01 October 2024

What Good Has Come From Them

Extortion and greed are all I see when I hear "union" and I fail to see any benefit to having them around.

As a customer of the places they extort, all I see is increased cost and decreased quality.

USW 8888 got a large raise and a 5-year contract in 2022; now we're hearing that they didn't do a significant amount of welding correctly.

Who won there?

The people who unload the ships are on strike on the east coast.

Who, besides themselves, is this helping?

They want MORE and can extort the entire nation to get it.

They're fucking everyone else.

Then their leadership donates to the Dems and...

Just not seeing the upside to unions for anyone not actually in one.

Triple this for anyone in a public employee union like teachers and cops.  Nowhere is the corrosive effect of union membership more visible.

5 comments:

  1. I can _almost_ tolerate unions that actively train and certify their members to be interchangeable cogs in the geartrain of our world, like the electricians (IBEW) and earthmoving equipment operators (IUOE), otherwise, I agree wholeheartedly with you.
    Over 50 years ago, mom was forced to pay "collective bargaining fees" to the teacher's union she refused to join (because of her father's experiences with the unions as a metalurgist in the steel mills in the 50's, where some years the union was on strike over 100 days, enough that he kept a cot and extra clothes in his trunk at all times, just in case). Upon finishing college, I interviewed several places that had unions and asked the interviewers how the union would respond if I grabbed tools and was actively participating to investigate and resolve a problem... their lack of response or shocked look always meant no further contact about the job. The idea that I could be trusted to design something but could not be trusted to troubleshoot their implementation of that design quite frankly irked me!
    Mike the EE

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The UAW ran the shop where I worked designing vending machines.

      It took 15 minutes to train me to make cabinets when they walked out "sick" when making a point about their contract. The 10 of us in engineering and 15 secretaries replaced 300 union workers and we managed to meet that day's quota.

      To me that said there were, at least, 275 too many UAW workers in the plant.

      Delete
  2. At Chicago trade shows, vendors are prohibited from plugging in their own equipment to a power outlet - requires union person to do so.

    ReplyDelete
  3. First of all, I'm curious as to your opinion of the Z-Man's take on the strike: https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=32776
    I think that he makes some good points, but I don't know enough about the shipping industry to make educated comments.

    Secondly, I'm reminded about the evil of governmental employee unions, which even FDR thought was a bad idea. The darling of some "conservatives", JFK, was the one who issued an executive order allowing them, as well as a lot of other liberal ideas.

    I would love to see a re-elected President Trump issue an executive order repealing that foolish idea, but I don't expect anything good coming from him.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I've seen a diagram of all the steps you have to go through to fire a tenured teacher in NYC, thanks to the unions, and frankly, it'd be easier and cheaper to hire a hit man. Unions protect the bad workers from the consequences of their bad work.

    ReplyDelete

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