Nat'l Labor Relations Board rises from the dead, goes after Boeing

[Dik2]

Grace62 wrote:
It's not clear to me how the people who design, produce, and maintain the product, therefore creating the company's profits, value, and reputation, can be referred to as "parasites."

The people aren't the parasite, the union is.

[cbelt3]

Grace-

As I noted, there is symbiosis and there is parasitism. When the union saps the strength of the company, it's a parasite. I would, of course, put overpaid "C" executives in that classification as well.

I have worked in three separate union shops in my day, admittedly as an Engineer and as "Management". In all cases the 'rank and file' union members will happily tell you that the 'damn union isn't worth spit' and 'just takes our money and doesn't do nothing for us'.

I can tell a few stories about the difference between bad union attitudes and good union attitudes. My favorite bad union attitude was in an armored vehicle factory. The union was the UAW.

I was working on a prototype tank turret as a designer. We had the prototype turret out of the tank and were checking wiring runs. A union electrician was under the turret operating the equipment... I was not allowed to touch anything. The chain hoist started to slip, and would have crushed the electrician. So I took one of his tools and jammed it in the hoist, saving his life.

He filed a grievance against me for touching his tools.

THAT is a parasitic / oppositional attitude.

[Grace62]

Dik2 wrote:
[quote=Grace62]
It's not clear to me how the people who design, produce, and maintain the product, therefore creating the company's profits, value, and reputation, can be referred to as "parasites."

The people aren't the parasite, the union is.
Unions are people, nothing more, nothing less.

[Grace62]

cbelt3 wrote:
Grace-

As I noted, there is symbiosis and there is parasitism. When the union saps the strength of the company, it's a parasite. I would, of course, put overpaid "C" executives in that classification as well.

I have worked in three separate union shops in my day, admittedly as an Engineer and as "Management". In all cases the 'rank and file' union members will happily tell you that the 'damn union isn't worth spit' and 'just takes our money and doesn't do nothing for us'.

I can tell a few stories about the difference between bad union attitudes and good union attitudes. My favorite bad union attitude was in an armored vehicle factory. The union was the UAW.

I was working on a prototype tank turret as a designer. We had the prototype turret out of the tank and were checking wiring runs. A union electrician was under the turret operating the equipment... I was not allowed to touch anything. The chain hoist started to slip, and would have crushed the electrician. So I took one of his tools and jammed it in the hoist, saving his life.

He filed a grievance against me for touching his tools.

THAT is a parasitic / oppositional attitude.

Sorry but I don't see what that has to do with relationships between labor and business. Individuals behave all kinds of ways, union or none. We're talking about the legally protected rights of workers to organize, to bargain, and to strike.

[August West]

Yes, unions can and should be partners in business. If they are not, the relationship changes from symbiosis to parasitism

How does this account for the business efforts to bolster corporate pay (bonuses) and to design stock plans which emphasize shareholder profit over worker interest? I can easily imagine management as parasitic also.

[Grace62]

Yes that's the thing and both you and cbelt hit on something important here, the balance of power between business and labor is very seriously out of wack. When workers can be treated like disposable rubbish, as they have been over the past decade, it does not set business up for health and prosperity, it sets business up for short term gains and long term disaster.

What I would like to see in American business, and maybe we're finally starting to turn this page, is the return of "knowledge people" to management, and a turn away from the "money people."
Knowledge people actually understand the product the company sells and the industry and bigger business environment of which it is a part. If we'd kept visionary "knowledge people" at the helm of our auto manufacturing businesses for example, could some of that disaster have been avoided?
No foreign enemy could have done to our economy what we've managed to do ourselves in just a few short decades. Scapegoating workers needs to stop, for starters.

[$tevie]

http://www.slate.com/id/2293526/

[cbelt3]

Grace62 wrote:
Yes that's the thing and both you and cbelt hit on something important here, the balance of power between business and labor is very seriously out of wack. When workers can be treated like disposable rubbish, as they have been over the past decade, it does not set business up for health and prosperity, it sets business up for short term gains and long term disaster.

What I would like to see in American business, and maybe we're finally starting to turn this page, is the return of "knowledge people" to management, and a turn away from the "money people."
Knowledge people actually understand the product the company sells and the industry and bigger business environment of which it is a part. If we'd kept visionary "knowledge people" at the helm of our auto manufacturing businesses for example, could some of that disaster have been avoided?
No foreign enemy could have done to our economy what we've managed to do ourselves in just a few short decades. Scapegoating workers needs to stop, for starters.

Well put. I've always felt that the minute a company starts being run by the accountants, it's in the splat phase of a death spiral. I've seen that happen twice to companies I worked for. In both cases the accountant / CEO actually CLOSED the only profitable line of business (yes, laying my butt off along with hundreds of others).

[Grace62]

$tevie wrote:
http://www.slate.com/id/2293526/

Good article, thank you. Depressing, but good to keep in perspective.

This makes it all the more heartening to me that the NLRB is apparently coming back to life. One of my hopes for the new Obama administration is that they would finally put some muscle behind our laws that are supposed to protect the rights of workers, laws that have been ignored for a long time.
I'm hearing here in Jet City that Boeing is negotiating a settlement with NLRB. They do not have the law on their side, that's clear. But the penalty put up by NLRB, to close the SC production and return jobs to Washington, probably too draconian and would be held up in court by Boeing for a decade, doing workers no good.
NLRB has put American business on notice, that they will NOTICE what's being done to labor, at least.

[Ted King]

Grace62:

What I would like to see in American business, and maybe we're finally starting to turn this page, is the return of "knowledge people" to management, and a turn away from the "money people."
Knowledge people actually understand the product the company sells and the industry and bigger business environment of which it is a part. If we'd kept visionary "knowledge people" at the helm of our auto manufacturing businesses for example, could some of that disaster have been avoided?

That was excellent, Grace, I agree with almost everything you said.

Here's a bit of my conjecture about how some happenings over the last several decades have played a big role in leading us to this state in labor-management relations: After WWII the U.S. economy was a relative superstar. We could build a lot of stuff and people everywhere in the world were demanding a lot of stuff. Labor unions were still strong in the U.S. after the struggles of late 19th Century through to the Great Depression. So with demand high and labor unions strong after WWII, we went through the 50's and 60's with labor and management were both getting wealthier at pretty much the same rate. By the late 60's and early 70's, though, the rest of the world was getting much more industrialized and transportation systems were reaching more places with greater efficiency. Management found that it was becoming increasingly viable to make more profits by using labor in other countries. The "balance of power" between labor and management that had existed a couple of decades after WWII was crumbling - with management getting more and more powerful.

In the capitalist/free-market system there has to be losers. If nearly everyone capable of working has a job then workers (labor) have a stronger hand to play in asking for more compensation for their labor. That leads to runaway inflation. The system breaks down if everyone has work - for the system to function there always has to be a group of people hungry enough for work to be willing to work for less than someone else is making at a job that they can do. (That is why it always pisses me off when I hear people implying that someone who can't find work must be morally deficient.) As long as there is sufficient demand for their products, management is generally better able to make more profits when there are more people desperate to get work. Because of well developed transportation systems, the rate of population growth that happens in even semi-industrialized areas of the world will continue to assure that management will continue to have the upper hand by far over labor - unless the rules of the capitalist/free market system are modified.