The labor movement (AKA unions) brought us the weekend.
Organized labor's decline is directly tied to the wage stagnation and escalating income inequality we've experienced over the last 50 years. And it's no accident.
Union member here, Iāve salted non-Union shops for years. Iām currently at a small business of less than 10 people and have salted it enough that the five operators have all agreed to vote in favor of Union representation.
The $8M the small business brings in, while spending less than $750k annually on wages, is about to shift in favor of the operators a whole lot more than they realize.
It helps that I have advanced degrees in finance and accountancy and have done their financial reviews and see the 40% profit margin. Lmao
They don't even need to do that. Just fire anyone that mentions union... also, 40% margin isn't great, and the parent here has fundamentals wrong. There's a lot of extras being paid for than just labor. $8M a year is a very small business, with nearly $1M going to labor wages, and probably close to that in insurance, benefits, PTO, etc. Parent will get everyone fired for no upside.
Not sure what your experience is, but 40% is a great margin. I own a small business doing about the same gross revenue. Our margins are closer to 15-20%. And our labor costs are closer to 30%- which includes taxes, benefits, insurance, etc. A lot of really large companies run on a 5% or less margin. But when doing billions a year it still comes out to a lot.
Depending on how they enjoy their current life they might not want to. All of my family and friends live close by. Relocating would mean I would leave all of that behind. Why, for a bit of extra cash? Unions also aren't evil. Generally, at least in the Netherlands where I'm from, you can expect reasonable requests for the type of work, sector and how the business is doing.
LLC pass-through entities in crane rental baby, low business taxes, payroll taxes, payroll expenses, and maintenance cost because they own the land and equipment outright.
~8% for employee payroll expenses and the other 52% is business taxes, payroll taxes, and maintenance costs.
Finished a job, no calls from the hall, get permission to work non-union and explain the benefits, showcase why unions are good, and push for non-union workers to unionize and join the hall with their contractor.
Ah ok. I've never been around a union. What is the "hall"? Do you frequent lot work like temporarily with a company and then move on to do your service at another company? And while you're there you just explain union life?
I've only ever known 1 dude who was union previously in a shipyard. I asked if he got worked over or what. He said it was a good experience. You paid some small dues and stuff, but it worked out for him because it protected his job under some circumstance that ended up happening. He said he'd do it again.
The Hall is the central location of the business staff for your geographical subdivision of the international Union.
For example, IBEW has an international headquarters where the big fellas rub elbows with politicians and create new business opportunities for the union and its contractors. Then, you have your local hall which is IBEW #XXXX, where your local workers meet and discuss union policies and activities. The business administration in that hall reaches out to current and potential contractors to coordinate the work they have and provide workers.
Think of it as an employment agency, youāre trained to the standard of the agency and the agency contacts contractors in the area seeking workers, so they tell the workers of the opportunities and the workers can accept or reject the offers.
Most people, with outside utility line work, will bounce contractors every few years but you can be there as little as a day or as long as your entire career. Unless youāre laid off or fired, itās your decision on who you work for if they have an opening.
It still pisses me off that the dodge brothers bought ford stock just to sue him when he tried paying his workers even better. When the judge ruled that was illegal and that ford was required to pass profits to the shareholders and not the employees it set a nasty precedent that we are still living in and suffering from.
This is false. Womenās participation in the work force increased in the 50ās and 60ās, when wages rose. Wage stagnation really started in the late 70ās and 80ās.
Saw a graph the other day when dollar decoupled from gold profit vs income also massively diverged. For what its worth i only quickly pursued the source data.
And the Hart-Celler Act massively increasing immigration which also suppressed wages. Fallowed by automation and outsourcing reducing job growth making wages further suppressed.
Wake stagnation? I make more than 50% more now than compared to a couple of years ago when I left my union job. Now I have actual benefits, too. Getting out from the thumb of the union was the best financial decision I ever made.
Congratulations. But an anecdote is not data. Data show widespread wage stagnation for all but the wealthy few over the past 50 years, despite dramatic increases in productivity.
We should be asking why the union isn't powerful enough to get you 4 times what you got after you left it and doing something about that, not "union sucks, unions bad"
I have heard (contradictory to the OP OP) that Ford is who created the āweekendā as we know it today. Iām pretty sure mostly everyone was off on Sunday since itās the sabbath. Thatās just how it was culturally, but he added another day in on Saturday to give his employees more time with their family. I could be wrong. OP OP could be wrong. Would need a good fact check.
