Why the GOP Really Hates Unions

[Harry Dresden]

Why does the right not like unions?

Unions are workers joining together to protect themselves. How can you hate that?

Your stance trusts the corporations over the unions to do the right thing.

It is just as I put it above.

my union (NALC) which i have belonged for 29 years,is about 50/50 maybe 60/40 (dems/repubs)....and the union leaders are so Democrat that they appear to shit Clinton/Obama turds.....but yet many NON-Dems belong.....im sure many other unions are the same.....so what about your statement above?......

 

[Diuretic]

I was part of a union and I hated it. Glad was I the day I found a better non union job. Glad that shit is over. The part I hated about it was when raises came around everyone got one. Even Joey the laziest piece of shit in the world. God forbid you try to fire him. He will just file a grievance.

You have some fucked up laws if you can't sack a lazy bastard. You need to get your legislators to fix that. Oh wait, you're not union now, you don't give a fuck. No need to worry then.

 

[manu1959]

They dont trust the workers to be fair to the Corporations.

They do however trust the corporations to be fair to the worker.

Now either they think workers are too stupid or they think the corporations are inherently more moral than people.

Why anyone buys that line I will never know.

lets see we just gave:

billions to the airlines...union

billions to the banks .... see construction industry .... unions....

billions to the auto makers....unions....

 

[Harry Dresden]

Bust the heads of the fucking scabs.

Do I make my position clear enough for you pandering quislings of the corporatocracy?

Edit....i know many die hard Dems. who are die hard Union....they would gladly bust the head of a scab.....and not think nothing of it....you are a SCAB period......

 

[Gunnen4u]

What do you mean WTF? Surprised at a different opinion? /quote]

No, just surprised that you came from that angle.

Why the fuck would a bunch of workers want to take over a business? Granted right now they could probably run it better than some of the twats who are fucking them up in large measure but the usual model is to allow management to manage but to have the union represent workers as a sort of counter-force.

I dunno, ask the ones at UAW. Question: why do they need to work there if it sucks?

By taking over, I meant using enough force to dictate what the company will have to do to meet their demands, even at the company's expense. Perhaps this wouldn't be the problem, if management had some balls. You say counter-force, this means an equal balance right? I am not seeing that in places.

Wages are worked out during collective bargaining. Wages can't be "too high" if they've been agreed on. The books are pored over, everyone knows the state of the company's finances, wages are agreed, that's how it goes.

Which is why I mentioned GM execs, etc, as spineless. They couldn't force a "no" out of themselves. If they did say no, UAW would keep crying or threaten a strike probably. They shouldn't have agreed on wages that were too high, as GM wasn't making enough money with relatively shitty vehicles to support wages, plus all the various benefits they have to grant to their workers.

Anyway, US unions are notorious for giving back during contract negotiations. That's what caused the CAW to split from the UAW some years ago. The UAW tried to monster the Canadian auto unions at GMH plants in Ontario into allowing a give-back when it wasn't necessary. The Canadians held out and came to an agreement, the UAW went ballistic because it's surrender policy was defied. I have to wonder at the leadership of some unions at times, they forget where their loyalties and interests should lie and they get too close to management. But that's no reason to attack the concept of unionism of course.

Of course not, I see the positive benefits and was at one time, willing to go into my Dad's line of work in his Union. When it comes to benefits and such, a Union definately keeps the cutthroats at bay.

I have a relatively low-opinion of today's Unions, because of politics among other things (it's more detailed than just this), and the way alot of the Union management does things, like they are corporate execs mabye? Or the fraud? It's why I didn't do my Dad's line of work, but according to him and mutual friends, the problem isn't totally local with the locals.

 

[Gunnen4u]

Yes, come bust my head someday when I am not a public-employee.

Just out of curiosity, why did you decide to take a public-sector job?

Most of the time, I really dunno my friend. Public sector job to me encompasses the service, unless everyone else thinks it different.

Getting in fights wouldn't bode me well is what I was driving at really.

 

[michiganFats]

Gunnen, I agree with you about today's unions. I am in favor of collective bargaining, but the larger unions are IMHO just as bad as the corporations they're claiming to protect the workers from. I've belonged to the Teamster's Union(12 years) and the UAW (I was forced to join in order to work a long-term contract job for a supplier on the factory floor). Large unions seem to me to be a perfect example of a good idea gone bad.

 

[Truthmatters]

Lots of Americans would love to have a union job right now.

 

[Harry Dresden]

Bust the heads of the fucking scabs.

