If you want to see
How an industry falls to a Union, take a hard look at Massey Energy, and it’s CEO Don Blankenship.
Blankenship is a piece of work, but at the end of the day, nobody wants to see anyone go home in a body bag. The EPA, OSHA, MSA, and NIOSH are all involved in regulating mine safety; the problem is, the cost of compliance is nightmarish, and most of the regulations don’t address common sense issues. Owners have to comply to the bullshit, and when the miners themselves want or need changes to make their jobs safer, the response is as often as not “piss off” If the law doesn’t require it.
I have had to work on machinery in mines. I’m horribly claustrophopbic, and as I rode the elevator underground I thought, will I freak out when I’m so far underground? Not to worry.
There are so god-damned many ways to die in a mine, that claustrophobia doesn’t even enter into the equation. Trust me, it’s hell, and it takes a special kind of nutjob to work there.
And now more people have died, and the owners of the company will act exactly like the “Evil republicans” that the left wants to portray them as; they will follow the script so exactly that it will be as if the left wrote it for them. And more statist union thugs will ease their way into power.
Unions suck. And we do it to ourselves, over and over again.
22 comments Og | Uncategorized
If unions didn’t have a legal license to abrogate rights of private property, association, and commerce, the choice between death and walking away would be starker. Sort of like: do you drive more or less carefully when there are guard rails on that mountain road?
If there wasn’t the excuse of unions, (in this day and age of instantaneous global communications), and the government were doing its damn job — preventing and punishing fraud and coercion in commerce — instead of micro-managing how many gallons your crapper flushes with, then assholes like you paint Blankenship (myself: I dunno — totally ignorant about the man), wouldn’t get away with their crap. They’d either be kicked to the curb by their boards because their mines weren’t producing (for lack of workers), or they’d be hauled away in irons for that fraud and coercion I mentioned.
“Dream on,” you might say. Ain’t gonna happen. To which I argue: it SURE ain’t gonna happen if We The (Little) People don’t DO nothin’. It’s the other side of the “don’t start nothin’ won’t be nothin'” coin.
M
Can’t imagine working in a mine. Gives me a little shudder just thinking of it.
I’m the only guy I know who has been blackballed out of a Union. Got booted from the Carpenters Union up in your area shortly before the Feds had to take it over because of the corruption back around 1985 or so. The good news was that the SOB that ran me out died in prison about 5 years later.
Yeah, I’m not likely to be singing that “Proud to be A Union Man” BS anytime soon.
I’ve been in a couple of the mines up in Wyoming when I used to repair some types of mine equipment; never cared for it much.
We the people lost all control years ago when corporations like this refused to do the right thing and let the unions in.
Mark, you keep talking about “market” as though it were some magical force. I don’t know if Blankenship was always a piece of work, but I do know this: he always managed to get his X number of metric tons of coal out of the ground by the end of the day. And it takes a damned poor manager to fail to do that. Just like Henry’s plants relentlessly made cars, Coal Mount always made coal. And if people died on the job, then more people were always ready to fill in the still-warm shoes of the recently deceased. What market forces can change this? Should the workers band together and prevent the company from prospering so they can force them to listen? You know, like forming a union?
You act as if this were the exception to the rule. it is the rule, and there are no exceptions.
Until I arrived, my family were coal miners—father, grandfather, uncles, older cousins. One of the larger mine disasters occurred at the Orient #2 mine in Southern Illinois. Over a hundred miners died. The explosion occurred about 500′ under our farm. Our whole house jumped when it went off.
I have a write-up about it on my blog.
http://crucis-court.blogspot.com/2009/01/night-of-big-bump.html
Dad never wanted me to be a miner although the only two real jobs around home was mining and farming. When I was in high school, he took me down on a “tour” of the mines. It made a believer outa me! I didn’t want to be a miner in the first place, but it was a real motivator to go to college and get a degree.
I’ve actually had this discussion with the GM of my company. My simplified version is just because management can get away with being treating workers like shitthey shouldn’t, because that pisses off the workers to the point where unions start looking good and a union collecting dues from half a million drones can buy more politicians than the owners of a small business can.
Graumagus;
The point to me is that the mistake made was allowing unions to — not to exist; no problem there — but to use coercion to achieve their ends.
Failure to observe current state of the art standards of safety isn’t just treating the workers like shit, it’s criminal. And it’s the gubmint’s job to prevent and/or punish such activity.
Og;
Market isn’t magic. Market just IS. It is a natural force, like gravity, and you ignore it at your peril. Giving any entity the license to coerce its associates in any way — management to coerce workers, or unions to coerce the owners of businesses — distorts the market. It WILL compensate. And that compensation is NOT pretty.
It is the right of free individuals to live free of coercion. It is the job of government to protect these rights. In this the government has failed of its fiduciary duty.
M
All those things being true: What market force will “Fix” this?
It seems to be a viscous circle. As the owners/management of any given company lose site of the real worth of (in the majority of cases) their single largest asset, their workforce, unions will come in.
