Doncha hate it?
when MT eats an entry you spent a couple hours crafting?
Well, before my head explodes from the lost work, I’m gonna nutshell the post instead. First go here and read this, so you get the whole deal.
1: If solution “a” is a better way to protect employees from opressive management, why did nobody ever try Solution “a”? because solution A does not exist.
2: The union was the only weapon that was effective to protect employees from oppressive management. The only one.
Are unions bad now? sure. Were they always? maybe. I’m not arguing that, never have. That’s still not the point.
The point is: We as the nation of Volunteers have weapons to protect us from those who would harm us or diminish our lives. Employees deserve the ability to protect themselves from opressive working conditons and management. We can theorize that other methods may eventually have been found that would have done the same things without the unions, but those will always be theories. And the laws protecting the workers from the employer,those laws that find their origin in union agreements, were in place, and functioning to protect the workers, before right to work took place. Ask anyone who does those jobs what ‘right to work’ means to them.
Mrs D: I have to say, you’ve made me chuckle like few people I know, when you said this:”Machines don’t have bad days the way horses and mules do” You have obviously never been around heavy industrial machines. ROFLMAO!!!
DISCLOSURE: I am a member of a union (American Federation of Musicians).
Yeah, I agree that unions today are mostly corrupt and totally co-opted by their own agendas — agendas that are not always crafted with the rank-and-file in mind.
But I can tell you from my own personal experience that the formation of the AFofM was absolutely necessary — musicians have been ripped off for time out of mind.
This is a fairly benign example, as few people have been killed on the job writing or performing music. (Robert Johnson is that rare exception, but that’s what you get when you go to the crossroads and get down on your knees.)
Other people have not been so lucky. You shouldn’t have to take your life in your hands to do a job of work; the very least an employer owes you is some measure of safety.
I’ve also held a variety of day jobs in my life, several of them at companies that for damn sure didn’t want unions around because they couldn’t do pretty much as they pleased if there was a union in the house. Their answer to that problem was to fire anyone who even looked like they might say the word “union.” As Georgia is a “right to work/employment at will” state, said company (and every other employer in this state) can fire anyone at any time for any reason or no reason at all. There is zero job protection for anyone; you work at their whim.
We’re going back to those days in many ways, especially in states like Georgia. Employees are interchangeable cogs in the wheel; if the cog burns out/rusts out/loses teeth, well, throw that one away and get you another cog. There’s no end of cogs, as there’s people who need to work for such trivialities as, oh, groceries for their kids. Unions have tried to make sure that those cogs got a fair day’s wage for a day’s pay and that cogs didn’t die serving the corporate machine. That’s not a bad thing.
Just saying.
Jenny
your humble TubaDiva
The slogan at the AFofM Local #802:
“Have all your affairs with union musicians.”
“You have obviously never been around heavy industrial machines” or owned a $75 car. I had a car that had more bad days than good.