Do I make my position clear enough for you pandering quislings of the corporatocracy?

Yes, come bust my head someday when I am not a public-employee and you might find yours splattered all over the wall.

That being said, no need to troll and ruin what might be a promising thread.

Don't you want the truth? I think he's serious. And I think I agree. And trust me, there are a lot more of us than there are of you.

Remember, we are the rabble!!!!

But then, you have the military.

bottom line Bobo......we are ALL Americans,and we have ALL been fucked over by the powers that be....it will have to be us,ALL of us, who get this joint rolling again,THEY are not going to care enough to do it,so it is up to US....there have ALWAYS been Dems,Repubs and BIG business.....and no matter who was in charge,you knew at the end of the day,that the country would still be there in the morning........lately we have had some pretty shitty leaders,from every sector.......dont judge all Repubs by the fucked up Repub leadership in the congress......all we ever hear from are those on the extremes...
left and right.....everyone closer to the middle seems to be more or less on the same page....

 

[sealybobo]

You are the product of a 30 year smear campaign on "UNIONS".

No, I am the product of a Union family.

For 30 years they have broken one union after another.

They convinced you that unions were the problem, but when unions were gone, you found out it was ALL AMERICAN WORKERS.

Who are whiney and over-demanding? I would love to make what some of those people make for jobs that are less-intensive than mine, or ones I had in the past. I all about American Workers, but there is a limit to it, and if they can't face reality, then that's tough.

If you feel above all this, consider your kids. What if they are not smart like you. Do you want them to live like people do in 3rd world countries?

If they're dumb, they're dumb, they'll have to take care of themselves none the less.

Third world countries are often the products of a terrible culture and society. Not because stupid people aren't getting paid 30 dollars an hour.

And the rest of this post borders on the incoherent or the un-educated. People who make that much money should be allowed to keep most of it. It's greedy, ignorant tools who buy into the lines put out by their "leaders: who force them to take their money elsewhere, if they didn't then people like you would take it.

I got 1000 back because that was how much I deserved. Quit crying and start making real money and then getting the tax rebate you want.

I just love pulling the truth out of people like you. Traitor.

The only reason America is better than all the other countries is because our government is for we the people and that translated into a government that faught for the middle class instead of us being just like every other country where there are a few rich people and a lot of poor.

If you grew up in Mexico, do you think you would be successful? EXACTLY! So expect your kids and grandkids to be poor, no matter how smart or hard working they are. But if they save REALLY hard, they can maybe one day have something. Forget about being rich though. That won't be possible. But they might be able to die with dignity.

And with your additude, and Glen Beck's, and Rush's, and O'Reilly's, and Bobbi Jindal's, don't expect to win any elections anytime soon.

 

[sealybobo]

Yes, come bust my head someday when I am not a public-employee and you might find yours splattered all over the wall.

That being said, no need to troll and ruin what might be a promising thread.

Don't you want the truth? I think he's serious. And I think I agree. And trust me, there are a lot more of us than there are of you.

Remember, we are the rabble!!!!

But then, you have the military.

bottom line Bobo......we are ALL Americans,and we have ALL been fucked over by the powers that be....it will have to be us,ALL of us, who get this joint rolling again,THEY are not going to care enough to do it,so it is up to US....there have ALWAYS been Dems,Repubs and BIG business.....and no matter who was in charge,you knew at the end of the day,that the country would still be there in the morning........lately we have had some pretty shitty leaders,from every sector.......dont judge all Repubs by the fucked up Repub leadership in the congress......all we ever hear from are those on the extremes...
left and right.....everyone closer to the middle seems to be more or less on the same page....

You can not expect the GOP and the Dems to get along. No matter how good the Dems plans are, the GOP are not going to support them. It just isn't how politics work. So while we have the power and the GOP can only obstruct progress so much, we need to get er done.

If it isn't clear to you by now, the GOP works for Corporations that want to send jobs overseas, AND GET TAX BREAKS for doing so. There is no "meet you in the middle" on that. But the GOP will say the Dems are "raising taxes", and THE COST IS GOING TO SPREAD TO THE CONSUMER!!! So what? I'd rather have our country back and pay double for a chair or boat. Yesterday Clinton went to China and China said we need them more than they need us. WTF? And the sad thing is, after the last 8 years, that is probably true. We went from the largest creditor nation to the largest debtor nation.

But that's ok, Obama is going to fix that. And he's going to have a balanced budget after 2013. Did you know that the Iraq war $ spent is not reflected on Bush's spending? He had a lot of "descretionary" spending that aren't counted on his horrible number.

