evil,
capitalism 101 doesnt stipulate that United CEO's give themselves massive raises as their company comes out of bankruptcy, and as their workers are at half salary and have already lost their pensions.
Capitalism 101 also doesn't require that CEO's make, on average, hundreds of times that of their labor workers. You honestly mean to tell me that UAW workers don't lay at home at night, worried about their mortgage payments, how they will send their kids to school, how they can retire, how they can make sure to stay healthy as to not incur massive medical bills (the cause of nearly half of bankruptcies).
Managers have more liability they should make more, i don't argue that fact, but if managers and CEO's wages increase, the workers who make that money for them should increase as well and it doesn't matter if you buy it or not, the fact is its not happening.
Of course Capitalism 101 would talk about workers and managers working together. The idea is, we all work hard, we all make money.
That is no longer the case in big business across the board. I would like for you to explain to me how the current state of the labor economy makes any sense. Rationalize to me why wages decrease and real earnings are lower than they were for similar work 30 years ago while those in the upper tax brackets earnings sky rocket every year.
damn you bossman, you know i love little caesar!!! it's the prefect combination of classical civilization studies, home town pride and nutrition....all hot-n-ready too for only $5
well, no offense vado but i'm sure now that i've asked this question, the whole of archinect is going to be giving me their blue collar street cred and the reasons why they are the utmost authority on the subject.
my beef with "capitalism" is that everybody seems to love it even though it tends to screw both white & blue collar workers alike. a capitalist society privileges those with capital, those that already have money. if have to work to meet living expenses, then capitalism is probably working against you
my understanding is that the real issue is the legacy costs involved with paying the healthcare pensions of retirees. the real outrage should be with the costs of healthcare and the fact that every citizen is not covered by the government. i've never understood why a company should be responsible for providing healthcare costs.
shit...it just ocurred to me that those indian workers making $6/day probably can't even afford to eat at little caesar despite the bargain basement $5 pizza pizza...wow, they really are poor
ive never worked a factory job... closest i came was the summers i worked at car dealerships as a porter. that really sucked because good lord... summer time in Kansas the sun is strong, and when cars sit on an asphalt lot for 12 hours, the steering wheels will blister your hands, and you get welts on the backs of your arms from accidentally touching the metal seatbelt clips...
Just because i haven't worked the jobs doesn't mean i cant sympathize with their plight though. I have no blue collar street cred. My parents worked white color jobs and we had a good house in the suburbs. But that 57k mark was were my family was at or below for the majority of my upbringing.
bossman - I did work a union job for several summers while in college. Helped put me through college, especially the union negotiated OT pay of 1.5 & 2 times base rate.
They line guys I was working with were mostly making high 40's to low 50's in pay. Their benefits were in line with the typical of the time which was pretty good. Medical/401K/profit sharing/etc. Not bad for a crew of mostly HS dropouts doing boring unskilled work.
One could make a decent living there, but.... Contract negotiations came up one year and the union voted to strike. I went across town and got my first intern job, at much less than my old union wage. Meanwhile the company decided to close the plant rather than fight. They liquidated the hard assets, and just wrote it off, leaving town. 300+ union members were now on the unemployment line. A couple years later the parent company that closed that plant filed for bankruptcy. Obviously there were problems. I don't blame the union for what happened, but I do blame the union for not recognizing a good thing when they had it.
excellent point vado, it is the legacy costs that are killing the american automakers (and many american companies beyond automakers)...who would have thought that old people drugs would be so expensive
Heres another angle. When I was working on a construction crew we did a tremendous amount of industrial repairs in Chicago. This was the dream repeat business that companies want. Clients who are willing to pay anything to get it done asap to get production back up. One by one during the 90's they disappeared. One in particular, a valve company on the westide, was hit by 2 strikes of which the workers didnt want. The union made them strike and a 120 year old factory up and said fuck you Chicago overnight. Gone was 200 jobs mostly held by Italien immigrant machinists. Gone was a major employer of Melrose Park and a lynch pin in the exciting and dynamic Italian comunity. These places arent mere factories for places like Melrose Park, theyre the enablers of a dynamic cultural exchange, free flow of goods and to lose them to some fat fuck cadilac driving organizing commie bastards is just not acceptable.
this was a rhetorical question for some of you to think about as you post on this thread. i'm not sure everyone here has really thought that deeply about the "plight" of the working man, it's reasons for existing, and it's place in our economy. it wasn't intended to incite a list of why you are or are not "blue collar."