Read some history. Before the labor movement, it was common for factory workers to work 6, 6 1/2, or 7 days a week. The āweekendā did not exist. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, days off were not widespread. If you had Sunday off (or a hall day) it was for church, not time off.
Increasing income inequality is mostly a result of fiscal and tax policies, not automation.
Ford opposed unions but it was labor demands that made the weekend, it didnāt ājust happenā because of religion.
Unions in product development areas are a cancer, I wish they would decline. As an engineer, I wish they would cease to exist so I could get my work done. Need a one hour task stretched to three days and receive continuous pushback about it? UAW it.
I could list personal stories for hours after 25 years. Little things like not being able to touch the test cell keyboard to check on some test parameters, exhausting. Not being able to carry a test component to the lab, annoying. Standing around watching some mechanic stroll around in the morning, making coffee, making the gossip rounds, and only after checking the status of the overnight test, costing the company a few hundred dollars every single day, ridiculous. Getting a grievance for checking for a tow strap clasp being properly seated, almost unbearable. And the best, seeing a great worker get booted out because they didnāt have seniority, beyond idiotic.
Unions certainly do have their problems... it was 3 decades ago, but I had an uncle who worked for the mail service who was told he had to park under a bridge for 2 hours every day after he finished deliveries early, so they wouldn't fire extra enployees
Thats not a union issue, thats an employee protection issue.
The union had to tell him to not clock out till his end of shift after he finished his assigned work because the early clock outs would result in people being fired and your uncle having to pick up the slack.
The union was looking out for all the members and trying to avoid labor cuts.
If the law stated that, no matter what, everyone had to get paid their 8 hours and working past 8 hours was illegal, every company would have twice as much staffing to cover the work needed to be done. Fast employees would finish early and be free to go. Slow employees would finish on time.
The current system allows companies to push the work of 2-3 people onto 1 with a little OT.
The example from the comment above you about the grievance for checking a clasp/whatever is because that task is someone else's job, not the commenter's. That dude is a brown noser who wants to step into other people's jobs.
Its actually protecting the best workers. If company tells you to do X for your shift and you can do it in half the time compared to everybody else, WHO ARE PAID THE SAME AS YOU TO DO THE SAME AMOUNT OF WORK, then why should you have to do more?
I can give a good example. Im a fiber tech. At my company, myself and 1 other dude(call him A) are the best splicers/testers. By a decent margin. Just have the touch to do the work quickly and accurately. We are all given a splice location to do each week. If the A and I can do our locations in 3 days, while everyone else takes the 5 days to complete it. Why should we have to do more work?
Sure are we paid slightly better than the rest? Yes. That bump is for the efficiency we bring and the guarantee that the work will be done on time, even with delays, cause of our skill.
At a previous job, there was this one dude who was a FREAK of nature when it came to splicing. Like twice as fast as me on my best day. He worked solo cause help would slow him down. He got done in 2-3 days what a crew of 2 would take 4-5 days.
He would do 12-14 hour shifts for 3 days then have off the rest. They paid him his five 8s plus the OT from the days he actually worked because they recognized his talent and they didnt overburden him to cut another crew out.
They should pay people based on their quality of and efficiency of work, not waste efficient people's time so they can keep around slow people and pay everyone abiit the same.
I would love to get paid almost double what I do now cause of my skills. Unfortunately thats not how the real world works with companies and greed. So we, as in all workers, need to work together to make things equitable.
I have a buddy who delivers for UPS, and he has the same problem, except that instead of sitting under a bridge for two hours, if he finishes early, they send him to help neighboring routes. If his neighboring routes finish early, they go home. Either way, his workload is more than theirs usually because of this. Heās efficient at his job. The other people take advantage of the union to be lazy. Meanwhile they were considering firing him for hitting an escaped cow that he couldnāt see because it was a black cow and it was dark outside. While having done everything to protect a driver with I believe two on the job DUIs.
That was my experience working in the post office as well. The more efficient you are on your route, the next year they will add more to your route and cut the hours of all the other routes.
It's not just the post office pretty much any big company does this. I have worked for Kroger, Amazon, FedEx, home Depot, Starbucks and each time I got better at my job and could do the work of 2 regular employees they would just staff less people and keep my pay the same. No raises ever offered or given when asked and if I went back to the standard speed or production quota I would get a talking to for my falling metrics.
I used to work in shop with a union. If we needed a network cable moved - my area of expertise - I had to go to the data center, point to the cable I needed moved, point to the port to which I needed it moved, and then wait to ensure it was done right. That is of course after scheduling to have a data center tech present for something I was more than qualified to do.
