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March 01, 2004
Snide Remarks on Strike Resolution
The grocery strike is over here in Southern California and now is the time for the "I told you sos" to start galloping through the parlors of the chatting classes. I'm going to be uncharitable and point out the obvious.
I'm mostly negative on the concept of collective bargaining, but I'm more negative about hyping the supposed superior morality of unions. Unionism is little more than co-dependent managerial infighting. It's like having two adversarial personnel departments working for the same CEO. Either way, unions are entirely dependent on the corporations against which they battle, so how they are considered to exist in a entirely different moral universe is a solopsism worth debunking.
It is in the context of that which I say the union has been successful in screwing a nice hole in teh pockets of all perspective new employees of the supermarkets. (Of course it's equally true of management.) Those employees with union membership and seniority keep their own benefits and all the new guys get to be treated as second-class citizens since they will contribute dollars out of their own pockets toward their benefits. This two tier system throws a disgustingly phlegmy wrench into the concept of union brotherhood. It's a miserable state of affairs.
"It was take it, or there's the door," said Ralphs cashier Carlos Beltran, 25, who voted "yes" at Local 770's polling place in Hollywood. "They are all thieves, the companies and the unions. They're just sticking it to us."
Lovely.
Not only that, the union employees voted themselves a little cash bonus, proving quite honestly that everyone has their price.
Instead of raises, veterans will get lump sum payments this year equal to 30 cents an hour for every hour they worked in the 12 months before the old contract expired. That would be about $500 per employee based on an average 32-hour workweek. A second bonus would be paid after the end of the second year of the contract, equal to 30 cents an hour for every hour worked from March 6, 2005, through Oct. 6, 2006, according to a contract summary obtained by The Times.
Please let us not hear anything more than arched eyebrows for golden parachutes. We've captured something about human nature here. I think I'm going to have some fun in my own private fisking of labor bloggers. Where's American Black on this?
Posted by mbowen at March 1, 2004 03:27 PM
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� Unions and management from nitecrawler
Cobb says this in part about the grocery strike in California and unions. In part: I'm mostly negative on the concept of collective bargaining, but I'm more negative about hyping the supposed superior morality of unions. Unionism is little more... [Read More]
Tracked on March 2, 2004 09:08 PM