If you are wondering why the right to collective bargaining is so important for union workers here is a story about my father.
My dad, Aldo, was a Longshoreman in Brooklyn from 1955 to 2001. In 1978 when the shippers wanted to containerize the docks they were going to save lot of money and a lot of union jobs were going to be lost. That is the way it would have gone down had it not been for my father's union, local 1814 of the International Longshoreman's Union (ILA). Led by Anthony Scotto the union organized bitter strikes and got a guarantee from the shippers that every man working gets 2080 hours of work a year (that's 40 hours a week) until they reached retirement age. Read Story. Before containerization it took 100 men a week of backbreaking work (e.g. carrying 100 pound bags of coffee beans off the ships). With the containers 45 men could do it over night.
Instead of losing his job my dad got guaranteed paid till the day he would have normally retired whether he worked or not. One condition was that he had to shape up every day. In other words show up and report to be ready to work. What happened is that the guys with the least amount of seniority got called to work first. Because he'd been there for over 20 years he had AAA seniority. By ten AM if he wasn't needed - and he rarely was - he got to go home and still get paid for the days work. Till 10 AM he hung out playing cards with his pals in the shape up hall. After 10AM he went to the diner in Brooklyn to continue playing cards and to flirt with Emelia, a beautiful waitress, who ended up as my dad's late life girlfriend.
What advantage then was containerization to the shippers if they still had to pay the workers for 40 hours a week? The ships got unloaded in one day rather than a week. Also there was no loss of products. Though a container here or there might disappear the content was pretty much safe locked up in the containers. Theft was a big loss item in the old days.
This was a great example about how the right of collective bargaining caused productivity gains to get shared by the workers and the employers. Normally what happens is the employers get richer and the workers get no gains or worse, lose jobs.
Also thanks to the union, wealth disparity was abated. Rather than the shippers making a lot more money because of the savings they only made more money while my father and his co-workers kept the income they had from their jobs. Over time as my father and his co-workers retired they were not replaced benefiting the shippers even more.
Finally my dad gave or lent his kids all the money he made in his senior years from that guaranteed job and my siblings and I started our businesses, bought our houses, or send his grandchildren to school. While I'm on the subject of my father he said to me when I was running for President of the USA: "Always remember, it's the working man who is keeping this country where it is. Not the guy who has two billion dollars and is telling everyone what to do. Have a little patience and the working man will take care of himself and you." Read more from my father in my book Raising Eyebrows, A Failed Entrepreneur Finally Gets It Right.
Yeah Unions!
Follow Dal LaMagna on Twitter: www.twitter.com/DalLaMagna
Read your Blog. In this modern day and time, people should not be coaxed to go to and to work for their living. Maybe, in the past, in our earlier years, but, not now. We must think in the present, and move on.
Colleges, higher education, online, and construction schools, all make it possible to function in a respectable and productive manner. It's up to people to find the right company to work for, or to go in business for themselves; hopefully, with good work ethics. People, from outside our country, are coming in and cashing in on our jobs- it's not the same anymore.
Read your book- lent it to a friend; she's a staunch Republican with an Independent mind.
Still would like for you to put me on the Ballot for President - Independent (Unenrolled). I know you can do it!
Take care,
Mary
If you don't get the kind of pay and recognition you think you are entitled to Organize ... form a Union(OMG) where you work and bargin. It is your right.
Don't cut down those who have unions. Get into your own. Make your own jobs better.
Most of the problems we have in the states and governments is because people who don't make good wages can't pay the taxes that they should and states governments are afraid to tax businesses. If the states stuck together...formed a UNION (OMG). They could keep the businesses from moving to states who lure them with less taxes.
Also: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCUQzwEwAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fselect.nytimes.com%2Fgst%2Fabstract.html%3Fres%3DF30617FB385A1B7A93CAA8178BD95F458285F9&rct=j&q=great%20railroad%20strike%20of%201922&ei=sttzTcyMBsv3gAelldW6CA&usg=AFQjCNFbpf20MdRgSwJdI1b2E3FFJ_x6pw&cad=rja
All considered safe by AVG.
Within days, 50,000 rail workers complied and railroad traffic out of Chicago came to a halt. When the railroad owners asked the Federal government to intervene, Attorney General Richard Olney, a director of the Burlington and Santa Fe railroads, (no conflict of interest here; comment mine) obtained (July 2) a court injunction. On July 4, President Cleveland dispatched troops to Chicago.
Debs and three other union officials were jailed for disobeying the injunction.
The nation's newspapers, were objective as always. Chicago Tribune headlines from June 31,1894 described the events of the Pullman Strike thusly:
"Debs Strikers Begin Work Of Destruction, Guns Awe Them Not, Drunken Stockyard Rioters Defy Uncle Sam's Troops, Mobs Invite Death"
The New York Times, never one to side with business rather than labor, in an 1894 editorial called Eugene Debs
"A lawbreaker & an enemy to the human race."
The Pullman Railroad Strike, largest industrial strike to date in U.S. history, eventually broken by federal government troops, resulted in at least 24 strikers killed, & President Grover Cleveland suspended the constitutional right to assembly (the ability of any two or more people to meet in public) in seven states.
