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Since unions helped to end practices like child labor and what amounted to indentured service, I’m not sure you know what “tragic” or “long term” means.
If what you mean is more like “what have they done for us lately”, you should probably just say it and start that conversation instead
That underscores the point for me though — the company and shareholders both take a back seat to the well-being of "the rest of us".
If you're looking for something much closer to home, look at how in the past half century unionized corporations were forced to take over pensions, and how they're doing now because of this. Pensions are a financial product, which should be paid for by each employee - quite likely with supervision and safety net from the state. Putting it on the employer's tab turned out to be more or less giving away the future of the company. And that's pretty much 100% on the unions.
That said, there are a lot of reasons why traditional defined benefit pensions aren't a good match for a lot of jobs today. I have one (for a non-union job) but it's mostly a positive because I'm sure I never gave it a second thought early career when I was earning into it.
Or would you like to talk about the long term results from actions of unions last year?
But for simplicity, remind me again who does the work, and who cheaps out on plane parts to drive up revenue?
Unions can can be bad if abused by powerhungy people, but the same is true for literally every other organization.
Do you have a source for them? The only one on the article is that Boeing stops breaking the law.
The only thing that's delusional is how backwards this comment is with respect to the customer. While, yes, Boeing has different buyers than most organizations we can see things like tertiary customers being affected by Boeing's "health" in terms of the quality of it's products. And by that I mean the 737 MAX scandal.
Shareholders shouldn't be afforded to drive the direction of the company, even though they have tools like voting rights. The purpose of a shareholder is that they provide capital because they trust Boeing will make great products that sell and potentially profit from. What a shareholder shouldn't be is someone who gets to tell Boeing to cut quality to artificially inflate the stock price. The shareholder doesn't matter in the case of Boeing employees and if it does then Boeing is not a company you should want to buy products from.
Unions are interested in protecting employees from greed, in its simplest definition. Boeing, as we know at this point in time, has put short term profits well above both its employees and its products. Yet your delusion is that not having a union will somehow fix both? Amazing stretch of reasoning there.
Unless they participate in said work themselves...
And? It's not the union's job to be good for companies or shareholders, it's their job to be good for workers.
> Unions are rarely interested in the "health" of the company itself but rather in their control (which is at conflict with shareholder control) and their compensation (again, eating from shareholder compensation).
Yes, and? You say this like it's a bad thing.
> Unions also use aggressive measures (strikes, shutdowns, etc...) rather than negotiations.
When you/workers are only used for their labour, withholding labour may be the only bargaining chip you have. Why not use said chip?
Or perhaps companies can treat their workers well so that they don't feel compelled to form unions. There are a number of auto plants in southern Ontario, and most are union shops, except Toyota's: the CAW has been trying to organize for many years, but the workers always vote "no". Seems like Toyota treats them well that the workers don't need organization 'against' the company.
Perhaps other companies can learn a lesson from that.
Unions start with negotiations and move to strikes if those don't work. Literally what happened here.
>There are very few good stories with unions but most of them are tragic especially long-term.
Do you have any proof to cite here, eg stats showing success rates of all unionized businesses? Boeing, much of Kroger, and a ton of other industries/companies have long used union labor without "tragic" results.
>For investors, it's both the short and long term that's f-ked.
I'm not gonna feel bad about the wealthy losing a bit of cash.
>Source: Check the current Boeing union demands.
Yeah, better wages, no forced overtime etc. - super shitty things to ask for. If you can't feel my eyes rolling right now, well...
This is the most blatant disregard for or lack of understanding of labor history I have seen in a while