Yes, unions were good for the working people.....too good. Paying top wages and benefits to people that did monkey jobs. That's why manufacturers left this country or replaced American workers with automation.
And guess what? The housing bubble was good for millions of people too, until it crashed. So was the tech bubble until it crashed. Unions were no different. It became a bubble of sucking dollars from the company until there were no dollars left.
All bubbles burst Joe. It's just a fact of life.
Gee, how come the bubble of CEOs getting paid obscene salaries never seems to burst.
Okay, let's take a look at the sheer stupidity of the statement. Those Union guys demanding a LIVING WAGE for doing "monkey work". Yeah, how totally unreasonable of them.
Me, when I'm travelling down the highway at 65 MPH in a machine made of glass and metal propelled by a flammable liquid, I really WANT The people who put that together to be happy with their jobs.
And while we are at it, it was totally unreasonable for the people of Cleveland to insist the factories clean up their ******* act when the Cuyahuga river caught on fire
When the rich were told they couldn't pollute the river anymore, they just moved their factories to some place where they don't have democracy and just let them pollute the rivers down there. Those unreasonable people, actually expecting clean air and clean water.
Seriously, this is why I stopped voting Republican. You guys are all manner of fucked up.
**** paying the people who do the work a living wage, I want to make money on my stock!
**** people who live in the city wanting to be able breathe the air and drink the water, I want to make a profit.
**** those little kids who got blown away by a crazy person who was able to buy a gun, I want to compensate for my fears!
Conservatism becomes, at the end of the day, an excuse for selfishness.
Seems to me that you have it a bit backwards. It's the unions that became so selfish.
The more a union worker makes, the more the unions make. In the beginning, unions did put the worker first. As they got bigger, it's the union that became the most important.
There is a difference between a living wage and a ridiculous wage. Let me give you some personal examples:
When I was a kid, Cleveland was a big steel town. I was in a band at the time and the other guitarist was older than I was. He worked at the steel mills and asked me one day if I wanted to take a ride with him to pickup his paycheck. I was on summer vacation and had nothing better to do. Besides, I wanted to see what the mills were like from the inside.
I knew he worked on the train, but really didn't know much more than that, so I struck up the conversation.
He told me that he was a fireman on the trains. Okay, so what does a fireman do I asked? He said the fireman shovels coal into the engine to make the train run. Confused, I asked "They don't have trains like that anymore, do they?" "No he replied, but the union says that every train must have a fireman on it."
So basically, the union forced the mills to put people on trains that didn't do anything but ride around on them. They made fantastic money at the same time. Another example:
I went to my friends house and he was in the front yard talking to his neighbor. When I approached them, he introduced me to his neighbor; they were in the middle of a conversation.
His neighbor was talking about how long he was away from home. He was a welder at the steel mills and spent the last three weeks there. I had to interject by asking why he spent three weeks away from home when the mills were only 15 minutes away?
As it turns out, he didn't have to be away one day. He and his wife were fighting, so he lived at the mills for three weeks because the welders had their own little room equip with a television set, a fridge, a stove, and cots.
He was "on call" as they say, but in reality, he used work to stay away from his wife, and at the same time, they paid him time and a half to live there. Yes, they called him to weld something once in a great while, but basically, they paid him outstanding money to just hang out and do nothing because each shift had their own welders to take care of the everyday work.
Laughingly he confessed, he thought his wife started fights with him because of the great money he made.
I could fill ten pages of the ridiculous union stories I have, but they are all pretty much the same.