Legacy costs are substantial and real, but, it goes back to making a product that GM can sell. Who cares about legacy costs when you're making $10k profit on every Escalade that sells?
america spends too much money on old people. my grandparents are still alive and pushing 90 years old. those old, defined-benefit retirement plans never envisioned people living 30 years after retirement. if i find out that i have to pay a premium on that escalade so that my grandfather can have viagra i'm gonna kill him myself.
got to - this is a very personal issue for my family since weve been watching our customers get put out of business for decades. And the day when a guy comes to your job site and asks when you'll be signing the "argreement" or they'll be trouble, you'll be just as inflamatory. Its criminal.
evil, i appreciate this is a personal issue for you as long as you understand that its an extraordinarily personal issue for an equal number of people who are on the other side of the coin. I find it criminal that even white collar workers have little to no recourse against the whims of their managers when not organized. Capitalism is not about making sure workers feel safe... no matter what some may say, capitalism is about black numbers at the end of the month... Any mercy or perks given out by management is not required by business, no matter how much they may be required by real life.
yeah that's great...until the mexicans unionize too
and forget gm, i think i'm getting a boxstar instead...only $590/month and who cares if it's built by mexicans, unions or alien robots tripping on 3dh fairy dust...it's too deck to care about any of that
Strawbeary - I hear you sister. My parents both run their own businesses too. Again, as has already been said... it's the retirement benefits that are severely putting all these companies in danger of losing eveything. Something really needs to be done to kill the activities of the health insurance lobbists. I hate the health insurance industry.
i'm a kraut. but i don't think i'd buy a kraut car. the kraut cars owned by people here spend much time in the shop. my honda has never been in the shop. it was built in england.
evil - I'd be pissed to if someone came to my place of work and told me to do this "or else" - but if we're going to add up all the anecdotal stories from unions and all the ancdotal stories from companies like Wal-Mart (well known for doing this) and other similar companies, I think it would be the wal-marts of the world who more often engage in this practice. Hating unions is easy, finding a way to protect your rights without them is hard.
puddles - you know, if it weren't for this global warming buisness, you could just have the elderly sit on the iceflows like tradition dictates.
tuna, puddles - the reason health care is back in the news is not Hilary - its companies expected to help out paying through the nose the health costs for their workforce, and those unable to paying the cost in produtivity and loss of the more qualified people who can find a job with benefits. The thing making public healthcare a possibility in modern america is the fact that the drug and healthcare industry is screwing over the rest of america, including whole other industrial sectors
evilp - even without organized labor, the rust belt would be rusting. No matter how low labor could go without unions, bangladesh, china, etc will be cheaper. We can't beat them because they don't care at all about their environment or their people. Do you want the sun obscured by a black sky at noon like it was in pittsburg during WWII? Eliminate the EPA and it will happen. Do you want people in your hot dogs? Eliminate the FDA. We've realized (okay, some of us have realized) that the costs for not being responsible are a lot higher than trying to pass them down the line to the poor and our children. Its starting to dawn on China and India, but there's a world of hurt coming down the line for them.
everyone - its not the american workers making GM, ford and chevy's car's suck - its the people at the wheel, if you forgive the pun. Most cars with foriegn nameplates are build right in this country. Toyota, mazda, mitsubishi, subaru... All built in places like Illinois, Ohio, South Carolina... Some have unions, some do not. If the people running the "big 3" didn't insist on trying to run their company like its still 1971 perhaps they'd be doing better. I find it very funny for people who can't shut up about how great the free market system is, as soon as the rules stop favoring the home-town plutocrats, suddenly the (otherwise big bad) government has to step in and either - bail them out (see: Chrysler), nullify the rule of law (abolish laws controlling collective barganing) or create oppresive tarriffs on foriegn companies (why Toyota moved here in the first place). So if you're going to tout the free market system as a gift from god, then stop bitching when its your turn to take the lumps, because the guys who sweat for a living have already had more than their fair share.
evilp - perhaps if you unionized your place of employment you'd be working less and earning more. $57K and a 40 hour week I bet would sound pretty good to your fellow employees.