Had it happen at one company I was working at. Their drivers had been wanting to sit down with management and address two or three concerns. Management gave them the run around, over the course of a couple of years. A couple of drivers had enough of this and went to “the local union who represented drivers -the Teamsters-” and inquired if they would be interested in “representing them”. Much hilarity ensued. In the end, the drivers were brought into the Teamsters, and the rest of “the rank and file” (us technical types) were deemed to be “outside of their purview”. Meaning we made a much better wage then the drivers, and our existing bennies from the company were such that we would never have voted the union in, so they left us out of the mix.
Not complaining, I did not want to see them become part of the picture. But at the end of the day, what real choice did the drivers have? They liked the company, but felt they were being given the short shift. The company thought they could get by in ignoring (at worst) or putting off (at best) the concerns of the drivers. Even the corporate response to the upcoming unionization of the company was a comedy of errors, which resulted in the initial legal team on the company side being fired in mass, for their inept handling of the whole thing.
At the end of the day, everyone (except the union) lost. The drivers did get some of their concerns met, but at the cost of no longer being their own men (so to speak), their own individual voices to management. The company lost, as they (corporate) was looked on as either uncaring or inept in their handling of both the drivers AND the union.
And the company, over all, lost. There arose a feeling of “them or us”. The added cost of “collective bargaining”. Even more of a management against the employees mindset.
I guess the real question is, what other agent or actions can be used to bring real balance to the two sides of any business (workers vs management)? Government control(s) only breed MORE control(s) and or micro-management. Unions, at the end of the day, are only in it for themselves (thus are as corrupt or corruptible as any corporation can or could become.).
I am kinda with Og on this one (at least as far as medium and large companies go). What market force will effectively fix this.
Unions are politics. Just substitute Dues for Taxes and you have the model.
At one time they where needed to get the owners to improve things, maybe back 2 cneturies. Henry Ford figured out well paid healthy workers bought the products they made so he had already started to do things the unions later demanded in the early negotiations.
Which gets me on to another topic. One of the guys at work ( an obama supporter) wants us all to get along now. He does not offer compromise though, just demands that you agree with him.
The only way to break a union is to not buy the product the company they work for sells. Course that hurts a larger group of people. but you cannot kill the parasite with out first killing the host.
Ticks not with standing.
The question “What market force will fix this” misses the point entirely. The reason that messing with the market is such a fool’s game is that NOBODY anywhere anytime can know enough to second-guess the natural forces involved in market dynamics.
What we have learned — much to our sorrow when we fail to heed the lesson — is that you don’t fuck with Mother Nature, and that includes meddling in voluntary commercial transactions.
What we do know is that, in order for markets to work at their best, certain interferences need to be obviated — among those being fraud and coercion.
And that, in order to protect human liberties from these forces, governments are instituted among me. Stop me if this begins to sound familiar; Tom Jefferson call your office.
M
Mark: Never said that they shouldn’t be allowed to exist, just that now they are legalized criminal organizations (oxymoron, I know, but it’s true) that exert far too much influence on our government and also drive away business by forcing companies to pay hyper-inflated wages to workers that damn near have to rape a llama during a board meeting to get fired. I personally know folks who get paid over $25/hr to do jobs I could train a monkey to do in an hour. Invariably, the ex-union folks who I have the pleasure of training because their gravy jobs went to mexico bitch and moan because “I used to get paid twice as much for doing half as much work!!!”
And they don’t make the connection there to why those jobs are gone….
75 years ago we were getting fucked by the company.
We got organised and marched to the bosses office and threw down.
Got enough to make us go back to work.
The union leaders got more and more power by running with Dems [which realized they had numbers] and figured it out that they were bigger than the Man.
75 years later, who is running the USA.?
In our mines the union steward should be calling the day to day safety issues.
The company should have a OSHA compliant program. If the company does, and has a good safety inspector, where was his partner, the union steward?
The company is bottom line, the union is the brothers.
Who was asleep at the wheel?
Graumagus;
Aimed that the wrong direction. ::grin:: Choir back here. Spin a one-eighty and aim it at the congregation.
M
Yes, it misses the point entirely because it is a fantasy to think that anything of the sort is possible.
In one comment you state “the government should be doing it’s job” which is de facto interference, and then that nobody can predict what “messing with the market” will do.
Here are a few things you may not understand because you don’t deal with heavy industry every day, like I do.
1: You can consider the potential work force to be infinite. For all practical purposes, in this country, it is true. For every worker that “Walks away” from his job, there are hundreds waiting outside the gates who will gladly take up that job, potentially for less pay, no matter how dangerous the conditions. I absolutely guarantee that there are hundreds if not thousands of men who heard of the mine tragedy and showed up at the employment office to apply for those gigs. And that, as they say, is that. This is not japan or finland, where the workforce is captive and tiny.
