Bloggers and labor activists at the Yearly KOS Convention discussed the idea of forming a BLOGGER'S UNION. Because what blogging needs is a parasitic external organization siphoning off money, killing initiative and pushing the few paying blogging jobs abroad.
4:24 AM * PERMALINK * 9 comments
Like The Raw Feed? Then you'll LOVE the FREE Mike's List newsletter!
Find Me On:
Mike's List Newsletter
Cell Phone Version
About Mike Elgan
Columns
Search
Old
Secret Link
Twitter
Technorati
RSS Feed
FriendFeed
Facebook
Google
Digg
Computer America
Other Blogs
And More!
AD: Master Windows 7 with Chris Pirillo's Windows 7 Tips eBook!
MORE MIKE ELGAN STUFF
The World Is My Office
Three Seconds of Genius
Mike's List
The Book of Kindle
Enchiridion
The Spartan Diet
The Spartan Diet Blog
Comments:
Yeah, once all the unions are gone, the good paying jobs will return. Congress has no union and we see the initiative they dispense. Maybe what bloggers need is a better understanding of history, labor and reality.
Unions are good. Didn't you see Sally Field in "Norma Rae" (which by the way, was originally offered to Faye Dunaway who turned the role down) which then ended up winning Sally an Oscar? So you just know that unions are good for us!
Anyone with the slightest understanding of history, labor and reality would know that unions kill everything they touch. It's a mafia protection racket that artificially creates antagonism betweeen labor and management, all at the expense of customer service and product quality. Unions are why our educational system is so bad, why Detroit can't compete internationally, and why customer service is so bad in so many sectors of the U.S. economy.
What's the best grocery store in the world? It's Whole Foods Market. Why? Because it has no union.
Mike Elgan
Blanket statements for or against Unions display ignorance. Anyone who believes that US automakers suffering is due to unions has no real understanding of automotive research, development and production. US automakers suffer because of their stupendous engineering inefficiency and management bureaucracy. Unions have helped exacerbate some of Detroit's problems , but at the same time Foreign company's are doing a fine job making a profit assembling cars in the US using workers represented by those same unions.
Without Unions, we would see less outsourcing overseas because we could count on wage slave children stateside to work for pennies in sweatshops as they did before the union movement in the United States. Our labor protection laws are a direct result of union involvement as is what is left of our blue collar middle class.
Yes, unions have been exploited by organized crime and yes they have caused problems, but just as frequently they have blessed us with a greater quality of life.
It is sad that the lessons of history are lost to this generation. I guess we will have to wait for the return of the company store for people to realize individual risks created by a lack of organized labor.
BTW. Whole foods doesn't have a union because they already pay union wages, provide reasonable benefits and behave ethically towards their employees. It is what their customers expect as they are willing to pay extra for everything in the store in order to feel good about shopping there. Do you honestly think other retailers have the same economic pressure to treat their human resources as well?
Sorry to get all Buddhist on you, comrade, but the raft that gets you across the river slows you down once you get to the other side. Best thing to do is leave it on the riverbank and move on.
Yes, a century ago, unions were on balance a positive force. So were horse-drawn carriages. But everything changes, and now unions so obviously cause pain and suffering and benefit only union bosses, who are nothing but professional parasites.
Whole Foods and other non-union shops don't pay great wages and provide superior benefits because they're nice. They do it because there is a competitive marketplace for labor, and the only way to succeed is to hire and retain the best people. Unions get in the way of all that, and kill customer service. In a globalized economy, that spells death to the industries that unionize if those jobs can be done overseas.
I can hire a really good blogger -- literally -- in India in five minutes, who will produce great copy for 20 percent of what an American blogger would be paid.
Throw in some mafia types forcing a blog publishing company to reduce hours, increase pay, provide all kinds of benefits and enforcing rules like "no more than three posts per day," and offshoring would happen instantly.
Mike
I love the simplicity of a good eastern analogy backed up with a McCarthy style red accusation. Unfortunately, I have to disagree on the competitiveness of the labor market. Walmart and other discount stores seem to have a deep well of desperate labor to exploit.
Perhaps you should travel from the Whole Foods belt to a flyover state where good jobs are very difficult to come by and the prices at Whole Foods are inconceivable.
The pain and suffering of health care and a living wage would be welcomed here.
Where I live, we have two Superwalmarts, more than 50% of our high school students drop out to shovel cow dung at local dairy farms or go to jail, our downtown is covered with boards and retirees from the coasts play golf on courses that are mowed for $5 an hour.
Organized labor might just keep a little more money in our local economy instead of it being shipped to Kentucky so some guy can pay the luxury tax to keep AI and Melo on the same basketball team. You wanna talk parasites? Sam's kids take the parasitic cake.
At least I don't have to worry about thumb breaking grocery labor bosses hanging around the produce section in zoot suits, running numbers and rubbing out their rivals with tommy guns.
Try innovating in the schools. Try fixing that dropout rate. The teacher's union will bury you.
Try setting up a car factory to provide a ton of jobs so Wal-Mart has to pay higher wages if they want to attract employees. The auto workers union will block everything you try to do to compete effectively with Japanese auto making superiority.
Union busting is part of the solution to your town's problems, not the cause.
Mike Elgan
It is easy to see here that a low paid blogger from India would have as much insight and knowledge about US labor and history as a US blogger. Soooo, India is the perfect labor environment, good place to work and live? Ditching that boat that got you safely across might not be the genius idea when there are other rivers still to cross, but maybe we should ask an Indian blogger for input. See if they are as ignorant of history and arrogant of the future. Yeah, unions create artificial antagonism between labor and managment, 'cause everyone knows the boss LOVES the workingman.
Mike,
Your rhetoric is artful, but your logic is lacking, try moving from sophistry to philosophy.
The teachers union has as little to do with dropout rates as the auto workers union has to do with failing US automakers. The same teachers union represents schools with few or no dropouts as ones with greater than 50% dropout rates. Dropout rates correlate with the regional economy, not the labor status of teachers. No causal relationship can be established between union teachers and dropout rates. Frankly it is an absurd suggestion.
The same union represents workers at highly profitable foreign owned auto plants as well as failing us owned plants.
I can detail at length the US automakers engineering and bureaucratic woes as they are very close to me in my profession. The unions are the least of Detroit's problems and account for fewer dollars per car than foreign import tariffs.
There are almost no union employers where I live, and our problems are plentiful, removing the 100 or so union jobs from a population of 80,000 will have no impact. We have no union to bust.
Unions have become easy targets as corporate marketing machines have used them as scapegoats for strategic failures at the management level.
Saying "unions kill everything they touch" is as patently silly a generalization as saying all wealthy people are greedy and corrupt or all poor people are stupid and lazy.
Unions do not always do what is best for their members and sometimes cause heartache, but unrepresented workers also suffer. Like any social phenomena, some unions are good and some are bad and most are a little bit of both.
Post a Comment
<< Home