Originally Posted by fastair
Dhast,
That was one of my points. The poster I quoted made reference to the incorrect fact that if they worked hard and good, that they would protect their jobs. This is untrue. I used to work for UA when customer contact wsa non-union, and I worked for them after it was union. A few bad apples got lazier with the union, but in time, they were terminated. Favoritism did go way down after they went union though, which to me, was a net good. An employee knew what to expect if he screwed up, instead of arbitrary decisions that varried from one supervisor to another.
The senority system has its faults...it does not recognize "above average" performers and reward them, but after all, what kind of a promotion would you give a mechanic? You make them a lead, then what? end of line. SUre they could be a supe, but that is not done by seniority. Until an equitable system that is applied uniformly can be divised to evaluate thousands of employyes work skills/ethics across hundreds of stations, senority works for me. FOr those who say that you can hide behind the senority system and goof off...you could hide behind a merit system and goof off to, provided you never got cought or wer friends with the supe. The bad apples will get thrown out in a union system too, but at lest they have someone making sure they do not get railroaded, they can appeal, and can comapre their case to other cases with precidents set.
Union or not, NW would try given todays economic conditions to do the same thing. The only difference is with the union representation, the AMFA folks got to vote on their course of action to accept NW proposal instead of having it handed to them with no choice. To me, a choice is always better than no choice.
I agree with what you've said. But although the mechanics have a choice regarding accepting a NW proposal, that choice becomes moot since US labor laws don't do a very good job of protecting US labor: if NW can find enough mechanics who will cross the picket lines and enough Americans to fly on an airline that is striking, the mechanics' choice is irrelevant. (Beyond labor laws, safety laws go unenforced: there are many well documented instances of corporations repeatedly violating serious safety regulations, to the point of deaths resulting, yet still little happens to the corporation; see Bill Moyers's Trade Secrets to see this in chemical plants
http://www.pbs.org/tradesecrets/transcript.html)
US labor is in a race to the bottom: so many people say "why should I support X workers? their situation is no worse than mine" when in fact, people should be saying "If working conditions/pay/benefits get cut back for enough groups, MINE will eventually be as well."
Sweatshop conditions and sweatshop pay is the legacy we're going to leave for our children/grandchildren, if we don't change our way of thinking and our labor laws. Corporations spend a fortune (much more than even 10 years ago) lobbying Washington. This isn't to benefit you, the worker, or us, the society; it is to benefit a very small percent of Americans (who are major shareholders in those corporations) who are extremely wealthy.
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... data published in a Twentieth Century Fund Report suggests a disturbing answer. The sharp increase in inequality since the late 1970s has made the distribution of wealth in this country more unequal than in what used to be perceived as the class-ridden societies of northwest Europe. Today the United States is the most unequal of any industrialized country in terms of income and, more importantly, wealth. And the situation is worsening more rapidly here with each passing year.
Indeed, the only other period in this century when household wealth was so disproportionately held by a relative handful of the richest Americans came between 1922 and 1929. During that time, inequality was buoyed primarily by the excessive increase in stock values, which eventually crashed and led to the Great Depression of the 1930s.
The Twentieth Century Fund Report, Top Heavy: A Study of the Increasing Inequality of Wealth in America, is written by Edward N. Wolff, a professor of economics at New York University. Among its major findings is that the gap in wealth is even greater than the widely reported gap in income among Americans.
INCOME & WEALTH:
from a 2003 article: The top 20 percent owns over 80 percent of all wealth. In 1998, it owned 83 percent of all wealth.
http://www.inequality.org/wolffint2.html
If you go back to 1979, prior to the period when the growth in inequality really took off in the United States, the top 5 percent on average had 11 times the average income of the bottom 20 percent. If you fast forward to the year 2000, the most recent economic peak, you find that that ratio increased to 19 times. So over the course of those two decades, the gap between the wealthiest and the lowest income families grew from 11 times to 19 times.... The idea is that a janitor in 1965 was paid a lot more than a janitor in 2000, despite the fact that that person was at least as productive and as well educated in 2000 as he or she was in 1965.
http://multinationalmonitor.org/mm20...bernstein.html