Over at Baby Troll Blog
Mr Alger expounds on his hatred of unions. I cannot but agree, having spent a large part of my formative years in the shadow of and in the employ of smokestack industry. I’ve seen the union today, and it’s not good.
Alger makes this statement:
In order to accept that unions were ever a Good Thing, you have to accept that: 1) the end justifies the means, 2) two wrongs make a right, and 3) all animals are equal, but pigs are more equal.
Well, that’s interesting, but far from being reasonable.it takes into assumption that unions are like marxism, and they are demonstrably not collectivist, but democratic. (in their original form)
Here are some fairly simple things to ponder:
At the turn of the last century, up through the thirties, labor was treated in a specific way. For the overwhelming majority of the circumstances, that way was bad. If you worked in smokestack industry (oil, steel, transportation manufacture, primarily) your chance of surviving your job to retirement were almost zero. Retirement plans didn’t exist for factory labor because retirement itself was such an uncommon thing. I don’t suppose this, I don’t come to this conclusion by conjecture, I have seen it with my own eyes. Where I grew up, there were dozens of the “survivors” of the mills, broken, beaten old men missing fingers or limbs or lungs, men with horrendous scars you would have thought only occurred in war. Ask an ER physician where the best trained trauma docs come from, and he’ll tell you: Manufacturing areas. I saw, in the 80’s,with my own eyes, injuries that were incredibly horrid to look upon, saw a man cut in half from the waist down die, close enough to blow his last breath in my face. This happened to me. Not to someone else. I’m not telling someone else’s story here. I saw, firsthand, with my own eyes, just how horrible the working conditions were in the 80’s, and I know, by speaking with the few survivors (out of hundreds of thousands)how horrible the working conditions were in the 20’s and 30’s and 40’s.
In that era, the number of men who wanted jobs usually outpaced the number of jobs available. To the extent that if a man died on the job, which happened a lot, replacing him was a simple matter of grabbing the next guy in line at the gate.
Human life, from the standpoint of the worker, was fragile and almost valueless. Some companies paid decent wages, but the working conditions were almost always nearly fatally dangerous, or just plain horrid work.
I’ll not drink the Kool-Ade that says big business had the politicians in their pockets all the time, neither will I drink the kool-ade that says the “market” would eventually have ‘fixed” these problems, for it would not, did not, and never will. When the pool from which you draw your workforce is large, you have no incentive to offer them any incentive, you take everything you can get from them, and discard them when you can. For a vivid demonstration of how this works, visit one of the US owned manufacturing facilities in China. A well-known plastics manufacturer I can’t name has a facility there with chain link fence topped with electrified concertina, and masonry walls topped with shards of broken glass. To prevent people from getting IN.
So, to rebut the statement Mr Alger makes above:
In order to believe unions were never necesary, you have to believe several other things:
1) Human life has no intrinsic value
2) The owners of industry have every right to treat their workers any way they want
3) There never needs to be any arbitration betweemn the industry,in whom all the power resides, and the worker, who has only his life to put in the balance.
I. Don’t.
Unions, in the early days of smokestack industries, provided a buffer between the almost infinite power of industry and the almost non-existent power of the individual. The unions of those days were specific to the protection of the workforce from a standpoint of safety (Show me a pre-union picture of a worker, or miner, or anyone, with a company supplied pair of safety glasses. Or hard hat. Or safety equipment of any kind)(sorry, you can’t. they don’t exist.)
before unions, in fact, the machinery of industry itself was inherently dangerous. Open belts. Open chains. No guards. No guardrails. No provision of any kind to protect the operator from the machine. At all. In fact, there were often more provisions taken to protect the machine from the operator.
The workforce deserved decent working conditions. Decent hours. Decent pay. Safe practices. Unions provided those things. Nothing else could, or it would have. It didn’t. period.
Now: when unions became political forces in their own right and began to attempt to play political games away and above the chartered course? Braaap! You lose, Alex! the union had no business overstepping it’s bounds in that way, and that spelled it’s downfall.
Now, of course, the safety and health is legislated, which originated with the unions, of course, and right then and there, the unions should have been disbanded, or kept to an in-plant collective bargaining unit, and nothing else. Making the union a political power is the worm in an otherwise good apple.
Update: True to his form, Mr Alger is discussing like a gentleman. So I will continue to try as well, to keep my neanderthal urges damped down.
The assertion that unions were never necesary takes as a foregone conclusion that there was nothing in the workforce that needed changing, or that other factors were in place that would make those changes. At least that’s if I understand mark correctly, which perhaps I don’t. I do know this, every situation I have seenw here unions arrived, they arrived due to an overwhelming need for a voice to use against opressive working conditons, NOT wages. The classic example is Ford- few, if any, ford employees were dissatisfied with their wages, they all liked and wanted to keep their jobs, they just didn’t want to be driven like cattle.
