This never ends. Union guys will fight to the death for justifying themselves and non Union guys do the same trying to point out what's bad.

What's hard to understand on how the union works?? Seems pretty straight forward to me.

What would happen if everyone working person in America was paid and have the same benefits of the UAW and I mean everyone?? I've seen people do the simplest mind numbing job and still get $24-27$ hour with the UAW. So what would happen?

I think that Unions serve a purpose but over inflated wages should not be one of them. I have met a few people in the UAW that have admitted that they are paid too much but are not going to complain about it.

Edit: My over inflated wage comment is directed to the UAW and no other Unions cause I have absolutely no knowledge of them since they are not in my field of work.

 

Your right, the Union has done alot for it's employee's in the past. These are no longer the days of slave labor like working enviornments. We now have organizations that ensure employee's are treated fairly and the business is safe for those working in it. The only purpose the union currently serves it to overinflate the salaries of it's members to the point it drains the parent company. Unions are a modern day parasite that will feed from the host until nothing is left

 

Not quite so---at least in education. Talk to those who teach in charter schools that have no or very little in the way of procedural protection. While one may think that organizations are in place, in reality, they do not exist for those in the field of education---at least for the charter schools here in the Buckeye state.

Where I am employed, in a public school system, we know what our receipts will be and what our revenue will be---and we can only ask for so much in terms of a pay raise... Recently, our union and the Board of Ed. entered into "interest-based" negotiations...much less antagonistic and much quicker results. How can we be a parasite when we know in advance how much (or how little) tax revenue will be coming in to fund our school system? We may change a little in terms of re-allocating where the money may go, but since we can only take in so much money, how can we ask for pay raises that are just not there? We normally get the status quo here in Northern Ohio---2% -3% at the most.

Tim C.

 

My wife is a teacher, and by and large, the only thing the Union does is look out for the interests of teachers, not for the interests of education as a whole. They spend an inordinate amount of time lobbying against things that would hold teachers accountable for their performance, and against things that would give society as a whole a choice (aka school vouchers) beyond the baseline of education that is provided by the public system.

And regarding class size, while I will concede that reduced class sizes can have a positive impact on education, I suspect the real reason the teacher's union lobby's for it is that it makes the teacher's job easier!

As someone with many years of experience, and who professes to enjoy the challenge of the job, you should be decidedly anti-union, and decidedly for a system that pays on performance, and not on seniority!

 

Actually, it's worse. When Dell computer transferred their customer service to India, they went from paying their AMERICAN employees approx. 32,000/year to paying their INDIAN employees 3400/year. Yep, that's 10% of what they were paying. America cannot compete with that. First manufacturing, then customer service. Soon these job cuts will begin affecting almost every American. There aren't too many jobs that can't be outsourced. Sit back and watch.

 

I would tend to agree with you on the differences of the roles the Union plays between manufacturing and teaching. On one hand you have unskilled labor making 2x the market value, only to turn around and demand more. Your situation deals with educated, devoted teachers who have somehow got the short stick for far too long. How this country still turns a blind eye to the poor pay of teachers is far beyond me. You need to pick up whatever Union leads the automotive industry hire's... Soon yall would be making 100k and have 6 months off and an assistant

 

Teaching, in many ways, is like coaching---you can only do so much with what you have on the team...as the saying goes, "You can't win the Kentucky derby with plow horses." I admittedly work very hard to get the kids in my classes to be successful---but part of that success is entirely up to them....Performance based on students' effort---that is a bet that I am not willing to make. Not all students, even when the teacher works hard and is demanding (not only of the students but also of oneself), will perform at the necessary levels. You can demand a great deal out of themn (as I do) but part of that performance comes not from the teacher, but from them. Idealistically, it is possible---realistically, no deal.

Tim C.

 

[QUOTE=scott1981]I would tend to agree with you on the differences of the roles the Union plays between manufacturing and teaching. On one hand you have unskilled labor making 2x the market value, only to turn around and demand more. Your situation deals with educated, devoted teachers who have somehow got the short stick for far too long. How this country still turns a blind eye to the poor pay of teachers is far beyond me. You need to pick up whatever Union leads the automotive industry hire's... Soon yall would be making 100k and have 6 months off and an assistant:lolQUOTE]


I must be in the wrong union! Darnit! I need to get into that one!