And thank God the dems have a big enough of a mandate and majority that they will be able to make some progress. That wasn't possible the last two years with Bush in office and a 1 person majority in the other two houses. Even now, the GOP will ban together to cock block any progress.

I think Obama is sweet. He said it best yesterday. If we agree on 90% of the bill but disagree on 10%, then we are just playing politics here.

Just watch the GOP the next couple years. Watch how they obstruct everything that is good. Great example. The GOP bankrupted the USA on defense spending. So when Obama cuts defense spending, the GOP will scream that he is weak on terrorism.

And the sad thing is, American voters fall for that kind of shit. Especially down south.

They will claim that every decision the Dems make will RUIN THE COUNTRY, when the fact is, the GOP already did that.

 

[sealybobo]

Gunnen, I agree with you about today's unions. I am in favor of collective bargaining, but the larger unions are IMHO just as bad as the corporations they're claiming to protect the workers from. I've belonged to the Teamster's Union(12 years) and the UAW (I was forced to join in order to work a long-term contract job for a supplier on the factory floor). Large unions seem to me to be a perfect example of a good idea gone bad.

So why are so many non union Americans getting f'ed in the a hole?

Can we throw Unions into the bowl as far as who caused this economic crisis? Them, Freddy & Fanny, Poor people.

So this thread should be, "WHY THE GOP REALLY HATES LABOR"

 

[sealybobo]

Holy Crap! I found a great Thom Hartmann article that will explain exactly why the GOP hates labor/unions.

ThomHartmann.com - McKinley or Roosevelt? This Election is as Much About the Past as the Future

Little tidbits:

From the Gilded Age to the Great Depression to today, the economic agenda of conservatives has been easily summarized in two words: "cheap labor."

Unions have been a bulwark of the middle class ever since the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Prior to Roosevelt’s 1935 Wagner Act, which guaranteed workers' rights to unionize, America had been mostly either very rich or very poor.

At the founding of America, the closest we'd had to a middle class was the "plowmanry" class Jefferson exalted - small family farmers – who were a major force in American politics from the time of the Revolution until the Civil War. But the industrialization of America, and the formation of huge agricultural monopolies made possible by rail transportation, began to wipe out the farming middle class (leading to the progressive Grange movement in the late 1800s), and from that time until 1935 America was increasingly a Dickensian nation of richer and poorer, with a rapidly vanishing middle class.

Workers protested, but conservatives of the Gilded Age held both economic and political power. Eleven workers were murdered in the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 when the B&O Railroad cut wages: That year only three national unions existed, and all were under siege.

In 1886, Boston police fired into a crowd of protestors – part of 340,000 strikers nationwide – who were calling for a change in the national workday from 12 hours to 8. One Boston worker died in the hail of police gunfire that injured scores of others, and four labor leaders were hanged, seriously crippling the union movement.

Of the 12 million working families in America in the census of 1890, the average income for 11 million of them was $380/year (equivalent to about $7900 today), keeping them deep in poverty. In 1893, federal troops did battle with railroad strikers in 26 states, breaking a national strike and sending labor leaders to prison. Eleven years later, while the majority of American workers were still desperately poor, Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish made society headlines by throwing a dinner party for her dog, who made a grand entrance wearing a $15,000 diamond collar.

Following the Wagner Act's implementation, and Roosevelt’s raising of the top marginal income tax rate on multi-millionaires to 90 percent, however, the first true American middle class came into being.

But in 1947 the cheap-labor conservatives fought back. In the elections of 1946, Democrats lost control of both the U.S. House and the Senate, allowing Republican legislators to push through the Taft-Hartley bill, which essentially allowed individual states to opt out of portions of the Wagner act. It was an early domestic version of the "free trade" disaster we're seeing now with NAFTA and GATT/WTO - a race to the cheap labor bottom - that started to take root in the American south right after passage of Taft-Hartley. Although President Harry Truman vetoed the Taft-Hartley assault on labor, Republicans in the House and Senate overrode his veto and it became law.

From then until the end of the Jimmy Carter presidency, unionization - and, thus, average worker wages in the United States - only gradually declined. When Ronald Reagan came into office, a quarter of the American workforce was unionized, meaning half of Americans could raise a middle-class family on a single salary.

But then Reagan declared war on the middle class, starting with the air traffic controller's union (PATCO) during his first year in office. The conservative assault on labor has been unrelenting since then: Today only about 8 percent of the private-sector American workforce is unionized, and at the same time Education Secretary Rod Paige described the teachers' union as a "terrorist organization," George W. Bush announced plans to lay off over 700,000 unionized government employees and replace them with non-union "contractors."

