On Tue, 14 Oct 2008 11:35:54 -0700, "Joel Koltner"
wrote:
"Jim Thompson" wrote in
message ...
That's basically what happened with INCO in Huntington, WV, though it
took about a year for the facility to be sold and resurrect as
Specialty Metals, sans union and at 1/5 the hourly pay and with no
benefits ;-)
That seems rather draconian, but of course I don't know anything about the
industry -- if they're still producing a quality product and managing to
attract employees, more power to them, I suppose. To me paying very little
and offering no benefits would suggest that the job doesn't require skilled
labor to produce quality output nor that employee retention matters a lot. In
fact, it's probably be the kind of job that robots ought to be doing. :-)
What happened was that union employees earning, on average, $35/hour
plus benefits (equivalent to ~$50/hour), demanded more than INCO could
afford to pay. INCO just closed the doors. Specialty Metals won the
game ;-)
Back in the late '80s as a teen I applied to work for a video rental store,
asking for $5/hr when the minimum wage was then $3.35/hr. The guy told me no
way was he going to pay me that, which at the time just made me mad, since I
knew I could typically be at least 50% more productive than the average worker
and also had the "computer skills" that -- again at the time -- it was
unlikely other teens would have had. In retrospect of course the real problem
was that there was no reason for the guy to *know* I really was worth more...
or that he necessarily *wanted* someone worth more in the first place. I see
somewhat similar behavior in industry today: Many managers, not being
particularly skilled themselves, would rather hire three mediocre engineers
for $50k/year, rather than two really good engineers who will be more
productive than the three at, say, $70k/year, even though the later scenario
is better both for the employees and the company.
---Joel
**** the unions.
But vote for Obama... a depression is good for the country.
...Jim Thompson
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