What is the problem?
 

Because labor law protects against "run-away shops." A Company cannot simply say, "this union and this contract costs too much, so we are closing up and moving to North Carolina/Mexico/China." A company has an obligation to negotiate with the union over the movement of the work.

Hank is absolutely correct in his statements about the UAW and Big 3 auto contracts. The UAW negotiated so much crap into the agreements that Delphi and Visteon have absolutely no way to compete with any other Tier 1 or Tier 2 supplier making the same parts.

aV

What is the problem?
 

The exercise of 2nd Amendment rights is a beautiful thing. Were these union rabble rousers armed? If they are like the modern day pussified liberal I doubt it. Therein lay the problem.

Penske (strapped and cocked) Account

What is the problem?
 

The Homestead Strike

• With Carnegie's carte blanche support, Frick moved to slash wages. Plant workers responded by hanging Frick in effigy. At the end of June, Frick began closing down his open hearth and armor-plate mills, locking out 1,100 men. On June 25th, Frick announced he would no longer negotiate with the union; now he would only deal with workers individually. Leaders of Amalgamated were willing to concede on almost every level -- except on the dissolution of their union.
  
  ***
  
  Frick turned to the enforcers he had employed previously: the Pinkerton Detective Agency's private army, often used by industrialists of the era. At midnight on July 5, tugboats pulled barges carrying hundreds of Pinkerton detectives armed with Winchester rifles up the Monongahela River. But workers stationed along the river spotted the private army. A Pittsburgh journalist wrote that at about 3 A.M. a "horseman riding at breakneck speed dashed into the streets of Homestead giving the alarm as he sped along." Thousands of strikers and their sympathizers rose from their sleep and went down to the riverbank in Homestead.
  
  When the private armies of business arrived, the crowd warned the Pinkertons not to step off the barge. But they did. No one knows which side shot first, but under a barrage of fire, the Pinkertons retreated back to their barges. For 14 hours, gunfire was exchanged. Strikers rolled a flaming freight train car at the barges. They tossed dynamite to sink the boats and pumped oil into the river and tried to set it on fire. By the time the Pinkertons surrendered in the afternoon three detectives and nine workers were dead or dying. The workers declared victory in the bloody battle, but it was a short-lived celebration.
  
  The governor of Pennsylvania ordered state militia into Homestead. Armed with the latest in rifles and Gatling guns, they took over the plant. Strikebreakers who arrived on locked trains, often unaware of their destination or the presence of a strike, took over the steel mills. Four months after the strike was declared, the men's resources were gone and they returned to work. Authorities charged the strike leaders with murder and 160 other strikers with lesser crimes. The workers' entire Strike Committee also was arrested for treason. However, sympathetic juries would convict none of the men.
  
  All the strikers leaders were blacklisted. The Carnegie Company successfully swept unions out of Homestead and reduced it to a negligible factor in the steel mills throughout the Pittsburgh area.

Vote no on Proposition 73
 

From the Federalist No. 43:

"But theoretic reasoning...must be qualified by the lessons of practice." This is only one quote of many. But I think it proves the point adequately.

Vote no on Proposition 73
 

That activist judges can subvert the constitution and make up rights?

What is the problem?
 

Tell that to all the part-time workers at Wal-Mart who will never be full-timers, because full-time employees have to be paid benefits.

And the crap about applauding every union job lost to outsourcing overseas is just plain old fucking mean-spirited.

Vote no on Proposition 73
 

You're hopeless. I give up on you.

ETA: To any Admin. Please put Penske on my ignore list.

What is the problem?
 

Good story. I am pro-all of it.

What is the problem?
 

Yes, but his art collection is something else.

What is the problem?
 

Oh God, yes. I couldn't agree more. There should be automatic reciprocity everywhere. But I guess that runs afoul of states' rights advocates.

I think the bar admission nonsense is the worst kind of local protectionism imaginable. Our fungible, transferable skill sets are no different than those plied by others who don't have such protections. We provide a service and should be forced to compete within anyone else anywhere providing the same service.

What is the problem?
 

That's life. Find a full time job. I know lots of low-skilled workers who work part-time who have better health benefits than I do. The market is a wonderful place for those with ambition and ingenuity.


Not really, because we all absorb the costs of union labour. i will take my Nikes made in Indonesia with cheap labour for a reduction in price. I work hard for my money and don't want to expend for socialist ideals.

What is the problem?
 

No one has to be given benefits, wanker. They could give health and other non-retirement benefits just to managers and above if they bought insurance rather than self-insuring. It's just not good for PR. And, you can't exclude a category "part time" from retirement plans -- so if you have full-time and part-time people in the same job classifications, the way to keep people out is to ensure that they don't work more than 1,000 hrs/year.

But the thing where they were going to add somewhat strenuous physical activity (pushing carts in the summer in 90+ heat is strenuous) to every low-level job classification to discourage people with health problems (and probably the elderly) from applying was possibly, like, illegal. Heh.

Vote no on Proposition 73
 

I thought we had a truce and were making progress. Why so much hate?

That is a distinction without a difference.

If the employer is forced to pay their dues, then in reality they are forced to join. Now if the employer could refund the dues to the employee who did not join the union there would be freedom of choice and action.

What is the problem?
 

Re your first paragraph, that is true. But unions also gave us an unsustainable level of expectation in terms of what workers were entitled to. Competing against foreign workers, companies utilizing our high priced workers simply can't compete. Unions never hedged for globalization.

In re to the second paragraph, you're taking a different view of the union member. I see him as uncreative and lacking ambition. You see him as a necessary lower level consumer who fuels the ambitious person's business plan. We're both right. I just have this naive ideal that if everyone tried to better himself, instead of just getting a union card and phoning in a worklife, we could achieve some amazing things. But from a pragmatic, practical perspective, your point - basically, "we can't have winners without losers" can't be debated.