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To: Mr. Whist who wrote (85917)	11/23/2000 11:52:50 AM
From: briskit	Respond to of 769667

flapster, what union was that you belong to? This wasn't another Gore-style dog getting cheaper prescription drug personal story was it? You know descamisados, right, who Eva Peron fought for?

To: Mr. Whist who wrote (85917)	11/23/2000 12:32:14 PM
From: Shadow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

Flap, A friend of mine worked in a union machineshop in the late 70's. There was one guy in the shop whose job was to fill the automatic oilers on the machine tools. It takes about 5 minutes to do and you could train an ape to do it.(Only lubeman is allowed to oil a machine) He's only got an hour a day of work to do. The rest of the time he hung out in the lunch room. He would also intentionally not oil machines so the tanks would go dry during the night shift or a Saturday shift. When the tank goes dry, the machine shuts down. Now you've got a quarter million dollar machine down and a $25/hour machinist twiddling his thumbs waiting for lubeman to come to work and pour a quart of oil in a little tank. Sometimes it took him a couple of hours to get there. Sometimes he didn't get there at all. If lubeman came in offshift to fill a machine he got 4 hours pay (time and a half) for 5 minutes work. He was paid $16 per hour (in the late 70's that was huge money) and usually managed to milk it for 40 hours straight time and 20 to 25 hours of overtime a week. The union rep fought tooth and nail to preserve this guys rights to abuse his employer. The skilled labor was equally abusive. Needless to say this company is no longer in business.

To: Mr. Whist who wrote (85917)	11/23/2000 3:48:11 PM
From: TH	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

You are so mistaken regarding unions. I have lots of experience with lots of different unions. I used to work for a large agency that worked with 28 independent companies. One of the companies had a very large contract and before the union had the highest quality ranking of ALL the competition we faced in that market segment, including the customer's own in-house organization. Within 18 months, and keep in mind producing the same mature product exactly, they moved to third from the bottom of the list. From 1st to 15th. Because our product was a structural product that was utilized at an early stage into our customers end-product production process, this created huge costs, of which we were charged back a percentage. I was sent in to fix this problem and after a review it was found that every single concern was directly related to human operator error. These were the exact same workers who had produced exception product for the previous 4 years. The following year we lost the replacement contract which was valued at around 280 million. This is only one story about unions. I have lots of them. All, are bad. One last note, this same company popped on CNN twice in one year. Once because an unhappy union worker (yes confirmed by an arrest by the local police) elected to release Mace into the central ventilation unit. This made dozens of workers and managers sick. A few months later, a highly advanced piece of capital equipment (with the nearest replacement over 10,000 miles away) suddenly caught on fire. Sealed hot oil lines that in over 10 years of operation in Japan and the USA had never caught on fire. No one was ever caught, but if was quite odd that negotiations with the union were at a standstill, as the workers wanted another increase of double digits. Unions kill the goose. HAGO TH