Crowbert - I completely agree. It's the health insurance system in this country that sucks. My parents, my brother and soon to be my other brother are all work in the healthcare industry, so my issues with the healthcare system started way before Hillary came into the spot light. It has nothing to do with the healthCARE system. But that's a topic for a whole new thread.... I'll get off my small soapbox now.
hello? is it crazy pills time again? some people are too poor to eat at little caesar's pizza...that's almost as absurd as paris hilton in jail until you realize that it's true and suddenly reality has been shaken again.
and liberty bell, thanks for the compliment. i thougth that was a nice sentance too.
how many of you have ever worked a blue collar job for any serious length of time in your life? how many of you know uaw workers or anything about their day to day lives? does anyone here have any idea what they really make, what benefit package they are asking for, and why they are not working? is this just an ideological conversation being had by elite, educated, white collar individuals based on generalizations about unions, corporations, and what you think people deserve and don't deserve in a world that most of you have virtually no interaction with at all?
striking at $57,000 a year plus benifits
i worked at a tractor factory,
a bread factory,
a plastic injection molding factory,
evil,
capitalism 101 doesnt stipulate that United CEO's give themselves massive raises as their company comes out of bankruptcy, and as their workers are at half salary and have already lost their pensions.
Capitalism 101 also doesn't require that CEO's make, on average, hundreds of times that of their labor workers. You honestly mean to tell me that UAW workers don't lay at home at night, worried about their mortgage payments, how they will send their kids to school, how they can retire, how they can make sure to stay healthy as to not incur massive medical bills (the cause of nearly half of bankruptcies).
Managers have more liability they should make more, i don't argue that fact, but if managers and CEO's wages increase, the workers who make that money for them should increase as well and it doesn't matter if you buy it or not, the fact is its not happening.
Of course Capitalism 101 would talk about workers and managers working together. The idea is, we all work hard, we all make money.
That is no longer the case in big business across the board. I would like for you to explain to me how the current state of the labor economy makes any sense. Rationalize to me why wages decrease and real earnings are lower than they were for similar work 30 years ago while those in the upper tax brackets earnings sky rocket every year.
damn you bossman, you know i love little caesar!!! it's the prefect combination of classical civilization studies, home town pride and nutrition....all hot-n-ready too for only $5
I worked in a printing press
As a construction laborer
and apprenticed carpenter
And I drove an 81 baby blue Oldsmobile Delta 88.
Best fucking car I ever had. If they made them like that
still, there wouldnt be a problem.
well, no offense vado but i'm sure now that i've asked this question, the whole of archinect is going to be giving me their blue collar street cred and the reasons why they are the utmost authority on the subject.
my beef with "capitalism" is that everybody seems to love it even though it tends to screw both white & blue collar workers alike. a capitalist society privileges those with capital, those that already have money. if have to work to meet living expenses, then capitalism is probably working against you
my understanding is that the real issue is the legacy costs involved with paying the healthcare pensions of retirees. the real outrage should be with the costs of healthcare and the fact that every citizen is not covered by the government. i've never understood why a company should be responsible for providing healthcare costs.
shit...it just ocurred to me that those indian workers making $6/day probably can't even afford to eat at little caesar despite the bargain basement $5 pizza pizza...wow, they really are poor
ive never worked a factory job... closest i came was the summers i worked at car dealerships as a porter. that really sucked because good lord... summer time in Kansas the sun is strong, and when cars sit on an asphalt lot for 12 hours, the steering wheels will blister your hands, and you get welts on the backs of your arms from accidentally touching the metal seatbelt clips...
Just because i haven't worked the jobs doesn't mean i cant sympathize with their plight though. I have no blue collar street cred. My parents worked white color jobs and we had a good house in the suburbs. But that 57k mark was were my family was at or below for the majority of my upbringing.
bossman - I did work a union job for several summers while in college. Helped put me through college, especially the union negotiated OT pay of 1.5 & 2 times base rate.
They line guys I was working with were mostly making high 40's to low 50's in pay. Their benefits were in line with the typical of the time which was pretty good. Medical/401K/profit sharing/etc. Not bad for a crew of mostly HS dropouts doing boring unskilled work.
