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Joined: Feb 2001
Posts: 2,163
Hard-core CEG\'er
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Hard-core CEG\'er
Joined: Feb 2001
Posts: 2,163 |
Originally posted by cjbaldw:
Regarding unions, I'll say what I've said many other times, unions served a historic purpose during the early to mid 1900's when the DOL (labor law) didn't exist. Now that we have very healthy labor laws on the books coupled with a litigious society, companies are no longer free to abuse employees as they were during the height of the industrial revolution. This means that the primary purpose of unions is effectively extinct, which was to prevent blatant abuse of employees and their interests.
interesting point about unions
"Queens Trash Hauler Charged With Assault
Oct 26, 2005 1:50 pm US/Eastern
The owner of a Maspeth, Queens garbage company has been indicted on charges of falsely imprisoning and assaulting two union organizers who were posing as day laborers.
Queens District Attorney Richard Brown says the two men were locked in a truck yard last July.
The garbage company also has been named in the indictment and charged with presenting a fraudulent carting license application to the New York City Business Integrity Commission.
DA Brown says the company owner also incited a mob of his workers to beat the two union workers.
New York City's Business Integrity Commission says it will be revoking the license of K and R Construction Removal.
The DA says Steven Russell of Cedarhurst, Long Island and his company have been charged in an 18 count indictment. If convicted, Russell faces up to 15 years in prison. The corporation can be fined up to $10,000.
The D-A says organizers for Local 79 of the Laborers' Union sent two undercover union workers to a construction and demolition job being done by Russell's company at the former Board of Education's headquarters in Brooklyn. Brown says Russell was allegedly using non-union workers. Workers at the site claimed they were being paid ten dollars an hour for ten-hour days with no benefits. Union workers are paid $48 per hour for similar labor and receive healthcare, overtime and other benefits.
Brown says the two undercover union members were fired for reporting safety and asbestos issues. The work site was temporarly closed down by the City's Department of Environmental Protection.
The DA says when the two workers went to K and R to collect their final wages on the evening of July 22nd, 2005, Russell and others restrained the two men and beat them.
"
Let us prevent unions from forming by any means necessary.
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Joined: Jul 2000
Posts: 443
CEG\'er
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CEG\'er
Joined: Jul 2000
Posts: 443 |
Originally posted by contour_phoenix_when:
Originally posted by cjbaldw:
Regarding unions, I'll say what I've said many other times, unions served a historic purpose during the early to mid 1900's when the DOL (labor law) didn't exist. Now that we have very healthy labor laws on the books coupled with a litigious society, companies are no longer free to abuse employees as they were during the height of the industrial revolution. This means that the primary purpose of unions is effectively extinct, which was to prevent blatant abuse of employees and their interests.
interesting point about unions
"Queens Trash Hauler Charged With Assault
Oct 26, 2005 1:50 pm US/Eastern
The owner of a Maspeth, Queens garbage company has been indicted on charges of falsely imprisoning and assaulting two union organizers who were posing as day laborers.
Queens District Attorney Richard Brown says the two men were locked in a truck yard last July.
The garbage company also has been named in the indictment and charged with presenting a fraudulent carting license application to the New York City Business Integrity Commission.
DA Brown says the company owner also incited a mob of his workers to beat the two union workers.
New York City's Business Integrity Commission says it will be revoking the license of K and R Construction Removal.
The DA says Steven Russell of Cedarhurst, Long Island and his company have been charged in an 18 count indictment. If convicted, Russell faces up to 15 years in prison. The corporation can be fined up to $10,000.
The D-A says organizers for Local 79 of the Laborers' Union sent two undercover union workers to a construction and demolition job being done by Russell's company at the former Board of Education's headquarters in Brooklyn. Brown says Russell was allegedly using non-union workers. Workers at the site claimed they were being paid ten dollars an hour for ten-hour days with no benefits. Union workers are paid $48 per hour for similar labor and receive healthcare, overtime and other benefits.
Brown says the two undercover union members were fired for reporting safety and asbestos issues. The work site was temporarly closed down by the City's Department of Environmental Protection.
The DA says when the two workers went to K and R to collect their final wages on the evening of July 22nd, 2005, Russell and others restrained the two men and beat them.
"
Let us prevent unions from forming by any means necessary.