So I have to return to my original argument: Show me a force that did or could have improved working conditions, anywhere that was not a result of unionization. I don’t believe anyone can, but as always, I’m willing to be taken to school.
hear me on this: if you want to talk trash about unions today? I’m in your court, and right behind you. But as I stated in comments at mr Alger’s place, just as our federal, state, and local government has become a kleptocratic nightmare, so did the unions. I don’t believe that either began with that intent. Mr Alger points out that unions were backed by some real dirtbags, and he may well be correct- he certainly is in todays unions. We had/have some real knuckleheads in our government as well. It doesn’t negate what the origins were about, in my mind, in either case.
I have to leave for work. I would love to stay and discuss this. I have no interest in or intention of making enemies, and I have the utmost respect for all the people in the discussion. I hate unions today FAR more than Mr Alger does, demonstrably, because he belongs to one, and I would not, not at gunpoint. I have witnessed firsthand the horrors of heavy industry. There is, was, as far as my research and my personal experience can show me, (and it is extensive) no other force that made any successful effort to make working conditons in heavy industry safe, aside from unions. Everyone lives in a world (now) where there are laws that protect the health and safety of the worker (and frankly, some of those laws have gotten downright stupid in and of themselves) but few people alive today have any recollection of an era where those laws did not exist.
Amen to that.
In the main offices of a company I used to visit (a bearing plant) there were pictures of the turn of the century stamping area. Every machine was manned by a child. Open belts, no safeties and 8-12 year old boys and girls on every machine. Their grim faces told all. Unions got rid of this deplorable practice.
I hate what they have become today. As I posted elswhere, blame the unions for the state of Dephi — blame the management more for letting it happen.
No doubt about the origins and the necessity therof when talking about unions. The problem is that they were corrupted early in the process and in many cases were even formed by those who saw it as an opportunity to profit from the labor of others.
How can the membership justify paying their leaders high six figure salaries as their wage and benefit packages shrink? It has become a diseased mindset. The union demands of the 70’s and 80’s are what is killing the likes of Delphi, GM and Ford today (though Jesse Jackson blames the President). That said, the aforementioned companies agreed to the ridiculous demands as long as they thought they were the only game in town.
As you said, the government has taken over enforcement and implementation of many of the worker protections needed and Unions have become corrupt, bloated entities working towards killing many of the corporate institutions needed to employ their membership. The politics is just the final straw.
Perhaps, you’re operating with a false premise (conclusion?)… that all industry or work can be safe (and that is the desirable outcome).
Just to ‘splain:
Let’s say Job X is incredibly dangerous without very specialized equipment.
To help qualify, we’ll a price on the equipment (or process changes) at $10,000 per incident.
Worker 1 says he won’t do it at any price because it’s too dangerous (forms/joins a union to prevent anyone from doing it).
Worker 2 says he will do it, and wants $5,000 for each incident, but the union won’t let him freely negotiate on his own behalf.
What’s wrong with this picture?
Mrs: I’m a certified risk assesor. There is little about risk and cost recovery analysis I don’t do on a regular basis. It’s not solely about risk, though that is a major consideration. It’s about the right to arm ones self against an oppressor, and when you’re the guy trying to keep his family fed, and you know that not only are the wolves at the door, but there are thousands of other people waiting for your gig the moment you leave, you have no leverage. It’s easy to say “walk away” if you’ve never been in that situation. No matter who you are, no matter what you are, when your children’s stomachs are making intimate acquaintences with their backbones, you will pick up and use whatever tools/weapons give you an even chance.
Just to make things clear, let’s look at the actual risk asessment.
Cost of making a machine safer by placing guards and safeties, in 1937, may have been around $40. The cost of not doing it? Nothing. When a worker got injured, there was no recourse for the worker, if he was lucky he might be killed outright so he didn’t have to watch his wife try to support him and his family. Cost/benefit analysis says, leave the machine alone. It’s not costing US anything. That’s how it worked then. Now, of course, employers must balance the cost of a safety improvement vs the cost of a lawsuit. If the cost plugs into their spreadsheet at x percent of the potential lawsuit exposure (and each company has it’s own formula for determining that) they fix the machine. Otherwise, leave it alone.
And, not to beat this horse too soundly, let’s take a look at the conditions that did cause (in this case, Ford workers) to fight back.
Henry was a great innovator in tons of ways. His combination of assembly line work made it possible for a couple hundred people with minimal skills to build a car; the larger job of making a car was broken up into small tasks that required very little skill of themselves. What they did require was time. You may only have been responsible for putting on the left front fender, but you had to do it 35 times an hour. And then 48 times an hour. And then 60 times an hour, as the demand increased. So workers were making Ford more productive but they were doing so at great physical cost. No breaks. 10 minute lunches. 10 hour workdays. Then 12 hour workdays. Then 16 hour workdays. All day, every day. Every man was happy to have a job. They weren’t happy with the safety, the work pace, the work that was required of them. To his defense, henry had kind of let control of his factories leave his hands. he’d moved control into the hands of his “service workers” who were most often ex cons and scumbags, and when Henry found out what they were doing, he was incensed, but held as captive by the thugs he hired as the unions were held by the idiots running them.