OlasDAlmighty said:
Baresark said:
That's not fair. The unions didn't kill the company. The company was dying, they just put the last bullet in it's head. And if a company isn't profitable enough to pay it's employees acceptable wages then maybe it should go out of business.
But here's something I don't understand:
why is it that when people at the top decide to increase their salary, despite the fact that they are easily the least efficient part of the company, it's just them acting with rational self interest which is healthy for the economy; but then when people at the bottom fight for a larger slice of the revenue they're being greedy and unreasonable?
Why is it that the workers who are the most necessary component the functioning of a company get absolutely no say in any major decisions within the company that would affect their jobs or pay? Why should only the few at the top get to make all the rules? Apparently democracy is evil in the corporate world.
And that's all collective bargaining is, an attempt by workers to regain some control of the company that they work for. Sure it's not an ideal situation, but it's the only one that works for them. It's not that they want everyone to suffer equally sillyhead. They'd all love to bargain individually, but they can't because individually they're all expendable. If any one of them refused to work until he was paid more he'd simply be fired and replaced. So to gain the needed leverage they're forced to bargain as a whole body.
And they wouldn't BE bargaining if they were just being paid acceptable amounts to begin with. Strikes don't form spontaneously.
The workers were not initially responsible to the companies woes, the executives and upper management were responsible. But the whole point of the wage cuts is they were supposed to buy the company time to recover or find more avenues of private investment. The bullet came in the form of the picketing and other unions supporting the picket. The upper management made poor decisions and the company was hurting, but no one can actually argue the company was going under anyway as no one knows that, it's a convenient rationalizing belief that people perpetuate in order to relieve the unions of culpability. If the company was dying anyway, they would not have been trying to negotiate with unions, they would have just shut the doors. They only know the company was having financial problems, it was liquidating it's assets to help pay back it's creditors, it was trying to keep the company alive.
But let me stop you, no one in this story acted rationally: The workers did not act rationally and the upper management did not act rationally. I simply said that any of the workers would have taken a raise even though others were getting pay cuts. The rational thing to do would be to do whatever is necessary to preserve the companies and the jobs. The upper management made bad decisions, but they were most likely acting in a way they believed would make the company prsoper, even if they seemed like stupid poor decisions at the time. Whether the salary increase affected the company at all is completely arguable from both sides. They could not raise their pay so much that it was even a blip on companies books, but it was not at all reasonable or rational on a social level to do such a thing.
I think that people have let thoughts of democracy ruin their overall sense of social rationality. Democracy is barely functional as a political systems, let alone a system of management within a company. And I agree that upper management is not as important as the workers, but that isn't the workers decision to be made. It's the owners decision to be made, whether that be one man or a group of majority share holders. They are the ones with the most at stake, that is the company.
Everyone always makes that particular statement about upper management. And while the work in a bee hive is all accomplished by workers, the hive still dies if it's without a Queen. The same thing can be said with the situation of corporate management. They seem useless, but the company does not run without them. Without them, there is no company and place for the workers to work. It's symbiosis, and everyone treats it like they are parasites. The workers are responsible for making the product and shipping it places it needs to go. But decisions that upper management makes can make a company prosper or die. If that was not the case, we would not have them in a company structure.
Also, Unions may have one point been about giving the workers control of the company, but it hasn't been like that in a long time. They aren't fighting for reasonable work hours or worker safety or even fighting for reasonable wages. All unions do is fight for ever increasing amounts of money or benefits from a company. That system is completely broken at this point. All it does is look at the workers and not the situation. And as I mentioned, collective bargaining is what prevented people from making the decision to stay employed at lower wages if they chose to. It effectively robs them of the ability to make their own contract.
The company wanted to lose the foot to save the body, but the workers chose to let the body die because it's not fair to lose the foot. It wasn't fair to ask the workers to take pay cuts while some of the upper management got raises (some took a salary of $1 for the year, as it turns out), but it was rational on a business level to ask the workers to take a pay cut. The Unions irrationally chose to lose 18000+ jobs (I read that number somewhere, but don't quote me on it) rather than have 18000+ lower paid jobs.
I'll tell you why that wasn't allowed though: You can take money from private workers and the union wouldn't give a shit. You can't take money from the unions though, which is what this would have done. Unions give power to unions, not to worker. They are just as exploitative as any business or corporate structure, more-so in a lot of ways. The sooner everyone realizes that, the better off we'll all be. Also, as a side point, shared suffering is what makes collective bargaining possible, it's not what the point is. If one loses, all lose, that's the power of collective bargaining. Which is also what took away one of the points of a free society, the right to make ones own contracts with whomever they choose.
What is your idea of acceptable wages? That is rhetorical question because any two people have very different ideas of what that number is. It's not a number that fits everyone, that number does not exist. It's unacceptable to take a wage cut because of loss aversion. No matter how small it is. If they had said everyone gets paid 10 cents less an hour, the unions would have done the same thing and the company would still go under. I'm not saying they were not asking the workers to conceded a lot, they were. But good luck finding jobs for that many union workers in that area.