* 1880s
* 1890s
* class struggle
In the year 1877, the signals were given for the rest of the century: the blacks would be put back; the strikes of white workers would not be tolerated; the industrial and political elites of North and South would take hold of the country and organize the greatest march of economic growth in human history. They would do it with the aid of, and at the expense of, black labor, white labor, Chinese labor, European immigrant labor, female labor, rewarding them differently by race, sex, national origin, and social class, in such a way as to create separate levels of oppression-a skillful terracing to stabilize the pyramid of wealth.
While some multimillionaires started in poverty, most did not. A study of the origins of 303 textile, railroad, and steel executives of the 1870s showed that 90 percent came from middle- or upper-class families. The Horatio Alger stories of "rags to riches" were true for a few men, but mostly a myth, and a useful myth for control.
Most of the fortune building was done legally, with the collaboration of the government and the courts. Sometimes the collaboration had to be paid for. Thomas Edison promised New Jersey politicians $1,000 each in return for favorable legislation. Daniel Drew and Jay Gould spent $1 million to bribe the New York legislature to legalize their issue of $8 million in "watered stock" on the Erie Railroad.
How we got here.
BTW, it's funny you should bring up your experience as a negotiator as I queried about that in a rebuttal post that has somehow been held up in limbo, but yours got through.
If you don't mind my asking, with whom were you negotiating?
And since we're going there, was it money, fame or both; that turned you to the dark side? Just curious.
It began with wage cuts on railway after railway, in tense situations of already low wages ($ 1.75 a day for brakemen working twelve hours), scheming and profiteering by the rail companies, deaths and injuries among the workers—loss of hands, feet, fingers, the crushing of men between cars.
Six hundred freight trains now jammed the yards at Martinsburg. Saying the state militia was insufficient. In fact, the militia was not totally reliable, being composed of many railway workers. Congress had not appropriated money for the army yet, (h)ut J. P. Morgan, August Belmont, and other bankers now offered to lend money to pay army officers (but no enlisted men). Federal troops arrived in Martins(h)urg, and the freight cars began to move.
Strikes were occurring almost every hour. The great State of Pennsylvania was in an uproar; New Jersey was afflicted by a paralysing dread; New York was mustering an army of militia; Ohio was shaken from Lake Erie to the Ohio River; Indiana rested in a dreadful suspense. Illinois, and especially its great metropolis, Chicago, apparently hung on the verge of a vortex of confusion and tumult. St. Louis had already felt the effect of the premonitory shocks of the uprising.
libcom.org/history/articles/us-rail-strikes-1877
The point with those stories was to correlate just our 21st century is becoming their 1920's. We've got a guy with a vegetable cart, who I'm sure didn't wake up that morning thinking to himself, "I'm gonna change the World today"
They on the other hand had a trainman who when told after suffering back to back 10% pay cuts they would be taking out a train double in size with no additional crewman, he said, "I'm just not going to do it".
"The strike," an anonymous Baltimore merchant wrote, "is not a revolution of fanatics willing to fight for an idea. It is a revolt of working men against low prices of labor, which have not been accomplished with corresponding low prices of food, clothing and house rent".
Sounds as relevant today as it did back then.
Or maybe it was that unions are good because they allowed your father to get paid for doing nothing?
So we should all stand behind government employee unions and their "right" to collective bargaining in order to guarantee that their employers (the taxpayers) don't get rich by saving money through efficiency, and to protect these workers from worrying that they might have to actually do work in order to be compensated.
Please don't run for public office again, Mr. LaMagna.
With union membership in private industry under 9% in the U.S., the majority of American workers (myself included) find it hard to feel sympathetic for those who fervently demand they retain such luxuries as you have described. We instead have to rely on our own abilities to prove our worth to our employers each and every day.
"This was a great example about how the right of collective bargaining caused productivity gains to get shared by the workers and the employers."
1) Collective bargaining isn't a "right". It is a privilege the unions have extorted from employers by striking.
2) The union did not create, implement or fund the improvement in productivity. They again used extortion ("Led by Anthony Scotto the union organized bitter strikes...") to force the shippers to share those gains with union workers who contributed nothing to the productivity improvement. In fact, the union workers were the cause of the low productivity the containerization was designed to improve upon.
http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/03/04/unions.history/index.html?hpt=Sbin#
At Eastern Air Lines, before it was destroyed by the infamous President L0renz0, was a profitable company. The last contract negotiated by the IAM, brought company stock and wages commiserate with meeting goals for not just the union members, but also the noncontract members. An audit of the books, also written in the contract, found brazen irregularities. The management closed the books during the audit because the contract failed to denote how long the books could be examined. During the lead up to the strike, baggage handlers were timed with stopwatches to intimidate as they loaded bags critical to the safety of weights and balances of the aircraft. Aircraft that took hard landings were kept in service. Profit was everything. The union reported the wrongs to the FAA. It was about dignity and safety as much as anything else.
[M]eticulous attention should be paid to the special relationships and obligations of public servants to the public itself and to the Government.
All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations. The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress. Accordingly, administrative officials and employees alike are governed and guided, and in many instances restricted, by laws which establish policies, procedures, or rules in personnel matters.