Three interesting advertisement illustrating the Power of Union is Strength.
An individual maybe brilliant and have strong core competencies but unless you are able to work in a TEAM and harness each others core competencies, you will always perform below par because there will always be situations at which you will do poorly and someone else does well.
Tag Archives: union
Your Boss Is a Dick (A Glossary of Labor Terms, Translated)
How to win arguments and lose friends.
January 3, 2014 | http://www.alternet.org
This article originally appeared on Truthdig, and is reprinted here with their permission.
* * *
Editor’s note: In light of recent tensions between progressives and their allies in the union movement, comedian and former labor organizer Nato Green was moved to write this humorous glossary. Please don’t take it literally.
Whenever there’s a big labor news story, I’m deluged with calls from friends who, like most Americans, are vaguely sympathetic to unions but don’t know much about them. Corporate media reliably provide the hard-hitting investigative journalism one expects from a Bazooka Joe gum wrapper. Bad enough that there are so few union members anymore that assigning a reporter to cover labor beefs makes as much sense as putting someone on the Coptic beat. And unions don’t help themselves win over the public, what with their East German approach to public relations and earnest commitment to matching T-shirts.
For example, during the 2013 Bay Area Rapid Transit strikes many liberals I know said, “I don’t have a pension or good health insurance! Why should they?” To which I would reply, “You seem pretty mad about black people having good jobs.” This is an excellent way to win an argument while losing a friend.
So to help out my friends in organized labor, here is a glossary of key union terms, translated for everyone else:
ARBITRATION: When labor and management can’t agree, the parties may submit the disputed matter to an arbitrator. The arbitrator hears both sides and issues a binding decision. Arbitrators are former lawyers who seek employment by appearing impartial to two groups of people who hate each other’s guts. They love the phrase “split the baby,” which is exactly as gross as it sounds.
BOSS: Guy at your job who doesn’t care about you. Only cares about power and money. Person with the authority to hire or fire you. Wants you to “feel like family” and dance to his favorite Van Morrison songs at the holiday party, but “will see” if you can have a raise this year. (See GOOD BOSS.)
BUILDING TRADES: Construction unions of burly men who like to drink and look a man in the eye. They’d build concentration camps if the Nazis would agree to hire their guys.
CARD CHECK: The easy way for nonunion workers to join a union. Workers just sign a union card saying they want a union. When a majority of workers sign union cards, the union presents the cards to an impartial third party, like a street juggler, who verifies that only living current employees signed. Fewer ways for the boss to hassle workers out of unionizing, which is why bosses act like card check gives them avian flu.
CONTRACT: Collectively bargained, legally enforceable, democratically ratified agreement covering wages, benefits and working conditions. At best, the union guarantees a defined period of time (usually three to five years) of no strikes in exchange for a good deal. At worst, the noble pursuit of workplace democracy is smothered by bureaucrats and lawyers like rancid mushroom gravy on apple pie.
COOLING-OFF PERIOD: Something politicians call for to act like they’re helping without having to take a risky position.
DEFINED-BENEFIT PENSION: The good kind of pension plan. This is a retirement plan in which you are guaranteed a specific amount of pay upon retirement, according to a formula 27 people understand. These are regulated and guaranteed. Because they offer workers enough security to rise above being desperate and grateful for an occasional “cake day,” bosses hate them.
DEFINED-CONTRIBUTION PENSION: This is the 401(k)-type plan, in which the boss contributes something, the workers contribute something, and then the employees are free to gamble in the stock market with their retirement just like teeny tiny Warren Buffetts. If they happen to retire in a year when their entire nest egg is swallowed in a rapacious Ponzi scheme stock bubble, that’s the magic of the market. Savor it.
Cheap labour and the lessons of the Plaza Hotel strike
By Robyn Benson on August 23, 2013 http://www.aec-cea.ca
Who are those people pounding the pavement outside Toronto’s Plaza Hotel, whom the owner called “animals?” They are workers with little or no hope for the long-term, decently-paid jobs that many of us take for granted, living a precarious existence. If you want to know how many of them there are these days, take one Plaza Hotel and multiply by a very big number.
The low-wage workers at the Plaza are at least unionized. Largely due to their Steelworkers Union and to the Ontario Federation of Labour, the public is becoming more aware of the appalling working conditions there.
But this is just the tip of the cheap-labour iceberg.
I’ve posted before about the Temporary Foreign Workers program, a part of this new race to the bottom, in which the Harper government has been complicit. A victory or two have been won in that area, but there is much more to the problem than offshore workers entering Canada on a government program. In some ways, that was just a matter of domestic Canadian cheap labour being edged out of jobs by foreign cheaper labour.
Take the North American fast-food service industry, for example. It used to be that this was a good sector for young people to find a job for a while, and then move on. Now more adults than teens are asking if you want fries with that, and they’re in it for the long haul.
The new employees of this largely non-union sector are more experienced and better educated than formerly, but their wages and benefits don’t reflect that. Small wonder, as we have seen recently in Halifax with coffee-shop baristas, and in the US with employees of McDonald’s and other franchises, that these workers are beginning to look to unionization—and a substantial increase in the minimum wage—as a way of making their circumstances comparatively less precarious.
Would this make hamburgers, coffee and fried chicken too expensive? That’s always the scare-story put about by the anti-union types. But it’s not founded upon fact:
Several studies show that raising the minimum wage would have minimal effects on the industry as a whole. One letter signed by more than 100 economists and published by the University of Massachusetts said that raising the minimum wage to $10.50 would increase the price of a Big Mac by a nickel. Another study shows that doubling the salaries and benefits of all of McDonald’s employees would add 68 cents to each Big Mac.
Perhaps one of the more comical aspects of the corporate fightback was the spectacle of McDonald’s solemnly informing its low-wage employees how to budget. The bosses’ scheme works perfectly—if the minimum wage is doubled, and you can do without water, clothing, gas, heat and child care.
Are low wages the natural cost of working for a living wage in the service sector these days? Well, no:
Consider Costco and Wal-Mart’s Sam’s Club, which compete fiercely on low-price merchandise. Among warehouse retailers, Costco…is number one, accounting for about 50% of the market. Sam’s Club…is number two, with about 40% of the market.
…A 2005 New York Times article by Steven Greenhouse reported that at $17 an hour, Costco’s average pay is 72% higher than Sam’s Club’s ($9.86 an hour).
On the benefits side, 82% of Costco employees have health-insurance coverage, compared with less than half at Wal-Mart.
…In return for its generous wages and benefits, Costco gets one of the most loyal and productive workforces in all of retailing, and, probably not coincidentally, the lowest shrinkage (employee theft) figures in the industry….Costco’s stable, productive workforce more than offsets its higher costs.
A cheap labour strategy doesn’t work. It costs just about everybody. Costco knows this from experience, and has resisted calls to lower its wages and benefits.
So the push-back against impoverishing workers is not only a union concern, although we can certainly play a lead role in it. But we in the labour movement can’t do that by focusing too narrowly. We need to be part of a wider movement to defend the right to a living, dignified wage and secure employment for everyone. After all, it’s our whole society that is at stake here—and surely that makes it everybody’s fight.
Andrew Phillip Chernoff 