"I know that this view doesn't mesh with your world view, but perhaps you could defend the unions by providing a couple of facts about what you see the good that they perform today in our globalized competitive economy."
Just passing by this thread as I'm so pissed off by Obama today... and I was attracted by your post, you really do have a flair for the pompous; your question fairly screams darkly ignorant so maybe I can shine some light here.
When I worked on the assembly line at Ford, I was doing windshields, soaping up the edges so I could sheath it in rubber. Hardest job I ever had, lost 5lbs a day just in sweat.
Anyway one day I cut a deep vein in my wrist on the edge and started bleeding pretty good; I shouted over to a foreman (I wasn't allowed to leave my workspace of about 6 square feet) and when he came over I told him I had to go see the nurse and get bandaged up.
"You leave you're fired, don't come back; your break's in 15 minutes, go then.", he said. This foreman was Cuban and used to rail at me (while I was working my ass off) because he hated Jews, because Marx was Jewish, all Jews were Communists, and he'd lost his country as a result of the Jews. Or something...
But I was still bleeding at a pretty good clip, blood everywhere, so I went to the nurse and got bandaged up. Then I went to the UAW office, got a shop steward, and went back to my station. I stood there while the foreman and the shop steward started screaming at each other, maybe 3 minutes. Then the foreman turned on his heel and stalked off, the shop steward turned to me and screamed, "Get back to work!" (Factories tend to be really loud places). So there you have it: actual life in action, and with a happy ending, more or less.
Unions may not be the absolute greatest entities in existence, but often they're all you have as a worker, otherwise workers are virtually powerless.
You should know that. |
