PM Series: Question 22

[TNF]

Disagree/Non-Critical

People who don't work eventually get fired. It's gravity in the labor market. Unions can try to fight it with labor laws and shareholder intimidation, but their jobs will get sent out-of-state or overseas, and automation will take more jobs. Unions are supposed to be providing a valuable service to the company and to the employees. Strike has zero value-added to anyone in the long run.

Unions are not supposed to provide a service to employers. The point of a union is to act as the representative of the worker and as an intractable enemy of the employer in every possible instance, because the union is supposed to seek higher wages, better benefits, and better working conditions for its members. That's what a union is. Unions that are buddy-buddy with the employer might as well be company unions (like the UAW has basically become, at this point) because they don't represent the people who pay dues to them and elect their leadership.

I selected 'agree / critical', because the right to strike should be inviolable, no matter what industry it is in and no matter who goes out on the picket line. Scabbing should be banned and companies should be forced into a position by the workers whereby they have to accede to their demands. If they don't, or if they try to break the strike or the union, the workers should be able to seize control of the company and run it themselves.

[TNF]

Unions are not supposed to provide a service to employers. The point of a union is to act as the representative of the worker and as an intractable enemy of the employer in every possible instance, because the union is supposed to seek higher wages, better benefits, and better working conditions for its members. That's what a union is. Unions that are buddy-buddy with the employer might as well be company unions (like the UAW has basically become, at this point) because they don't represent the people who pay dues to them and elect their leadership.

It's comforting to know, especially for all of those who've lost their manufacturing jobs, that you are dedicated to the moral purity of the labor movement, regardless of the outcomes achieved.

It's comforting to know that you continue to be a vapid idiot with no conception of what working is actually like in the real world. If a union bends over backwards for the boss, it might as well not be there, because it's betraying the workers who pay it dues. End of story. The fact that manufacturing jobs have moved overseas has less to do with the fact that unions acted antagonistically vis a vie their employers in the period in which they were strongest (in fact, with few exceptions, the union movement in the United States was always more conservative than its European or Japanese counterparts, and thus was a lot more willing to work with their employers, partly as a result of the purge of the labor movement of communists and other radicals in the late 1940s and early 1950s) and more to do with the fact that employers don't like paying high wages and would rather leave the country than treat their employees like human beings.

I don't think they should be able to move capital out of the country, personally. If you want to relocate production elsewhere, you should have every bit of your productive capacity here at home liquidated and given to your workforce and given them a shot at running it, while you should have to start from scratch wherever it is you decide to move. And of course, if you relocate, you should face every kind of nuisance regulation in the book in order to get that product back to the United States. If you turn your back on our workers, we should turn our back on you, and discriminate against your products, deny you federal contracts, freeze your assets, etc.