2: The purpose of the alphabet agencies is not to protect the workers, it is to kill manufacturing by acting like the ATF: creating a convoluted mass of rules and regulations so complex that non-compliance is virtually guaranteed. if you ask ANY SAFETY MANAGER for ANY COMPANY they will tell you the same thing: To survive an OSHA audit, you must have three obvious and clear violations right out in the open where they can see them so you can get reported, repair them, and give the inspector something to do. Alphabet agencies are the death cults for industry. Lip service is paid, but if they were really interested in safety only strip mining would be allowed. If the unions existed but the alphabet agencies did not, we’d be far better off than the other way around from a worker safety standpoint.
3:In this country, No other mechanism exists to protect the worker from companies than the unions. And the unions are horrible. Companies would do well to realize this (and some do)but in the specific disciplines of mining, steel manufacture, and meat production (to name the most egregious) the companies will never change. Too much profit is there to be made by doing what they damned well please, and nothing ther “Market” will do will ever change that. Period.
So you’re saying that meddling in the free choices of individual citizens is acceptable if it’s done for the sake of public sentiment and the convenience of political operatives with no interest in those individuals’ liberty or free choice?
Sounds awfully statist to me.
So long as there are willing sellers and willing buyers, abridging their rights to engage in free commerce is an affront to liberty. Erecting barriers to entry, playing favorites, picking winners and losers in markets is exactly what the government should NOT be doing. Complaining that there ARE willing sellers… Well… That’s un-American in my estimation.
On the other hand, if those sellers are misled as to what they’re going to be compensated and what exactly they’re selling, well, that’s fraud. That’s what governments are constituted among men to do.
You can put the word “market” in sneer quotes if you will. But the laws of economics are every bit as iron-bound, as much the cold equations as are the ones of Newtonian Physics. Remember the story “The Cold Equations?” That’s what happens when sentiment is permitted to override natural law. People suffer.
M
“So you’re saying that meddling in the free choices of individual citizens is acceptable if it’s done for the sake of public sentiment and the convenience of political operatives with no interest in those individuals’ liberty or free choice?”
I’m saying absolutely nothing of the sort. I’m saying that when laborers are constantly shat upon by management they will eventually turn to the protection of a union, and nobody can blame them, because there is no other tool for them to protect themselves.
I’m a bigger fan of the free market than you can imagine. You believe free markets can fix this, and you’re demonstrably in error. Then laws of human nature are far more iron bound, older, and predictable than the laws of economics, though the laws of economics force this to be true as well: When the workforce has no protection, they will turn to whomever can offer some protection, no matter how evil that protection may be.
OK. If you’re not in favor of foreclosing the choice of free individuals, then why the objection to those individuals’ choosing to fill jobs that others — perhaps more sane, or less desperate — have rejected, and with good cause? You can’t have it both ways. Either those people are free individuals, with the right to make choices for themselves, including where, for how much, and under what conditions to sell their labor, or they are slaves, whose labor is to be disposed of by the dictates of you, or the state, or some union official — and it really matters not.
You seem to be straining to force this false dichotomy between market forces and human nature. Market forces ARE human nature, atomized, and in the aggregate — the choices made by individuals acting in their own interests.
However, properly-operating “free” markets rest on a foundation of trust. Otherwise, they cease to operate as markets, and become survival-of-the-fittest jungles, where it’s every man for himself and Devil take the hindmost. Black markets fit this description quite well. Look where THOSE have gotten us.
In order to have trust in a marketplace, some agency must see to it that neither fraud nor coercion gains the upper hand in a plurality of transactions, or the whole falls apart. In human affairs, this agency has grown to be called government.
When a government permits one actor or group of actors to engage in fraud or coercion, that distorts the marketplace — which is nothing more than the sum total of all human interactions.
Unions cannot have a substantial effect without the license to engage in coercion.
Remove the coercive power of unions and watch them float away like dust in the wind. OR… watch them flourish when the businesses to which they provide workers who are trained to high standards and uniformly skilled, and willing to work for wages set under a collective bargaining agreement… when those businesses win again and again in the marketplace because their less-scrupulous competitors … can’t compete on quality, service, and/or price.
This tiny preview window makes it hard for me to appropriate what I’m writing. (How you write posts on your phone is beyond me.) So I’m gonna stop here and see what it looks like on the big screen.
M
“then why the objection to those individuals’ choosing to fill jobs that others ”
None at all. I don’t know where you get that at all.
In order to have trust in a marketplace, some agency must see to it that neither fraud nor coercion gains the upper hand — Alger
Are you making an argument for global government? There has been foreign slave labor providing low prices to our markets for decades now.
Pascal;
If global government would adopt and hew to our Constitution and all the peoples of the world had the same Anglo-Saxon traditions and classical WestCiv culture our founders did, I’d sign on in a second. Otherwise… not so much.
Og;
Where I get that is when you justify the formation of a union by arguing that just walking away won’t stop the abuse of employees by employers, because there’s x-number of more-desperate men waiting outside the factory gate who’d jump at the chance of a job.
M
M
Then you completely miss the point.