addition to workers applies to legislators as well.