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ORIGINAL: feylin

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ORIGINAL: farglebargle

The Union "Leadership" have simply sold out and become part of the Boss Class.

http://www.statesman.com/business/content/business/stories/other/02/08/8walmart.html

I cannot fathom why a union leader would sit in the same room as a representative of Walmart.  I understand that union reps and CEOs need to be able to sit down and communicate, but Walmart??


I belonged to a strong local, even became a steward. Had to represent a scab a time or two and gave it my best (even though I thought he should be shown the door) since I was trained that it was illegal to do otherwise.  But he was the minority in more than two hundred members I assisted day in and day out.

Sure most of the time I just fought for fair vacation practices and argued grey areas of the national contract, but here's an example of something that happened in the late 90s.  Male managers of this predominantly female workforce wanted to hold a folded dollar bill against workers' thighs to measure the distance between the hem of her shorts to the top of her knee to determine if her shorts met dress code requirements.  That had to go out of the building.   Unbelievable.  Result:  practice discontinued, plant manager promoted to DC job.

My stepfather was a Teamster so I was raised from almost birth to respect picket lines and when I joined my own  union that idea was reinforced in my mind.  After being involuntarily reassigned, I discovered all locals are not created equal and an unsupportive, lazy rank and file gets exactly what they deserve from the leaders they vote in office. (I should note this same local got me a $9,000 settlement a year after I had to quit to retain my sanity.  Some of my reassigned friends who stuck it out got almost $25,000.  The service just figured a blatant contract violation was worth the payout.  I liked my job, though, and would have preferred keeping it.) 

Anyone who thinks unions are antiquated should work a day in that plant near Philly.  Its like stepping back in time.

Now I work for an insurance company. <laughs>  So the fact that a union leader and Walmart are going to come up with a health insurance reform doubly scares me.  I know my company uses and promotes consumer-based health insurance.  In my case, it means you pay into a health plan but don't actually receive any benefits unless someone beats you into a coma ~ and that only kicks in after a high deductible.  I am sure others are familiar with the health savings plans.  Is it the wave of the future? No doubt.  I just miss my union dental plan, I really do.  I actually get better benefits from my car insurance.

quote:

ORIGINAL: MissBabydoll



Thank you. The point also needs to be made that corporations have vast wealth that unions do not approach by several entire orders of magnitude, because they are organizations of ***ordinary working people*** in a society in which the top 10% of the population controls 90% of the wealth, and the top 1% more than 50% of it--the most grotesquely unequal distribution of any developed nation. None of this 1% is composed of union leaders, nor any but the tiniest fraction of the top 10%.

Let the point be made also that the NLRB and the entire apparatus of labor law in this country is the most restrictive and union-hostile of any developed nation, with the possible exception of Airstrip One, aka Great Britain. Let the further point be made that the US now ranks well below the EU and Japan in median standard of living, and has the highest rates of malnutrition, poverty, and infant mortality in the developed world; the shortest amount of vacation time and parenting leave for workers; and on and on and on.

And then people grouse because unions, which are made up of human beings operating in an unbelievably corrupt decaying empire, sometimes resort to bad tactics to get workers to join. This is like all the conservatives who are against social welfare programs because they discourage the poor from initiative and self-reliance, while they themselves use their wealth to gain every possible advantaege for themselves and their children. If George W. Bush had been born into a working-class family, he would be stacking for Wal-Mart and drinking and tweaking himself into oblivion every night, and his daughters would be selling their asses on the corner.

I don't know that I can go on dealing with these boards. The politics of some of the people on here, especially some of the maledoms (why am I not surprised?) are making my head explode.

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"The presence of secret ballots can't overcome the corrupt nature of NLRB elections," says political scientist and University of Oregon professor Gordon Lafer, Ph.D. "They look more like the discredited practices of rogue regimes abroad than anything we would call American." In his 2005 report, "Free and Fair? How Labor Law Fails U.S. Democratic Election Standards," Dr. Lafer measured the union representation election process against democratic election standards established by the political philosophy and published works of the Founding Fathers, the historical development of electoral law and jurisprudence, and current statutes and regulations that define "free and fair" elections. Lafer's examination found that: workers' free speech rights are squelched; employers practice various forms of economic coercion; and labor law allows employers to indefinitely delay recognition through drawn out appeals. "The existence of such realities make the current system utterly undemocratic," concludes Lafer.