Workers are seen as little more than overheads by our increasingly Americanized businesses Unions are a safeguard against these evil corporations, yes they might cause trouble, but it's all they've got left in their arsenal
Not everything in life is a battle between good and evil - in the last 'evil' (LSE listed) corporation I worked for the standard workers deal was 35 days a year holiday, company pension, annual performance bonus, annual retention bonus (they paid you a bonus simply for staying with the company!) and travel expenses. None of us were unionised, the corporation paid well because there was a marketplace for skilled staff, and in order to get good staff they needed to be competitive with working benefits and conditions. Of course at the bottom of the market there are unskilled people who are easily replaceable, which pushes wages and company benefits down. It's here where I think there could be made a case for Unionisation - although at this level we could simply introduce better Labour laws, the likes of raising minimum wage consistently above inflation, or making zero-hour contracts illegal for longer term employees. This is a different scenario from the likes of middle class British Airways staff striking because the (struggling to make a profit) airline reduces their employee benefits closer to what the market pays elsewhere.
Yes, but once they find a way of doing your job for cheaper every benefit you have in your job will be squeezed or thrown out all together...and hardly ever because the companies are struggling
As an amateur economist I fully expect them to squeeze my benefits and pay if there is a cheaper way of doing what I am doing - it keeps me up at night thinking about it. I sat down the other week and learned some ****ty new standard of API programming (JSON APIs, it's terrible) because my older method of doing things (.NET WCF, it's awesome!) was becoming outdated - if I didn't learn the new skills I'd risk falling behind some smart little ****head whose more modern skills would push him above me in the marketplace. The economics are quite simple - if someone or something can do the job cheaper or better than you then your value to the market will decrease. The way to keep your wages high is to keep your skills useful to the market. We don't teach people this though, we teach them that their low pay is due to exploitation by some unseen rich corporate ****, rather than the fact that they have less in-demand skills. Anyway, taking into consideration the above, and with my economist hat on, I think labour laws actually create inefficiency - they encourage people to stay in less productive jobs, not learning new skills, because the government has forced the market to still pay them a reasonable wage. The whole economy loses out because of these laws. In saying that, and with my human hat on, a complete laissez-faire market system would cause a lot of human misery - if a computer becomes redundant we chuck it away and pay money for the newer model, if a human becomes redundant there are crying children and stressed wives. We need to accept some inefficiencies caused by labour laws because we are dealing with real peoples lives and not just a theoretical numbers game - the question is how we introduce such humane laws with the least inefficiency to the market, as if we push it too far with tougher and tougher labour laws we create bigger and bigger inefficiencies to the point where the average person ends up losing (think pre-1980's Chinese Communism where everyone was equal, but everyone was starving).
You do like an extreme don't you Mick . Nobody wants communism nor do we want a return to Victorian workhouses that we had before unionisation . Labour laws that are fair and protect workers from exploitation whilst furnishing them with a living wage would do fine . If this causes "the market" to be inefficient then the market needs to change because it's obviously deeply flawed .
Not in my experience, but maybe i've just been lucky all my life, I doubt it though. I've met more corrupt Union men than I ever have bad bosses. In fact a Union cost me my job so inept/crooked were they.
We all know people are the same wherever you go There is good and bad in everyone When we learn to live , learn to give each other What we need to survive Together alive ...........
There's never been any shortage of egotistical tosspots among Union reps, for sure. Some are incompetent, some are just out for themselves. But the Union itself is the sum of it's members, and a Unioinised workforce nearly always has better pay and conditions than a non Unionised workforce. Incidentally, those good managers you had; did they have to deal with a Union? Because if they did, that might have been one factor in keeping them honest.
I'm not Anti Unions per se, I agree that a lot of the time they do a good job but we don't have to look too far back in time to see them ripping the absolute piss out of the public for no good reason other than to flex their proverbial muscle. The Tube strike in London last year being a prime example.
Bob Crow used to wind me up something rotten, holding London to ransom at the drop of a hat. Not hard to see why the tube workers loved him though. There's another strike scheduled for next week by the way, **** knows what it's about this time. They'll get a god deal though, they always do. Personally I think it's nice to see the working man getting a result rather than the shareholders of one of the dodgy German companies profiting from privatised bus routes, for example.
Half the stuff in my house was made in China and practically all the electronics are made by Samsung (who don't allow Unions). It's not a deliberate act, it's just these countries/companies produce better stuff for cheaper - the working man can afford a 50" plasma in his house because another working man is helping produce it at a competitive wage - the question must be asked after being one of the first countries to Unionise manufacturing why there are no big British electronic manufacturers left competing at this end of the market? The poster-boy of Unionisation is the German car industry (and to be fair the Unions there are a good example, they have good dialogues with the companies and rarely ever strike) but the German car industry competes at the premium end of the market - you pay three times as much for a BMW as you do for a Ford, so the average man can't afford the first but can afford the latter.
