[Lamplighter]

Originally Posted by lupin..the..3rd

NASCAR makes me LOL. Driving in circles? Only turning left? How dull.

Unions are responsible for the modern "amenities" that all workers enjoy today. Things you take for granted, like Five-day work weeks (Saturdays off), were originally Union ideas, as are many of the current worker protection laws.

That said, Unions are obsolete now, what with all the labor laws to protect employees these days. Workers comp, OSHA, Minimum wage, Non-discrimination laws, etc. 100 years ago, we didn't have any of these laws, and people depended on the Unions to provide these worker protections. But that's just not the case any more. IMO Unions don't serve any purpose but to (drastically) inflate the cost of labor. As an example, look at auto workers. The workers at non-union factories, (like the BMW and Mercedes factories here in the US) make more money and have better benefits than their Big-3 Union counterparts. The automakers who employ non-union workers also enjoy lower operating expenses. Lower costs and better employee compensation = a win-win situation. I'll never work for a union - I like the freedom to negotiate my own salary and benefits package, and like the freedom of "at will" employment.

So everything is right in lupin's world, and won't change.
Management is beneficent and will never take advantage of it's labor force,
and certainly would never coerce or threaten it's work force.

And even if the overpaid automobile workers have to take cuts,
it will never affect other industries, and won't affect me.
I'll never work for a union.
My boss loves me !

Lupin's world-view has now been confirmed by the NYTimes

Unions Yield on Wage Scales to Preserve Jobs
By LOUIS UCHITELLE
Published: November 19, 2010

Organized labor appears to be losing an important battle in the Great Recession.
Even at manufacturing companies that are profitable,
union workers are reluctantly agreeing to tiered contracts that create two levels of pay.

The arrangement was a fairly common means of shrinking labor costs in the recession of the early 1980s.
At the end of the contracts, however, wages generally snapped back up to a single tier.
At G.M., Chrysler, Delphi and Caterpillar, the wages will not be snapping back.

Nor will that happen for workers at three big manufacturers here in southeastern Wisconsin
— where 15 percent of the work force is in manufacturing, a bigger proportion than any other state.
These employers — Harley-Davidson, Mercury Marine and Kohler — have all but succeeded
in the last year or so in erecting two-tier systems that could last well into a recovery.

His [Harley-Davidson] union recently accepted a new contract that freezes wages for existing workers
for most of its seven years, lowers pay for new hires, dilutes benefits
and brings temporary workers to the assembly line at even lower pay and no benefits
whenever there is a rise in demand for Harley’s roaring bikes.

Increasing the pressure, Harley-Davidson and Mercury Marine, a unit of the Brunswick Corporation,
publicly declared that they would move factory operations to lower-cost American cities
— Stillwater, Okla., for example, or Kansas City, Mo. —
if the unions failed to accept the concessions set forth in remarkably similar contracts.