Nice article. All strictly opinion until both parties get their day in court of course. This article has exactly nothing to do with my argument however. This article is about crime, not about unions. I did pay attention to this statement however:
"Workers at the site claimed they were being paid ten dollars an hour for ten-hour days with no benefits. Union workers are paid $48 per hour for similar labor and receive healthcare, overtime and other benefits."
48/hour is almost 100k per year assuming a 50 week year (not that most construction workers are actually employed that consistently due to the seasonal aspects of the work). Figure an additional 30-40% of cost for healthcare, retirement, and other benefits (yes, it is that much - I know how much I pay total for an employee making 100k per year where I work), so now we're paying 130-140k per year for a construction worker. Once again, manual labor is no longer valued to such an extent in an information/service economy. If we want to ensure that manual labor pays excellent wages along this line, then we all need to be willing to pay a lot more for certain goods and services. Currently America wants more for less. We can't have it both ways. I'm not saying there are not companies that abuse labor employment, but by and far in today's world most companies are forced to treat employees much more fairly than they were in the past, and if they do not, contact the DOL and start to build a case against the company in question. Undercover union workers, what a joke. What is this the CIA? What was the end goal of sending undercover union reps to this worksite? My father is part of the local electricians union and I can tell you he has no love for unions. Based upon my dad's experiences (as well as my neighbor who runs a non-union demolition business and has to put up with this stuff constantly - not to mention the union trucks that show up in my development with pickup trucks with huge inflated rats and sit outside of our homes to protest against him, hang up signs all over our development (illegal I might add - and yes I have reported the unions and it stopped) - yeah that's a good use of time and money), most likely the goal was to dig up any possible evidence to force the non-union company off the job site or to cave in to union demands and use union workers. Interesting indeed that the allegations are designed to do exactly that in this article, and 10 to 1 the new contractor will be union, no surprise there, strong arm techniques that will only hurt us all in the long term from an economic perspective. If the non-union employees felt they were being treated unfairly, they had options to pursue. You'd be surprised how much influence the DOL and other state employment orgs can have on your behalf.
Look, I'm not against unions per se, I know plenty of union guys that are hard workers, but even many of those guys that work for the unions have few positive comments behind closed doors and in fact mostly complain about corruption of union officials and so forth. One could make the exact same argument about corporate executives these days as well. Inherent to both scenarios is the sickness of selfishness and greed, of being self centered rather than other centered when it comes to doing what is ethical and right.
My original argument was based upon the laws of supply and demand from an economic perspective. The simple fact is that if, taking the above example, the demand for such work means it only pays 10/hour, if an entity is artificially inflating the price of labor to some 60/hour with benefits, one of two things is going to happen, either the consumer will pay a considerably higher price for the finished product because the high cost of labor will be built into the final price, or if the price is regulated somehow, then the provider of the work may no longer be able to endure the high cost of doing the work, and if squeezed too much, the supply for doing the work will simply disappear. This is what is starting to happen in the healthcare market. HMO's promised to be everyone's newfound solution to healthcare management problems in the industry, and we were all going to see cost savings as a result. In fact, HMO's and the new methodologies formed by the business sector of the healthcare industry have actually dramatically increased the cost of healthcare for us all. We simply added one more middle man into the process and one that needs to be profitable and happens to be service/information based which means wage demand is high for the employment base so it's not cheap to manage the new bureaucracy of business processes created by the new healthcare systems. Who's getting squeezed? Well, HMO's aren't feeling it, profitable as ever, look at the numbers, but we're seeing doctor's drop out of the industry like never before. Many trauma centers are literally unable to keep well qualified surgeons on the payroll because the costs passed on to the doctor's are becoming so prohibitive that the supply is dwindling. This is all occurring even as consumer healthcare costs soar. Personally, I'd rather go back to the way the healthcare industry worked before the 80's, I got a better level of personal care and paid a lot less for it. Just one example, I could site many others in different industries, and of course, unions and the auto industry is but another IMHO.
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Joined: Sep 2002
Posts: 3,709
Hard-core CEG\'er
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Hard-core CEG\'er
Joined: Sep 2002
Posts: 3,709 |
When I was a co-manager of a very large retail chain I we were trained on detecting union reps that were trying to get into our work force and turn the companies employees against us. They take it very seriously.
Useful unions seem to have disappeared.
Originally posted by Chickens:
Religion can't do much for ashholes (unless you are an alterboy)
98.5 Se w/SVT mods
98 E0 SVT~ sold
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