aerius wrote:
The problem is when the union gets too big and starts taking power trips.
This is a problem with
any human endeavor organized along hierarchical lines. I mean you need unions to combat the corporations in the first place because they're too big relative to their workers and thus run amok on power trips.
Meanwhile, the German Auto Industry has strong unions, highly paid workers and are profitable. The US Auto industry does the opposite and is a debacle needing government bailouts every other decade. There's a good article
http://www.remappingdebate.org/article/ ... s?page=0,0 detailing why.
in a nutshell
"...Workers in the German auto industry maintain high wages and good working conditions through two overlapping sets of institutions. First, in the auto industry, virtually all workers are unionized members of IG Metall, the German autoworkers’ union. With such union density, workers have considerable power to keep wages high. German autoworkers have the right to strike, but as Horst Mund, head of the International Department of IG Metall explained to Remapping Debate, they “hardly use it, because there is an elaborate system of conflict resolution that regularly is used to come to some sort of compromise that is acceptable to all parties.”
In addition to high trade union density supporting the power of German autoworkers’ wages, the German constitution itself includes a second mechanism for keeping employees involved in the decisions of the firm for which they work. The Works Constitution Act provides for the creation of Works Councils in each factory. The Works Councils provide a mechanism through which a company's management must work with employees, whether they are in a union or not, on issues affecting work life, such as shop floor conditions, scheduling shifts, and other issues particular to the factory. This system, according to Mund, institutionalized “direct contact for workers’ representatives with management at various levels, from lower to middle to senior management in daily affairs. So you exercise some kind of dialogue where you don’t always wear your management pin or your union pin.”
Mund points out that the German example goes “against all mainstream wisdom of the neo-liberals. We have strong unions, we have strong social security systems, we have high wages. So, if I believed what the neo-liberals are arguing, we would have to be bankrupt, but apparently this is not the case. Despite high wages…despite our possibility to influence companies, the economy is working well in Germany.”..."
The part that makes me laugh at the folly of man is despite the example
right in front of their fucking eyes of how decentralizing decision making, and how well paid workers secure in their jobs is the best profitability boost there is, German management will immediately default to the proven broken US model as soon as the fucking leash is off them.
"...When asked why German firms operate so differently with respect to labor in different countries, Claude Barfield, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute where he studies international trade and globalization, told Remapping Debate that they do so, in part, “because they can get away with it so far.”
Though a Volkswagen-Chattanooga spokesperson told Remapping Debate that “it is up to our production team members to decide” whether to join a union, Barfield points out that all of the German-based auto manufacturers in the U.S. located in right-to-work states are “not unhappy with the situation they have now,” citing the fact that they “have more authority, they have more power” than they would in a unionized context.
Barfield said that factors other than wages brought the German carmakers to right-to-work states. A central reason for their interest in those states, he says, “has to do with not wanting to…get involved with work rules and seniority.” They have, he continued, “a much greater flexibility just in assigning work, and to be able to have plants change as conditions change. So, they’re not unhappy with that. They would not say they are happier with this than the system they deal with in Germany, but they probably are.”..."
Given this, I'd say that unions are not only neccessary, but basically mandatory. Absent checks and balances, managament can and will drive the fucking place into the ground to common misery of all.
