Unions ...... Good Or Bad??

There was a time when management hired people to intimidate strikers which many times led to injuries and sometimes death. it his a heated issue from every angle, ultimately the working man/women needs to find away to get a bigger piece of the pie.this web site in many ways is an informal union ,helping one another get started in trucking,suceed and excel in a very difficult business.even though I have not had to use my cdl I enjoy many of the stories and adventures. the people with the money have formed their own union to destroy unions and have done quite well.

Sure, but that's how the market works

When you have gigantic corporations forming oligopolies within industries the free market is taken out of the equation. These corporations will make informal (and illegal) agreements about how they'll manage the industry they control including caps on what they'll pay workers. If the workers don't ban together to prevent these types of distortions and manipulations you'll have a mess.

Trucking doesn't suffer from this situation but a lot of industries do. So as always, it isn't as simple as telling the workers to take a hike if they don't like it. That's how it was back in the day so unions and laws were created to help protect workers from abuse.

Unfettered capitalism doesn't work. Economics 101 teaches that. Before long the money consolidates into the hands of a few sociopaths that control everything. The "Free Market" is not at all a free market in fact. It's an organized system of laws and regulations designed to protect and maintain fair and open competition.

A lot of people mistakenly think everyone should just leave the free market alone completely and things will work out on their own. No, they most certainly will not. The free market has to be governed by a strong central body, in our case the Federal Government. The problem is that the Federal Government is mostly controlled by big money people who manipulate the law making process in their favor. So in return there has to be yet another force out there trying to establish a fair and balanced system, and that's what unions are meant to do.

Unions suck. They don't look out for the worker but for the union.

New guys are laid-off first. Pensions aren't guaranteed. Nobody is allowed to work harder or excel for fear of making the "senior" members look bad or, heaven forbid, showing management that productivity can increase by working harder or smarter.

Yup. Saw all of these things at GM and East Germany.

What sucks more than unions is company management taking advantage of workers left, right and centre. Sorry, and where exactly ARE pensions guaranteed (outside of the government)?

It is very sad that people that share your attitude is why management will continue to to keep paying substandard wages. You seem to think that unions are against the workers?

A mind is like a parachute, only works when it is open. Is your parachute open? Do you even have one?

New guys are laid-off first

Would it be better if the experienced guys got laid off first and the new guys kept their jobs?

Pensions aren't guaranteed

That's not a shortcoming of unions. That's the way the bankruptcy laws and other corporate laws are written.

I've said this a couple of times already in this conversations but as I expected it just gets ignored by the people it's aimed at. But I'll try one more time for the heck of it:

Complaining doesn't solve the problems we face. I have no problem with the fact you don't like unions but we face problems that need to be addressed. What do you propose workers should do to make sure there is a fair balance between workers and management? Without having some sort of representation for the workers, management has complete and total control of all aspects of the business including operations & pay and we've witnessed throughout history how poorly this situation turns out for the workers if left unchecked.

So ok, unions are terrible. No problem. Then what do you propose should be done to maintain a fair balance?

I was just stating pensions are not guaranteed which is something the unions would rather not be repeated.

Expenses and government taxation/regulations usually eat up 95% of a company's gross income. Any company, not just trucking.

If you were the CEO of a major trucking company what would you do to grow your company and keep your workers happy with that leftover 5%?

"Expenses and government taxation/regulations usually eat up 95% of a company's gross income. Any company, not just trucking."

This is over-generalizing it, as there are many businesses that have gross-margins of over 40% ... technology and pharmaceutical companies come to mind. Do you know how much Apple makes off an iPhone? In a commoditized business like trucking, yes the margins might be 5%, but this 5% is still enough to pay top-management millions of dollars a year. Some of these fat-cats make more in a single year than many of us will make in our entire lifetimes! And who are the ones risking their lives out there daily? Who are the hard workers? Many of today's CEO's do didly squat, they have others who do the hard work for them, yet they are the ones collecting obscene amounts of money.

"If you were the CEO of a major trucking company what would you do to grow your company and keep your workers happy with that leftover 5%?"

In a way, you answered your own question of why we need unions. Obviously most CEO's would rather award themselves and their fellow thieves in management a higher salary, and not their workers (just look up how Coca-Cola just recently distributed some $3 BILLION dollars in executive compensations) Since management will not pay or play fair, how do you suppose workers will ever have enough bargaining power? Unless they unite, the exploitation will continue.

Brett put up a real nice chart how over the last 20-25 years truck driver salaries have actually DECLINED! Forget about making as much today as in 1990, you are actually making less! So de-regulation and de-unionization has only worked for those at the top. Now some of you will say, yes, but look at what de-regulation has brought us, cheaper airfares and cheaper goods on store shelves, and to this I say yes, those things are cheaper, but you are also making less money, so as a percentage of your income, those items still cost the same. Also, how many times a year do you actually fly for it to matter so much? America is blessed with an awesome and efficient interstate system, you can always drive if airfare is too prohibitive. And who needs all these cheap quality Chinese made goods anyway? Most of it ends up in dumpsters a year or two after purchase. But it is making the Chinese rich ... and look how "rich" they are, the poor *******s can't even breath their own air for Pete's sake! The air quality index in Beijing is atrocious. We will be choking on our own garbage soon.

Apologies for the semi-long post, but we are facing real problems that we need to address head-on, if we do not do anything about it, we should stop complaining.

Aside from unionizing, I really don't have a solution.

There will be no resolution to the drivers' problems without some sort of unification. Brett is correct in saying that complaining won't correct anything. It seems that if we could find the right kind of unification that only carries out what we all fundamentally want, then we could have some truly astonishing change.

I am reminded what happened to Arrow trucking. Granted, the same thing still may have happened, but if the employees were unionized in some way, they would have had some sort of compensation, and avenues to pursue, to better get through that rough time.

I am reminded what happened to Arrow trucking. Granted, the same thing still may have happened, but if the employees were unionized in some way, they would have had some sort of compensation, and avenues to pursue, to better get through that rough time.

Maybe. I remember one of my instructors telling me when he got hurt, and couldn't drive for a while, the wife went to the union, and they told her to apply for food stamps.

If you think about it, BIG unions have become someone corrupted. That is why you see some unions decertifying from the major unions and becoming "independent" unions.

Unions, from the "Simpsons,"...

http://youtu.be/bcEfOcEsbDc

Dave