<p>People keep promoting the idea that the d**n unions ruined everything, that if it weren’t for them all these jobs would be here, etc…one of the ironies is less then 1 in 10 workers in this country is unionized, and have been for years, and jobs still go overseas in droves. Unions are convenient scapegoats, but the reality is the same problem afflicted unions and management, it is known as greed and short sightedness. More importantly, most of the ills of a company are generally do to bad management, they control the capital spending, and in terms of quality and productivity capital (management) outweighs the effect of labor by at least 10-1 or more (my masters in management is in that area). Unions don’t decide to make the products companies do, unions don’t decide how to market products or make decisions like cutting back on quality to save 50c. </p>
<p>The tea party types were outraged when they talked about UAW wages at auto plants (that in some cases, were way inflated, they included a worker with a lot of OT, benefits, and so forth, that wasn’t typical for most workers), about how they were overpriced, but no one surprisingly talked about GM management making millions of dollars in salaries and bonuses when the company lost 4 billion dollars…</p>
<p>I am as well aware of the shenanigans of unions and the ills of them, I know about them first hand, the guy who taught one of my courses on total factor productivity had been a union economist, and he told great stories…</p>
<p>It is very easy to look at the stupidity and idiocy of union rules (they never heeded the warning of people like Walter Reuther, who knew better) but it also leaves out a lot of inconvenient truths about management, that while laying of 10,000 jobs and sending them to China, while collecting huge salary and bonuses. Executives today get most of their pay from stock grants (not even options) that vest in a year, and they have every reason to pump up the stock price that often hurts the long term competitiveness of the company to increase their own personal stake, it is brass-ackwards. Once upon a time CEO’s relied on salary and cash bonuses for their pay, and back then a typical CEO earned about 30 times the average worker, today it is pushing 400 times, mostly because of stock…rather then invest in new technologies to produce products efficiently, or when doing well hire new workers, they send 100 year old technology to China to be made by workers making 40c an hour, no benefits, or work their existing workers to the bone, because capital spending and hiring people is frowned upon by the almighty stock analysits (who generally are 27 year old kids who barely know how to wipe their tookus but have an MBA degree from some prestigious business school and wouldn’t know which end of a bolt was up). </p>
<p>It is not surprising the living standards of average workers has declined while that of the executives has gone through the roof, the pay ratio has gone from 30x to 400 times or more in the last 30 years, it goes along with the decline of unionized labor as a counterbalance to that kind of greed (and before anyone wants to talk about CEO’s benefitting from a free market, they aren’t, read people like Graef Crystal on the subject). </p>
<p>BTW, in most stories about how ‘unions’ ruined a company, when you look at the actual case studies, and I did, most of the problem was a management team that didn’t know what it was doing, failed to account for competition, and then bailed out (with huge payoffs to themselves0 because it was more lucrative to liquidate then save the company for themselves personally. </p>
<p>If you are seriously thinking about the union, ask them about how they have dealt with similar situations at other plants, ask them what they would do with the situation you faced, how would they get what you are looking for, how would they be anything but a figturehead…ask them to give you details about workers covered in other companies, about what their pay has done, what their benefits have done, in the past, to get an idea if they deliver. If they can’t or won’t answer that, it prob means they want to come in, collect their dues, and do nothing but make a lot of hot air…</p>
<p>Unfortunately, what others have told you is probably more the reality these days, unless times are booming economically in your area and there are alternate jobs, you probably are faced, union or no, with the realities of a bad economy, that employers, fairly or unfairly, have the upper hand. I think seeing what is out there is not a bad idea, but one of the realities is without unions, companies also have de facto collaborated to bring down wages for workers, because without unions there is no one to keep them honest, the informal network among executives means executive A at company A and executive B at company B have an informal network with others, and if A decides to cut wages and benefits, B doesn’t use that as an opportunity to hire good workers, they use it as an incentive to do the same thing (kind of like airlines when they raise ticket prices and put new charges on passengers). Same way if a consulting arm of Bain consulting comes in and tells the owner he can boost his stock profits 50% by sending manufacturing offshore, there is no one to stop them from doing this, an uncle sam generally gives them huge tax credits to do so…</p>
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and spoke to the workers. He told them that they had talked to the owner, who had said that he was making the best offer possible, and that if they did not accept it he would have to close the business, and that they believed him and thought the workers should accept the offer. They voted. H cast the swing vote that accepted the offer. The workers, not the union management, were the ones that were willing to shutter that business.</p>