GatherNoMoss wrote:
As trade union member, who has found himself flopping around in a
muddy ditch laying conduit on mant occasions, I find it somewhat
puzzling the vitriol I sometimes hear from even other trades people at
how unions demand a certain wage standard for their efforts.
Not extravagent wages....just a wage package with which to raise even
a modest sized family with some level of comfort in this society.

The most puzzling aspect to all this is the silence of these same
union critics when it come to the salaries of say.....money changers.
What do these people do for us...these manipulators of
numbers...these parasites...these
carrion eaters ? These people who so often profit from misery and
collapse.

Our perspective has become so upside down.

Some will call me envious..."class envy".
I don't think that's it. I refuse to think of myself as a serf/slave.
Rather it is these union haters that are so class conscious.....they
believe in the classes, believe that they are of a lower class. They
don't somehow deserve better, but people like these money changers DO
deserve it.

Many of you union haters are stuck with a slave mentality.

-- snip --

When unions are asking for a good living wage to do honest work, that's
a good thing.

But all too often, unions don't promote pay for value -- they promote
pay for a warm body, and damnation for the manager or business owner who
wants to retain and reward the really good people. Not only that, if a
worker wants to improve his or her station by rising above the mediocre
a union environment automatically pits him against all his co-workers.

As witness to this ceiling of excellence in union jobs, of the handful
of people I know who have worked in union jobs, about half have been
threatened with violence for working too energetically.

I can work faster than most of my peers, on more technically difficult
material. I like to have that capability reflected in my paycheck,
without having to go through some bureaucracy to make it happen. I
_certainly_ don't want to have to put up with threats (although mine is
a white collar profession -- it would be interesting to see what form
threats would take in that environment).

So put in my vote for unions being a necessary evil -- necessary because
concentrating power in the hands of big-company management leads to evil
behavior, but evil because concentrating power in the hands of the union
leads to the same evil, only pointed in a slightly different direction
and wearing a different mask.

--

Tim Wescott
Wescott Design Services
http://www.wescottdesign.com

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