While gutting the American middle class, conservatives also launched a well-funded propaganda campaign - using right-wing "think tanks" and talk radio - to convince workers that their growing economic woes were the fault of minorities ("affirmative action") and the poor ("welfare queens"). At the same time, they began stacking federal benches with conservative judges, and passing thousands of federal, state, and local laws, ordinances, and regulations that further weakened the powers of organized labor and their ability to unionize.

It's just fine, they said, for capital to organize in the form of a corporation. It's great when corporations organize into trade associations, chambers of commerce, industry groups, and lobbying consortiums. But to have workers organize to level the playing field? Inconceivable.

The result has been an explosion in CEO and executive pay, a rush of wealth to the conservative elite (the top 10 percent of Americans now own 71 percent of the nation’s wealth), and this year's cut in taxes to a maximum 15 percent for those who "earn their living" by sitting around the pool waiting for their dividend checks to arrive.

See, this is from 2004, so don't tell us liberals that we didn't warn you all!!!

ThomHartmann.com - McKinley or Roosevelt? This Election is as Much About the Past as the Future

Seriously, read the whole thing and tell me how Thom is wrong. Not if he's wrong, how.

 

[sealybobo]

Gunnen, I agree with you about today's unions. I am in favor of collective bargaining, but the larger unions are IMHO just as bad as the corporations they're claiming to protect the workers from. I've belonged to the Teamster's Union(12 years) and the UAW (I was forced to join in order to work a long-term contract job for a supplier on the factory floor). Large unions seem to me to be a perfect example of a good idea gone bad.

You like my Thom Hartmann op ed's. Read the one I posted and tell me if it is incorrect.

 

[Truthmatters]

FDR saved this country when he helped the worker prevail.

If he had not pushed the New Deal the average American would have revolted and we may have ended up a communist country.

 

[sealybobo]

FDR saved this country when he helped the worker prevail.

If he had not pushed the New Deal the average American would have revolted and we may have ended up a communist country.

And then the Republicans revised history so no one remembers that.

It has been a 30 year campaign to con/kill the middle class.

Notice how they got us arguing over Unions, meanwhile they are raping us non union Americans in the a hole too.

Divide and concur. Or conquer. How do you spell it? I'm done. Goodnight.

 

[Patriot2009]

When the economy is great, workers benefit as wages increase dramatically, with or without unions. If companies don't pay enough, then they will not prosper. On the other hand, when the economy takes a downturn, unions tend to keep businesses from being competitive. This is not to say unions have no good purpose. The reason they came about was due to the fact that business took advantage of their labor for so long. The problem now is that the unions have gone too far, hurting not only the businesses they work for but also themselves directly.

Obviously, some unions are much stronger than others. I think we need to ask ourselves what makes an auto worker worth $45.00 per hour (wages and benefits included), while the butcher at your local union grocery store is only worth $22.50 per hour. Adding to that, we should ask ourselves another question; could those jobs (autoworkers) that are paid $45.00 per hour be filled by people making $30.00 per hour? Would people stand in line for those same jobs at $30.00 per hour?

People constantly complain that we have lost all of our manufacturing jobs. Well, we have priced ourselves out of the market. It is that simple. I'm not against employees making a fair living wage. However, it needs to be competitive on a global basis, within reason.

The claim that American workers have priced themselves out of the market is nothing but pathetic jargonism that ignores the fact that even at their zenith in the 1950’s unions never had more than 35% penetration in the workforce. If one is to accept your argument one has to believe that 1/3 of the workers ( less than 10% of today’s workforce) priced the entire workforce out of the market! The very notion is laughable.

The reason that manufacturing jobs have fled the nation is that we have had a government that has encouraged and even financed the practice. Many billions of our tax dollars have paid for the construction of plants for American corporations overseas that have caused the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs in the U.S.

 

[Alpha1]

see the hate for workers here?

I belonged to the IBEW for 37 years deshrag....what union did or do you or your husband belong to.....????
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What ?....NONE ? Thats what I thought....

 

[Truthmatters]

I have family members who belong to unions and they make their jobs much safer.

 

[Annie]

see the hate for workers here?

I belonged to the IBEW for 37 years deshrag....what union did or do you or your husband belong to.....????
.
.
.
.
What ?....NONE ? Thats what I thought....

I've belonged to IBEW and meatpacker's union. Caused more trouble than they're worth.