Quote from trendy:
Yeah, and then the rest of the world became industrialized and globalized, and then the over-paid, over-entitled, can't be fired union workers got their asses and their pink slips handed to them. The unionized auto workers is a perfect example. Decade after decade they kept churning out crap. For so long the public had no choice but to buy this junk. Well, times changed. Walk the parking lot at any up-scale mall, and count the number of Toyotas, Nissans, Mazdas, BMWs, Audi's, VWs, and Mercedes you see. You are dreaming if you think there is going to be a resurgence of unionization in this country.
Oh please.
The workers assemble the cars. The designers design them, and management decides what parts go into them.
If the designs are crap and the parts are crap like plastic clutches, you get people moving on to Japan or Korea or wherever to get their cars. That has nothing to do with assembly line workers, because they don't make a SINGLE ONE OF THOSE DECISIONS.
Not one.
Including, by the way, any decision on stupidity like the job banks. No one put a gun to the head of the car companies' managements for that one. They can say all they want that they were responding to union demands, but in any negotiation, all kinds of things are put on the table, and what's agreed to is usually very different from each side's starting position.
If you don't know how to negotiate, you shouldn't be in management in the first place.
Competent managers have a little secret: they let the unions be, while making sure they don't run roughshod over management. Why? Because unions can and do act as a lightning-rod for worker complaints: instead of just complaining about management, they can and do also complain about their union leadership. That lets the managers get their jobs done without having to constantly deal with disgruntled workers.
Or at least that was how the good ones still thought thirty years ago when I was young and coming up. Now, of course, they don't need a lightning-rod for worker complaints, since the workers themselves reject union membership. And stupid threads like this one get started over the resulting stunning inter-generational and intra-generational inequalities that result. And the usual stupes come in and blame the last people to have anything to do with any of this: the politicians.
Blaming the politicians is what a coward does. A person with courage would confront the real source of the problem.
But that would involve taking more of a risk than just jacking off in a voting booth by writing in your own name.