What website can tell why modern day labor unions not beneficial to the long-term interests of their members?

Question

i dont necessarily need specific answers, but any helpful site would be appreciated

Answer 1

i don't know of any site, but i can tell you from experience that labor unions are bad for people. its like a form of communism. you cant have a socialist idea in a capitalist society. Labor unions stipulate that all employees are equal, regardless of merit or ability. if you are in a certain classification, than you get paid what everyone else in that classification gets paid. in other words, if you work harder, you wont get paid for doing a better job, or for getting more done. And it also means that the slowest person dictates the amount of work, since doing more than them wont get you any better pay, and it will cause the rest of your coworkers to resent you for making them look bad, ie trying to raise the bar, so to speak.

In the end it means that people get advanced according to seniority, instead of merit and ability. some certification comes into play according to the job you are in, but mostly it means that people who wont understand the job very well end up doing, while the person who might have done the job better, ends up getting harrassed constantly for "raising the bar".

While Unions do get better pay for their members, and they do have a better say in the job enviroment, but do those people really need to get paid that well in the first place. i mean everyone wants a good paying job, but should you get paid well for doing a crappy job?? Also unions make it even harder for employers to get rid of the "bad apples" in the work place, for they are protected by the union, again regardless of merit or ability.

IE - if someone does a shitty job, and the manager is trying to discipline this person, the union would step in and say something like, you cant discipline this person for not doing the same workload as this other person simply because they arent that person, and setting workload levels arent allowed since it sets an unfair arbitrary amount. its all a bunch of crap.

Answer 2

Well, I like unions...but their influence is limited when it's so easy to outsource jobs to countries where there are much lighter (or no) punishments for breaking labor laws.

Sometimes, when plants have to deal with long-term strikes, the parent company just up and moves the operation to another country.

Like at a Boeing plant...the workers won a lot of rights through a long strike.

And the plant is shutting down and moving...somewhere. Probably another country.

Long term? The union didn't protect the workers from the fact that the US has few sanctions against countries who routinely commit labor law and human rights violations. This country will not only import goods from other countries for cheap, it'll also export jobs in the form of office/factory relocations.

Now, the workers have no jobs...so the rights they won don't matter much.

In a country that will impose giant tariffs on some goods and no tariffs whatsoever on others (for instance, there's a GIANT tariff on sugar, which means that it's profitable for Big Sugar to drain the Everglades and plant it in sugar rather than us buying sugar from other countries), unions can only do so much.

I love what unions have done. But if the job goes to another country, US unions can't fix the labor rights violations. Unions have their place, but they deserve to operate in a country that respects ALL human rights. We could punish countries that break labor laws by refusing to import their goods and refusing to outsource jobs to them.

But right now, that's not the case.

That's not the fault of unions. They do what they can in a hostile society.

But if those people had rolled over and let the company do what it wanted...they might not have their jobs sent elsewhere. It's a filthy compromise, but when the government will let companies step on your rights, it might make sense in a twisted way.

Edit: oh, yeah--look up charter schools. Like, I saw this thing on 60 Minutes, I think it was, where schools somewhere in California needed to improve under No Child Left Behind.

But the teachers' union wouldn't play along.

So they started charter schools and only hired non-union teachers.

And the schools are way better.

I forgot about teachers' unions. Some schools really suffer under the influence of teachers who want to have rights for doing a bad job. Those charter schools had the right to hire motivated, happy, good teachers who really turned the schools around.

Something to think about...

Answer 3

Unions are as needed now as they ever were. If you are not in the Union you are doing yourself a disservice.

Answer 4

Any of the right wing Republican websites would be more that glad to help you.