Neanderpundit

it sure seems that way, anyway. This week, though I’m on vacation, I’m helping a onetime customer and now good friend do some maintenance on some machinery in his plant. It’s not like side gigging so much as it is spending time with a bud and getting paid to do so. And I enjoy the work a great deal. yesterday, I wasn’t able to get there because I had a car ripped to pieces in my garage, belonging to my nephiew, and he wasn’t likely to be able to fix it himself. So I stayed home and helped him hammer that out, from 9 AM to ten PM.

Thing is, as much as it beats me up, I enjoy it a lot. I am always doing something, and I cannot imagine anyone who isn’t. How do you sit on your ass all day? When I go on vacation I’m invariably fixing something, be it a messed up showerhead or a recalcitrant door latch.
When I’m visiting the inlaws, they always have something for me to fix A sister in law, nearly ten years ago, asks me ‘can you figure out why my tree lights don’t work” christmas eve. I look a bit and find that the lights are plugged in to the socket on the end of their own string, and NOTHING is plugged into the wall. I correct this, and the tree lights up in miniature light splendor. She thought i was God. I’ve never not been working on something, and I cannot imagine anyone who sits all day, would drive me insane.

I’m really trying to get past this.

When shit hits the fan at my company, when a job is going south, I usually get called in. I tend to wade through bullshit and find the core of the problem, and fix it. It’s what I do, and I’m very, very good at it.

In the engineering circles I frequent, I have seen people have meetings to figure out who fucked up in an engineering project. Greeat. Let’s waste dozens of man hours so we can assign blame.

I walked into a runoff a couple of months ago where the equipment varied from what was quoted. Engineers ran out to explain what happened, telling me they’d get to the bottom of this, find out who fucked up.

I laughed.

And then, in less time than it would take to meet and assign blame, I fixed the problem, and moved on.

When people used unions just after the turn of the century to give them bargaining power against companies who used them like toilet paper, they picked up the only functional tool they had. period. There were other options, and many people tried them, (like walking away. Don’t hear too much about those people, because they probably starved to death) but none of them worked. None. No “market force’ was going to magically appear that would “fix” anything. period. As long as labor was plentiful and jobs were scarce, industry would have the oppressive upper hand.let me repeat that for clarity: As long as labor was plentiful and jobs were scarce, industry would have the oppressive upper hand. Did those people make a bad choice? did they let a constrictor into the granary to kill the mice that were eating the grain? it certainly seems as if this was the case. Has that constrictor now grown fat and bloated and is now more of a hazard than the mice ever were? That is almost certainly so. Is it the fault of tose people? who cares? they did the only thing they could do at the time. The only thing. Don’t like unions? well, you could spend a lot of time villifying decent, honest people whose backs were against a wall, and had no place to go, or you could(as mom still says) get off your halfmoons and do something yourself. I walked away from the union that fucked me around and sold me downriver in 1985. I have never looked back. I have left two jobs that threatened unionization. I was lucky, of course, because unlike those workers of the 20’s and 30’s, there were other jobs for me to get. There are simple solutions to problem unions too. Buy a Kia. Shop at Wal-Mart. Don’t buy products made in union plants. Of course, unless everyone does this, it will have little effect, just like one or a dozen or a thousand workers walking away from Forchevplymouth has zero effect.

And, of course, if Everyone does it, it’s called a “union”

Mr Alger contends that the Solution A alluded to in a previos post is simple: “Walk away” he says.

Let’s see how that worked.

Worker 1 has a job at Forchevplymouth. Worker 1 likes to make money, and his wife and children, hostages to his fortune, like him to make money too. They have grown accustomed to eating regularly and it is good. Conditions in the plant are far from optimal, though, so Worker 1 appeals to his boss to fix the broken and dangerous machinery, to issue safety equipment, to stop working him at an unbelievable pace. Worker 1’s boss declines to comply. Worker 1 walks away.

Forchevplymouth is not even mildly inconvenienced. There are a thousand men outside the door, begging to get in. before Worker 1 is out the gate, Worker 2 has been handed a shovel and is doing the job. Worker 1 cannot get another job, because men are plentiful and jobs are scarce.
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