One could make a decent living there, but.... Contract negotiations came up one year and the union voted to strike. I went across town and got my first intern job, at much less than my old union wage. Meanwhile the company decided to close the plant rather than fight. They liquidated the hard assets, and just wrote it off, leaving town. 300+ union members were now on the unemployment line. A couple years later the parent company that closed that plant filed for bankruptcy. Obviously there were problems. I don't blame the union for what happened, but I do blame the union for not recognizing a good thing when they had it.
excellent point vado, it is the legacy costs that are killing the american automakers (and many american companies beyond automakers)...who would have thought that old people drugs would be so expensive
Well you asked for it Lebossman
Heres another angle. When I was working on a construction crew we did a tremendous amount of industrial repairs in Chicago. This was the dream repeat business that companies want. Clients who are willing to pay anything to get it done asap to get production back up. One by one during the 90's they disappeared. One in particular, a valve company on the westide, was hit by 2 strikes of which the workers didnt want. The union made them strike and a 120 year old factory up and said fuck you Chicago overnight. Gone was 200 jobs mostly held by Italien immigrant machinists. Gone was a major employer of Melrose Park and a lynch pin in the exciting and dynamic Italian comunity. These places arent mere factories for places like Melrose Park, theyre the enablers of a dynamic cultural exchange, free flow of goods and to lose them to some fat fuck cadilac driving organizing commie bastards is just not acceptable.
guys
this was a rhetorical question for some of you to think about as you post on this thread. i'm not sure everyone here has really thought that deeply about the "plight" of the working man, it's reasons for existing, and it's place in our economy. it wasn't intended to incite a list of why you are or are not "blue collar."
the union world is in my mind very complex and not summed up by one or two specific examples.
fuck. architecture is basically a factory job.
fat fuck cadilac driving organizing commie bastard...
wow good on there evil... im avoiding this flame war which you seem to be looking for, your getting much more inflammatory.
Legacy costs are substantial and real, but, it goes back to making a product that GM can sell. Who cares about legacy costs when you're making $10k profit on every Escalade that sells?
the airline companies are hurting because of legacy costs.
i would imagine they are making much more that just 10k on friggin' escalades.
america spends too much money on old people. my grandparents are still alive and pushing 90 years old. those old, defined-benefit retirement plans never envisioned people living 30 years after retirement. if i find out that i have to pay a premium on that escalade so that my grandfather can have viagra i'm gonna kill him myself.
airlines, autos...hell, many governments, school districts, etc are all getting killed on legacy costs...old people need to stop living so damn long.
LLETDOWN -
got to - this is a very personal issue for my family since weve been watching our customers get put out of business for decades. And the day when a guy comes to your job site and asks when you'll be signing the "argreement" or they'll be trouble, you'll be just as inflamatory. Its criminal.
i hate old people
evil, i appreciate this is a personal issue for you as long as you understand that its an extraordinarily personal issue for an equal number of people who are on the other side of the coin. I find it criminal that even white collar workers have little to no recourse against the whims of their managers when not organized. Capitalism is not about making sure workers feel safe... no matter what some may say, capitalism is about black numbers at the end of the month... Any mercy or perks given out by management is not required by business, no matter how much they may be required by real life.
WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU SMOKING DUDE?
they had a plan for old people in Logans Run. No legacy costs there.
why don't people save for retirement themselves? I don't get it. I guess that's how the daughter of a self-employed mother and father thinks...
is why GM can't sell cars. IMO the company should go belly up for its arogance and ignorance.
who needs unions when you gots Mexicans!!!!!!!!!!!
yeah that's great...until the mexicans unionize too
and forget gm, i think i'm getting a boxstar instead...only $590/month and who cares if it's built by mexicans, unions or alien robots tripping on 3dh fairy dust...it's too deck to care about any of that
Strawbeary - I hear you sister. My parents both run their own businesses too. Again, as has already been said... it's the retirement benefits that are severely putting all these companies in danger of losing eveything. Something really needs to be done to kill the activities of the health insurance lobbists. I hate the health insurance industry.
i'm a kraut. but i don't think i'd buy a kraut car. the kraut cars owned by people here spend much time in the shop. my honda has never been in the shop. it was built in england.
on NPR this morning, they were talking about how GM could just as easily move operations outside of the US if the labor things goes on much longer
puddles: if i find out that i have to pay a premium on that escalade so that my grandfather can have viagra i'm gonna kill him myself.
