You undermine your argument with this statement. The company has a right to reduce its workforce in whatever consistent way it requires. They have to follow ADEA rules so as not to discriminate based on age and EEO rules so as not to discriminate based on race, etc, but only a union sees the value of making difficult force reduction decisions solely by seniority. Typical union thinking is they would rather see the entire company fail and everyone lose their job than make big cuts to save the business where 20 or 30% lose their jobs, but more importantly, 70 to 80% kept their jobs. Unions are masters of the BS headline that the big bad company fired 2,000 people. Of course they never mention the 8,000 whose jobs were saved.

Totally separate entities, taking credit for government programs further shows that you are simply another Kool-Aid drinker. The industrial revolution was a long time ago, and the government (not unions) is the primary entity now responsible for workplace safety.

Seniority is a total joke, it simply serves to protect the under performers that have been in place the longest. The company has the right to eliminate the dead weight, regardless how long they have been there. Our union shop has a significant number of "retired in place" individuals who know that they are protected under seniority, total joke. Work hard or go home.

Wow.

I can't believe this has lasted so long without going to PARF!

Sincerely, a decent conversation with two views that will never merge.

Skilled trades definitely benefit from unions whether they are unionized are not. The last company I worked for paid us a premium to keep the unions out of our shop. We had some guys in the company that came from a union shop beating the union drum and managed to convince a bunch of the younger guys they were getting screwed.
The reality was that the union guys would not accept the fact that long service with the company paid off incredibly well in the long run.
While the company never went union, the owner saved a pile of dough by making our benefits and holidays the same as the unions offering. The whole company suffered for this decision.
I always looked at the union wage as being minimum wage for a qualified tradesman.
Good tradesmen make more. Excellent tradesmen do better than that.

Unions definitely remove some of the flexibility that companies need to operate effectively.
Companies do not have the employees best interest at hand but their profit seeking owners and stockholders.
There needs to be a balance but what we end up with is swings of the pendulum.

My senior HR VP kept bugging me about layoffs in order of seniority. She became such a bother I laid her off and promoted her assistant. True story.

I don't suppose any of you union-haters have ideas for reform, so workers will still be protected???

Get rid of unions and laws will change to leave workers unprotected because of lobbying by business interests - just like what happened before!

No, I have never belonged to a union.

Boeing 1
Unions 0

Boeing's Machinists union OKs benefit cuts to keep 777X in Washington state - NBC News.com

Protected in what way? The government has multiple layers to protect against discrimination and unsafe workplace practices. If you mean collective bargaining, it is totally unnecessary. I spent plenty of time doing blue collar labor prior to going back to college, I stood on my own merits. If you work hard and do a good job then pay and success will follow, collective bargaining is for those that don't.

Unions are granted a legal monopoly on labor at a given company.

It would level the playing field if multiple unions could compete on the contract to supply labor.

718: I have been in the work force for 33 years. I have had many private sector non union jobs. I was never mistreated. That represents from the late 70s to the early 2000s. I now own a company with about one hundred employees plus subs. We treat them well because we fear they will go elsewhere and because it is the right thing to do. No union ever factored into these decisions. But morality and the market sure did!

We are talking about 2 different things. You are talking about the union protecting the dead weight. I'm talking about productive employees (regardless of age) who pull more than their weight and still face job loss scenarios at the whim of management's poor decisions by trying to force them do illegal things to 'get the job done'. (like fly broken airplanes, or work over duty hours, etc.) Without the union's protection, those pilots who are doing the right thing, would have been fired.

And seniority is EVERYTHING in aviation...

I'd like to hear a little more about Rattlesnak's experience with the aviation unions. I have heard thise before and I could easily see the airlines shaving pennies here and there ultimately making things unsafe for the public. Similar with the RR's and mines.

I can see why parts of the country (NE United States) need unions to keep from low paid people coming in from Mexico, etc and replacing them.

Other industries...not so much. Complicated problem, glad I don't have to solve it.

Do you believe it should be? Time in over performance/value to the company?