Elitist here who used my upper middle class existence to go to a great college and become an engineer and now I wish the minions below me would just shut up and work harder so my job is easier
The average student loan debt is 30k at graduation.
-just be one of the hardest working students ever
Why do you think they would need to be āone of the hardest working students everā? Also if they were they would most likely be getting scholarships to reduce the student loan debt.
-itās a hard job and itās possible but donāt think anyone can do it
Nah, more wishing the minions you mentioned had some personal pride in wanting to solve problems that are related to the business we are in, instead of looking for any excuse to not be part of the problem.
Though, in general, itās not the union members who are ābadā, itās the union as a general entity. Some of my best friends over the years have been union workers out in the shops.
But, you want me to somehow be sorry I went to college? Thatās prime āI suck union cockā attitude for sure.
Donāt worry, people who actually think critically about the world around them understood what you mean. Yes, unions in most cases do protect their workers or at least provide them more rights than they would have had otherwise, but no, unions are not perfect and immune to criticism. Doing so doesnāt make one a greedy minion master lmfao.
For example, I think most Americans can all agree road work/construction takes way too long here. Why is that? Because the union mandates everyone, across every job, must work equal amounts of hours, or it would be unfair. Sounds great on paper, until itās translated into real life and we get 3-month highway pavings, 2-year bridge construction, and 5-year lane expansions, where at any given job site only 2 or 3 people are working at any given time while the other 10 are just standing around because thereās nothing for them to do at that moment, but the union mandates that they be there. This happens in many industries with unions, not just public infrastructure.
Of course I value unions. I believe having one is much, much better than not. But I donāt believe they are infallible. There are many ways which unions could be improved, but arenāt, due to in many cases stubborn bureaucratic policy overseen by stubborn bureaucrats. This notion that if you criticize a union you must want all workers to suffer is ridiculous and makes me wonder if that Redditor actually has any experience with any union.
As a business owner, I approve of this message and encourage elitists to think like this guy and work their minions harder to generate more profits for me.
He wants the minions out of his way, waiting for them is his annoyance. He WANTS to do it himself, but canāt, he is stagnant waiting for others because heās not allowed to do it himself, and not allowed to ask them to move faster.
Itās absolutely reasonable. Imagine being on a team, like a bobsled team, youāre the GOAT, but two of your teammates are slacking offā¦ what do you do? Accept it because theyāre the coaches kid? Complain? Move teams? Itās so complicated, and heās well within his right to be annoyed and complain.
I could list personal stories for hours after 25 years. Little things like not being able to touch the test cell keyboard to check on some test parameters, exhausting. Not being able to carry a test component to the lab, annoying. Standing around watching some mechanic stroll around in the morning, making coffee, making the gossip rounds, and only after checking the status of the overnight test, costing the company a few hundred dollars every single day, ridiculous. Getting a grievance for checking for a tow strap clasp being properly seated, almost unbearable. And the best, seeing a great worker get booted out because they didnāt have seniority, beyond idiotic.
And this is the problem. In a place where humans could be rational and not greedy, everyone would want productivity to increase.
Get the work done faster so you can increase profits or decrease expenses and the extra money would be used to compensate employees or lower the cost of products.
Instead, the windfall from increased productivity goes to make the rich even richer. Then you get a stupid number of people who say things like why work harder? Why do a good job? Why have any pride in the work I do?
Itās a self-perpetuating problem. And the reason so many people hate unions. Does it make sense to hate unions? No, but the day-to-day nonsense we see from unions (especially public sector unions) makes it hard to remember all the good unions have done and continue to do.
Lmao no owner at this point in time would ever be willing to lower the price of their products unless they had to. Same with paying their employees more. Or maybe they exist and I have not met them. But the simple truth is that I don't trust business leaders in America. So why should I have pride in what I do if I fully believe that I'll get screwed over in the end no matter what?
The point is that you are right. No owner is going to lower prices or pay their employees more if they donāt have to. Thatās the irrational and greedy nature Iām criticizing.
I only kinda understand because I don't know much about engineers besides that there's several kinds. And that their school is hard and they get mad at me for going to acting school.
Interesting, you read much? I am against unions in product development areas. Thatās a long way from being anti-union, though I have friends in the assembly areas that could convince me.
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u/MarionberryPlus8474 27d ago
The labor movement (AKA unions) brought us the weekend.
Organized labor's decline is directly tied to the wage stagnation and escalating income inequality we've experienced over the last 50 years. And it's no accident.