• Americans support labor unions: No. Labor Unions have just about killed manufacturing in this country. They do not make any sense from the stand point of globalization in that wages are too high to make products be competatively priced. Those operations still in the US have moved to technology such as robots to do the work cheaper anyway. They do very little to keep the jobs they are trying to protect in the long run.

From http://ayonae.com/america-right-of-center-politically-t11477.html

This could be an interesting topic so I split it off of the other thread to not bog it down.

Without a labor union, look at what Wal-Mart has become. Is a lack of US manufacturing any better than a lack of non-Wal-Mart stores? This past weekend Linens and Things went out of business, and all their employees are going to lose their jobs as soon as they liquidize all their merchandise, namely because Wal-Mart has all of the same stuff in their stores yet doesn't pay their employees health care or a decent wage. So since Wal-Mart saves their money on healt care and employee wages, they can pass half of that savings on to you - and the rest to their stockholders and the PR firms working around the clock to make you forget how shitty they treat their employees. They've grown and grown, and show no sign of stopping (I've quoted in numerous places they sell over 90% of all of the DVDs and CDs in this country). So now all of the employees that had a decent wage, had health benefits, etc ... don't. And soon the tax payers will have to pay for their health care and their welfare and so forth, so Wal-Mart's stock holders can get their dividends.

There is a huge bracket of un/under educated jobs in meat packing plants, grocery stores, and retail chains where their employers would pay their employees minimum wages without benefits if there wasn't collective bargaining. That was the reason unions began to exist in the first place.

Giant-Carlisle (aka Giant Foods) is a union shop that pays pretty shitty compared to a job requiring some education, but their rate is better than the average grocery store and has benefits for full time employees. The unionization in the grocery stores hasn't closed the chains down - so its obviously a model that can work in the US.

And then, my father is a chemist for General Electric. His company has outsourced nearly 80% of their research and development in the past 10 years. When I was a child he was traveling to Beaumont, Texas and Boston, Mass to check on plants - now he flies to China and India. Even if US unions volunteered to work for half of minimum wage, it would STILL be cheaper to produce goods in China and India. You can't beat someone willing to work for $2/hour, and you can't blame that on the Unions.

I'm not really pro-union, its very situational. I can see the virtues, and in my line of work (film and television) I can see the negatives. To produce a union feature film it probably costs twice as much as it would to hire non-union crew because when I walk on a film set I'm not allowed to plug in a standard extension cord ... that's the electrical department. And half of these grips / gaffers spend half of the day sitting on their asses but there is a minimum number of people required per light. Its excessive, but the unions basically have the studios by the balls so there's nothing they can do. When it boils down to it, if the people can't go out and find a better job because they are too poor / uneducated (yes, these both can be remedied - but not everyone is so lucky or even inclined) and its going to eventually fall on my tax dollars to pay for them, I'd rather their companies foot the bill.

Someone said in the thread earlier that Unions have their place but they can go to extremes.

While you can't pin 100% of our automotive companies woes on Unions ( I think most goes to 50 year old business model "build 30,000 red trucks and then try to sell them!!"). You can certainly find fault with paying Joe NotAPlumber 25 bucks a hour to install ashtrays.

I belong to a rather large union myself, AFGE, but even I think they are often abusive of their powers.

Well, I look at unions as having the capacity for both good and bad.

Prior to the Postal Service strike in the early 70's, letter carriers were in many cases having to collect food stamps to supplement their salaries and keep food on the table. Working conditions and hours were of a similarity to what we now condemn other countries for requiring of their workers. We now have a fairly strong union that negotiates our contracts, and that also sometimes means doing things that piss us off to no end as well as holding fast to keeping our salaries and benefits strong in relation to the work we do.

But, along the lines of doing things to piss us off, all unions I think will at times push too far and not have a long term vision of what their actions today might yield down the road.

There is a terrible spiral those at the top wanting more profit so charging more for products, and those who assemble those products wanting to have both a share of that profit as well as a salary that allows them to also afford to buy the product; add in health insurance and it gets crazy.

But, right now I am really in a pissed mode as far as unions go, because I have asked over and over and over to not receive these *frakking* phone calls/messages on my machine on who to vote for; my vote is my private life so stay the fuck out of it, please.

Whether or not you like unions for other reasons, the jury of real world history has come down that unionization made no difference at all in off-shoring of jobs in any given industry. Naturally trade barons are lying bastards and will say anything to justify their policies, but the only jobs that have generally stayed here are the ones that are locality sensitive -- it doesn't matter in the outsourcing sense if salesmen or plumbers unionize because they have to be where the work is.

Case in point:

Boeing's machinist strike. They went on strike even after being offered huge concessions by Boeing because they were uncertain about the future of their jobs due to outsourcing. Way to endear yourself to convincing a company that represents one of the few last large exporters of manufactured goods we have left. One that very well could just pack up the whole plant and outsource everything because they already have the capacity to do just that. It makes me wonder if the powers that be would be better just selling Boeing to Airbus or Catapiller to Hitachi or sell all big three US car makers to Toyota now instead of waiting until bankruptcy.

Its all about global competition. The rest of the world doesn't give a rats ass about fair labor or trade policies. They don't mind working people to death for a penny an hour 100 hours a week. If I owned a factory that was kind enough to base itself in the USA and hired people non union for a wage better than the local norm, I would stand by the choice to hire non-union 100%. Why? Because the fact that I have a JOB for you should be reason enough for you to work in my plant. Work here or McDonalds or fucking starve. I don't give a fuck. There are 1 billion Chinamen that can do the same job for 100x cheaper and almost just as good....if not better. We can give a little and still offer wages that will feed a family of four to those that don't have access to a college degree or we can just get on with a two tiered society already.

Now if you want to talk about trade unions, there are select cases where they do well, because they offer training etc and steady work. They tend to be a bit more "deck plates" level. They still can incure an expense on industry, but its one that is just part of doing business. Malse is right on locality. But as far as manufacturing unions. They are dinosaurs.