I don't want to be involved in this very complex argument, I just thought this sentence was very darkly funny. Thanks, puddles.
Also, I found out today that GM is a corporate sponsor of PFLAG. Good for them.
they also had a plan for getting naked in logan's run.
evil - I'd be pissed to if someone came to my place of work and told me to do this "or else" - but if we're going to add up all the anecdotal stories from unions and all the ancdotal stories from companies like Wal-Mart (well known for doing this) and other similar companies, I think it would be the wal-marts of the world who more often engage in this practice. Hating unions is easy, finding a way to protect your rights without them is hard.
puddles - you know, if it weren't for this global warming buisness, you could just have the elderly sit on the iceflows like tradition dictates.
tuna, puddles - the reason health care is back in the news is not Hilary - its companies expected to help out paying through the nose the health costs for their workforce, and those unable to paying the cost in produtivity and loss of the more qualified people who can find a job with benefits. The thing making public healthcare a possibility in modern america is the fact that the drug and healthcare industry is screwing over the rest of america, including whole other industrial sectors
evilp - even without organized labor, the rust belt would be rusting. No matter how low labor could go without unions, bangladesh, china, etc will be cheaper. We can't beat them because they don't care at all about their environment or their people. Do you want the sun obscured by a black sky at noon like it was in pittsburg during WWII? Eliminate the EPA and it will happen. Do you want people in your hot dogs? Eliminate the FDA. We've realized (okay, some of us have realized) that the costs for not being responsible are a lot higher than trying to pass them down the line to the poor and our children. Its starting to dawn on China and India, but there's a world of hurt coming down the line for them.
everyone - its not the american workers making GM, ford and chevy's car's suck - its the people at the wheel, if you forgive the pun. Most cars with foriegn nameplates are build right in this country. Toyota, mazda, mitsubishi, subaru... All built in places like Illinois, Ohio, South Carolina... Some have unions, some do not. If the people running the "big 3" didn't insist on trying to run their company like its still 1971 perhaps they'd be doing better. I find it very funny for people who can't shut up about how great the free market system is, as soon as the rules stop favoring the home-town plutocrats, suddenly the (otherwise big bad) government has to step in and either - bail them out (see: Chrysler), nullify the rule of law (abolish laws controlling collective barganing) or create oppresive tarriffs on foriegn companies (why Toyota moved here in the first place). So if you're going to tout the free market system as a gift from god, then stop bitching when its your turn to take the lumps, because the guys who sweat for a living have already had more than their fair share.
what lumps - Im working 60 hours a week for 55k
they can kiss my white collar ass
evilp - perhaps if you unionized your place of employment you'd be working less and earning more. $57K and a 40 hour week I bet would sound pretty good to your fellow employees.
i'm still stunned that there are some people on this planet who are too poor to afford little ceasar's pizza. this has been a very eye-opening thread
i agree. little ceasar's is hot, fresh baked, comes with 2 pizzas, delicious.
But can you make a ptyerdactyl with its container?
Unfortunately not. So what good is it really?
you can too, you can make an origami one
Crowbert - I completely agree. It's the health insurance system in this country that sucks. My parents, my brother and soon to be my other brother are all work in the healthcare industry, so my issues with the healthcare system started way before Hillary came into the spot light. It has nothing to do with the healthCARE system. But that's a topic for a whole new thread.... I'll get off my small soapbox now.
hello? is it crazy pills time again? some people are too poor to eat at little caesar's pizza...that's almost as absurd as paris hilton in jail until you realize that it's true and suddenly reality has been shaken again.
and liberty bell, thanks for the compliment. i thougth that was a nice sentance too.
puddles, have you been drinking on the job again?
son...drinking is my job
gufaw.
so who is making 57k again? all blu collar auto workers? some? none? what is this thread about?
A drink at this very moment would be greatly appreciated.
how many of you have ever worked a blue collar job for any serious length of time in your life? how many of you know uaw workers or anything about their day to day lives? does anyone here have any idea what they really make, what benefit package they are asking for, and why they are not working? is this just an ideological conversation being had by elite, educated, white collar individuals based on generalizations about unions, corporations, and what you think people deserve and don't deserve in a world that most of you have virtually no interaction with at all?
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