 

It is now starting to affect other areas of employment. MY brother in law is an IT specialist and the company he works for, formerly GE Reinsurance, got bought by a Swedish company, I think, and are trying to replace and/or farm out the IT work to a company in India.
People say autoworkers are paid too much, blah, blah, blah, but no matter what line of work you are in you can be replaced by someone somewhere who will do it for less, or A LOT less. You might think your job is safe, but with technology today there are ways to replace almost any worker with someone overseas. Then you are considered to be overpaid.

 

I would agree with that, although I would be more inclined to shift the onus onto the parents. From watching my wife teach over the years, I would draw an extremely strong correlation between excellence in classroom academics and excellence on the part of parents -- mainly in terms of their expectations for their child (behavior, accountability, etc.).

Lousy parents (discipline is someone else's job, not mine / my adorable spawn could not have done that, it must be someone else's fault) generally produce lousy children who perpetuate the cycle indefinitely.

I went to private schools (Catholic) until high school growing up back in Minnesota and was flabbergasted at what kind of behavior students got away with in the public schools. Had I pulled a fraction of that mularkey in the Catholic schools, the teacher would have beat me to within an inch of my life in the hallway, and my parents would have been waiting at home with a similar dose of medicine for me that evening.

 

Hey, anti-unionists, try this. It's 1998, times are great and you're handed an application for one of THE best paying jobs in the city, straight out of high school no less. What would you do? Upon getting hired, they say you WILL be joining a union, do you say, nah, I don't like unions. Now you make lots of money, the company is too, everyone's happy, do you see where this is going? What kind of retard do you think I am to turn down this? People with great educations didn't pass this up either.

Now, things are sh+t and we are asked to make concessions just as we were asked for increases. So be it. A job is better than NO job. I don't understand where everyone gets off thinking the unions are so militant. If anything, they fight the gov't WITH THE SUPPORT OF THE COMPANY. Trust me, I am unionized, have been more than not and seen managements point of view (often the same as the unions). This crap that's going on now is quietly bieng adjusted between the unions and companies, but mostly has to do globally in country to country imports/exports.

The part that is not good is the union's represent lazy, cow like people who are a waste of space no matter if it's a union place or not. I can and do, but union steward's and management can't really tell them they are lazy pieces of sh+t. Our local union's are very efficient, with a good relationship with the companies as well as most the community. Trust me, non-unionized shops around here get away with alot of crap, stuff the Ministry of Labor would love to know about. If you had a safety question, who you gonna ask, your foreman who's getting his *** chewed already for time wasted? Think of the consequences in a little scenario as that.

Trust me, blaming the union is the easy way out of a bigger problem. Foreign competition making it hard to compete? Make it harder for them to sell here. Keep your thin, lead filled crap where it came from a-holes.

 

I rest my case, you don't know how a modern union works.

But that's OK. If we all had the same opinions this would be one boring place.

 

A moderator can close this thread now, this sums things up perfectly. Nothing else needs to be said, everyone can go home now.

 

I would say hell yea, when do I start if I was given the opportunity. I don't hold against anyone for being in a union. You might as well get paid good if you have the chance.

Your right about the select lazy asses that take advantage. In my work there are times I just want to say " quit your damn bitching, your getting paid more than your worth already just do the damn job". But I can't say a word cause there is an *** chewing coming my way if I do. Or if I'm at a customer I might cost my company business if I don't go with the flow. It is the smallest things that come up, like a line worker saying I can't grab the part out of the container that way cause it is not comfortable, I need it positioned this way instead, I mean come on it is usually a light part like a fog light bezel, give me a freakin break.

At certain ter1 parts supplies the engineers are loosing there jobs and getting outsourced over the border or overseas. So no one is save from jobs get outsourced. It's just that the engineers are not part of the Union so they are SOL.

 

Drawing from memory I believe you are in a union. My comments mainly deal with the unions of the automotive industry. They have dug a grave slowly and now it's time to lay in it. I don't have sympathy for those who made, what they knew was, well over market value for their position. They had to know this day would come, hope they saved some cash