There sure are a lot of experts on labor unions posting in this thread. Some claim they know what every union is, or does, because of their first hand experience with one union. Or unions in one city. Or in one area of business. Some are only parroting what others have said or written. Every union is unique. Every local chapter of every union is unique.

I worked in a restaurant as a teenager. Does that make me qualified to say that I know everything about every restaurant in the world? I know what all restaurant owners think, how they treat their employees, how they prepare the food, because I have first hand experience? I have been to church. Can I accurately declare that I know the inner workings of all churches, what they believe, what is expected of the members, etc. because I have been there? Of course not. Those talking in absolutes and blanket statements are only showing their ignorance, and a bit of bigotry.

Some are just plain naive. Because they, personally, were never mistreated they think nobody was, therefore nobody needs protection. Because he is a responsible business man, all are and unions are not necessary.:rolleyes:

Bigotry? lol

Airlines would lose all their customers if they began to have accidents due to poor pilots. The market would fix that in an instant. No one would fly the accident pron airline and it would fail and management would lose their jobs and their pensions. And I would suggest the market would correct it much faster than a union protest!

What about that low rent airline that crashed in Buffalo a couple years ago due to a low hours pilot. I think they are still flying. But I want to hear more of what Rattlesnak is talking about.

Haven't there been multiple accidents in recent history involving senior pilots who have failed recurrent training but been allowed to retake (against instructor recommendation) because of their seniority? I work in aerospace and have spent a lot of time in flight test, I know that experience is not necessarily consistent with ability when it comes to pilots.

Bigotry is the state of mind of a bigot: someone who, as a result of their prejudices, treats or views other people with fear, distrust, hatred, contempt, or intolerance on the basis of a person's opinion, ethnicity, race, religion, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, socioeconomic status, or other characteristics.

So, black73, you are saying that the bigotry is against union members? The key word here is "person's". Several times in this thread you have tried to say that the union and the union worker are the same. This shows a basic lack of knowledge about how unions have evolved and how they operate today. I've negotiated/managed with six different national/international unions. I'd say this experience qualifies me to speak some what knowledgeably about the subject. Do you know what boilerplate language is? When you say that all unions are different, I respectfully disagree. Everyone I have worked with and the premier labor educational institutions (like Cornell's ILR School) will disagree with you. Unions operate on a premise that is outdated. McGregor's concept of Theory X drove the formation and continuation of unions. Today, any business still operating this way is doomed to failure or decline. Often, with a union's help.

Today, unions are the biggest obstacle to company progress and the ability to compete globally. Like it or not, it's a global market and you have to remain competitive. The USW, UAW, Teamsters, and others have all seen their membership drop, pensions dry up, and work decline due to their inability to adapt and short-term thinking. All of this has then had a negative impact on the individual union worker that you keep trying to bring into this conversation. When I worked in the steel industry, I saw more companies go bankrupt, not due to poor management but due to union ignorance. Bethlehem Steel had 16,000 active employees supporting 134,000 pensioners due to the union forcing boilerplate language (12 Points of Light) on all U.S. steel companies and requiring accelerated vesting of pensions when people were displaced by technology. They declared bankruptcy for the final time about 10 years ago and their former assets are now owned by a foreign company. This scenario has been played out over and over, industry after industry. It is the union, not the hard working union employee

Back to my examples, because some restaurants have failed, all are doomed to failure or decline. Restaurants operate on a premise that is outdated. Etc., etc., etc.,.......

Etc.,etc/

Really? And that is an unbiased opinion? You were not on one side or the other? Just an impartial observer? Or were you a member of the management team, the people that decide what products were made, how they were made, the QC process, responsible for updating or upgrading equipment to maintain quality, the marketing and distribution of the products, the party that signed the union contract, and the people that made the decisions that led to bankruptcy?

The unions are contracted to do X amount of work for X amount of dollars. How did their ignorance cause all the above factors to go wrong.

I know it is more convenient for you to believe, and try to convince others, so that you don't have to face your failures and your bigotry, that the unions and union workers are two separate entities, but that just is not true.