Lets talk unions....

[81Horse]

... capture, "process", and sell kitty gut to an offshore tennis racket manufacturer.

NOOOOOooooooooo!

 

[Hold West]

Let me tell you this people. I have been in fractionals for almost 7 years now. Prior to that, we discussed it in college. Let me tell you, management HATES unions.

Yep - unions interefere with management's right to: wantonly fire people, sexually harass them, age discriminate, overwork and underpay, lie, violate environmental and labor laws, violate OSHA requirements, cheat the public, hire illegals, on and on.... They HATE that.

 

[Hold West]

Guess which one has a "Union" ?

Sago coal mine had no union - 12 dead because employees were afraid to speak out. That and Bush administration anti-labor policies killed them all.

 

[Diesel]

Hmmm lets see what my union got me. 40k signing bonus. 50 percent payraise, fly from home, better schedule, better work rules, the list keeps going on and on.

Think about this though. Managment gets the union it deserves. Look at SWa and how much their pilots love the company but hate mgmt.

 

[Coool Hand Luke]

There is a reason why these companies do not like unions. Think about it. What's so bad about having an "employment contract"?

Let me ask you, how many upper level managers, do you think, have "employment contracts"? So if they think it's a good idea to have an "employment contract" for themselves, why is it such a good idea for you TO NOT have one?

nuff said.

 

[JPAustin]

The argument for/against unionism is the chicken or the egg argument. Which caused which? Did unionism cause angst against employees, or did management create the angst which forged unionism? There are arguments for both, but historically during the Industrial Revolution it is agreed that the managment created worker environments were far left of ideal.

Without unionism, the federal and state laws workers enjoy today as well as research into quality management concepts (to curtail the need for unions), would have never come to fruition. Many managements, and I should say SMART managements, now recognize that employees are as much intellectual capital as are the infrastructures supporting the product. As a result, to improperly manage the employee intellectual capital would be akin to improperly managing the infrastructure capital and will lead to the firm's faultering or demise in the worse cases.

If a company builds it's infrastructure intellectual capital correctly in the first place, then there is no need for artificial inefficiencies (constant inspections, retrofitting, etc) to ensure that the infrastructure will work as needed. If a company builds it's employee intellectual capital correctly in the first place, then there is no need for artificial inefficiencies from the unions to ensure the employees will work as needed.

Long story short, if a company wants a competitive edge, it won't need a union. It is not a cause-and-effect argument to say that the company with the lowest employee overhead is the most profitable. It might be correlational, but not cause-and-effect.

To be competitive in modern capitalism and to survive ever-evolving capitalism, a firm must treat its employees as intellectual capital, not necessary evils detrimental to the bottom-line. Unions have served their purpose and served it well. Those who fought for the rights and PROPER management concepts we enjoy today should be applauded and forever studied lest we forget. Nevertheless, unionism as we know it is in its twilight years and descending into the past.

 

[DJRobbioRobbio]

After reviewing my other post "Lead follow or get the hell out of the way" i have decided to tell you frankly about unions.

Let me tell you this people. I have been in fractionals for almost 7 years now. Prior to that, we discussed it in college. Let me tell you, management HATES unions.

Say you start your own company and you hire some people that you trust with Millions of dollars worth of you own personal assets. Then some jackass lookin for a buck tells you that you no longer understand your company and the needs of the employees that you hired and says that you should pay him to talk to your own employees that you hired.

How would you feel?

Me personally, I think that paying a union rep to speak for you shows that you are either too scared or cannot find the words to speak for yourself.

Unions destroy the bottom line of a company and makes me realize that gangsters, I mean unions will do anything to make a buck. Even if it means capitalizing on a few weak minded men and women to pay them for their services to talk. Heck, if thats the case, pay us dispatchers, we'll be your backbone to do your deeds.

Dirty deeds, done dirt cheap. "AC/DC" still lives...

I'm not against unions, however I think that sometimes they like to use collective bargaining (which is totally legal) as a means to force a company into getting what they want, especially when the straits look dire. A great line from a great cartoon Rocko's Modern Life in a little song called "Corporate America" pretty much explains it:

You can't fight city hall
You can't fight corporate America
They are big and you are small,
you can't fight city hall.

With that being said, as mentioned before it does allow for the mere employee to voice his opinions, as power in numbers does stand a chance against those big wigs with their big wig salary
However in the airline industy, unions are sooooo pointless....The airline industry is about CHANGE, and those that can adapt to it quickly are the soul survivors, while those that have overinflated pay scales, ineconomical pay raises, fleet and route structure (ie. they could make Enron look clean) are the first round draft cuts. Things like guranteed pay increases over the next 'x-amount' of years is ridiculous. Or you'll end up doing what Delta did, and approve a massive pay increase for your pilots, and then have something as devistating as 9/11 happen all over again. It's been proven that the airline industy works in 5 - 7 year cycles of gain and recession, but nobody estimates how much gain will be made, and nobody can deduce the amount of loss attributed to a recession. In all reality, if you work in the aviation industry, you do it because you love it, not because you have to, and you should be able to understand, and adapt to the cycles of the industry, and not piss and moan when things don't go your way, because people just aren't flying in your goddamn airplanes anymore. As my ground school instructor would commonly say, "McDonalds is always hiring".


P.S. CEO's are paid too much anyways. WTF are you going to do with an 80 million dollar bailout package, or a 15 million dollar yearly salary. Only a few people in the airline industry are even WORTHY of such a salary, and those are the people that have shaped the industy, or performed miracles to their own airline (a la: Eddie Rickenbacker, Juan Trippe, Gordon Bethune, CR Smith)

 

[RVSM]

1. Your sig is wrong. A person doesn't fall at 9.8 m/p2. That is the rate of acceleration of gravity. You accelerate initially at that rate but your falling speed quickly reaches a terminal velocity dependant on drag coefficients. I guess the $3060 you spent on PS103 didn't stick.

2. If unions are the big awful profit eating, business destroying monsters then how is it that the most profitable airline is also the most heavily unionized?

Have a nice day.

CAS
ERAU 1992

 

[DJRobbioRobbio]

1. Your sig is wrong. A person doesn't fall at 9.8 m/p2. That is the rate of acceleration of gravity. You accelerate initially at that rate but your falling speed quickly reaches a terminal velocity dependant on drag coefficients. I guess the $3060 you spent on PS103 didn't stick.

2. If unions are the big awful profit eating, business destroying monsters then how is it that the most profitable airline is also the most heavily unionized?

Have a nice day.

CAS
ERAU 1992

Oh no I'm aware that you fall alot faster than 9.8 m/s^2 in terms of terminal velocity. But the speed at which you fall is not a given. Earth's acceleration is , hence why I mentioned the term CONSTANT.

Apparently the 80 grand you dropped into Riddle's pocket didn't fare too much for your reading skills either.

 

[DJRobbioRobbio]

2. If unions are the big awful profit eating, business destroying monsters then how is it that the most profitable airline is also the most heavily unionized?

B/c there is a great working relationship between the pilots union, and the people in upper management. Not to mention, most WN pilots are hired with them already knowing that they're not going to get paid the big bucks like their DL or UA counterparts to fly airplanes, b/c that's just not what Southwest is about. Their corporate philosophy is about saving YOU the consumer money, while making it very lucrative and cost effect for the company. Southwest's unions understand this, and everybody interviewed by Southwest has to have a grave understand of this philosophy (the pilots even more so), or they're just not hired.

It's a lot easier to edge out negotiations with your unions if everybody in the company is playing on the same level field.