"...Silvertooth, you made an interesting statement, "Organizing your particular terminal is in our best interests, the positive benefits for you are nice, but the real motive is to increase wages and salary ...
Your said that organizing your particular terminals is in "our" best interest, not YOUR best interest. You also said the real motive is to increase wages and salary. Wrong. The real motive is to increase the coffers of the union. The union, any union, is a business just like IBM, General Electric and General Motors. The unions main goal is profit just like any other business. It amazes me that some union members go on and on about the evil of "big business" and apparently fail to see that the union is the same thing..."
Ummm... you entire logic is flawed. Unions are by nature, and under IRS regulation (at least in the U.S.), non-profit. Now, that is not to say that unions do not try and stay profitable in the sense of maintaining positive cash flow so they can perform their business, which is representing their membership. Because of course they have to stay solvent. And of course they want to grow, because more workers in a company or industry means more leverage, generally. If you look at the U.S. in historic terms, the unions who are declining serve sectors or industries which are also on the decline. Steel, coal, textiles, airlines, etc. However, in the burgeoning service sector, unions such as the SEIU and the Teamsters are making sizeable inroads.
I'm not saying that there is not occasionally corruption or abuse of union funds, but if you were to compare the statistics of publicly-traded companies who have been investigated and convicted of fraud under the auspices of the SEC as well as the IRS to unions investigated and convicted by the U.S. Department of Labor... well, there is no contest. The DOL requires unions to file LM-2 financial reports which are public knowledge. Unions are under the microscope, which leaves very little room for fraud or misuse of funds.
We also have the option of voting incompetant or corrupt union officers right out of office. When was the last time you had that option with your company's executives, hmmm?
But getting back to the original point so brilliantly stated by Brother Silvertooth... what a union does is represent it's members before management. At the negotiating table, and during disciplinary matters, and at any time a worker needs a hand in dealing with management.
You migh ask youself this: if unions are so horrible and corrupt and crappy... why do so many of us believe in them? Why do we argue so adamantly on their behalf? Many of us have had experience on both sides of the fence, and prefer the union shop over the non-union shop. It's not that unions are perfect. Far from it. They simply represent for the average worker a far better deal that they could get otherwise.
By way of example and in the case of Oak Harbor, let's go back to the last contract negotiations to see what the union actually accomplished. The company decided that contract negotiations had drug on too long, and so gave the non-union side a $.50/hr. raise and a $500 "signing" bonus, and issued a memo from our esteemed VP of Operations stating that the company was going to award their non-union employees for their patience and furthermore stated that they would always "take better care of their non-union employees than those they actually had to bargain with".
Ouch. The contempt in that memo was clearly felt by all who read it, which was many.
But lo and behold, the union negotiators ended up getting $.60/hr. a year for a three-year contract, as well as full MOB on our H&W and we converted our "signing bonus/retro pay" into our pension, where it would pay far larger dividends over the long haul than a bonus check that the government taxed at an exorbitant rate and is then quickly spent.
I also enjoy how senior management now likes to go around telling all of the non-union employees that the union "left money on the table" in the last negotiations. Might I add that the company ended up raising the non-union employees to match the union employees hourly wage rate?
So, what can we learn from this little example?
1.) The union was able to get a better deal than was initially offered to the non-union side. If this had been a completely non-union company, I doubt we would have even seen $.50/hr. As it was, everone got a good deal, which leads me to my second point.
2.) A rising tide lifts all ships. The union got more than what was offered to the non-union side, and they were eventually
brought up to
our standard. The UNION STANDARD. And this applies to the industry as a whole. Do you think FedEx Freight drivers would have what they have if FedEx management wasn't living in constant fear of being organized?
3.) Statistics don't lie. Unionized workers average 16% higher wages overall, and more union workers have affordable healthcare and a retirement plan than non-union workers do by a fair margin. Even in workplaces that have those fringe benefits, non-union employees pay a far larger share of their healthcare costs than union employees do, again by a large margin. And non-union companies are increasingly moving away from defined-benefit retirement plans to 401(K)-type defined-contribution plans where the burden of ensuring a decent retirement fund is totally on the employee.
So, to wrap up this little story... your tired old rants about the union are just that: tired. They are just the same old lies and half-truths spread about by management types who resent having to deal with their employees on anything approaching a level playing field. In this day and age, when corporate profits are approaching historic numbers and when executive pay has climbed hundreds of times higher than what their average employee makes, and executive golden parachutes clauses eclipse anything approaching common sense, you really have the nerve to get on this soapbox and decry the only tool the average worker has left to try and maintain decent wages and benefits for himself and his family?
Wow... I'm so sad for you.