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Ziegler Lumber, I think. Just remembered.

   

Pfft...what government regulations and enforcement? All those "agencies" supposedly established to ensure the existence of the middle class have been defanged and the laws have been re-written or made voluntary. Not to mention all the free trade agreements and pro-globalization policy that puts Canadian workers in direct competition with cheap third-world labour and child labour overseas.

Almost every major strike in the past 20 years by unions has been a rear-guard action against employer take-backs like the one here. Government is a willing accomplice and often coerces unions into making concessions to the employer, like they just did with GM and Chrysler.

We are returning to the world of robber-barrons and worker abuse all in the name of being "globally competitive," which is something they and the government made necessary in the first place. This is a race to the bottom.

   

awwwwww the workers at GM and Chrysler finally had to make concessions. After years and years of demanding ever more than they are actually worth( and getting it), they had to make concessions. BOO fucking hoo. The CAW is a bad example to use my friend. They are their own worst enemy and a blight on Canada. I'm sorry but, if you think some shmuck installing battery posts should be paid the same as many nurses, your priorites are messed up. 60K a year to install fucking battery posts, what a joke. Over the last 20 years unions have been responsible for driving up prices on many consumer products. Over the last 20 years, unions have put people's health at risk by cutting off or disrupting city services. Over the last 20 years, unions have disrupted and interfered with our children's education. They have assualted people that were simply trying to do their jobs.
But to hear them tell it, they do it for ALL Canadians. Bullshit!!!

   

Minimum wage laws, safety laws, limits to working hours, overtime compensation, mandatory holidays and holiday pay, rules for termination, protection for gender/religion/ethnicity/age/etc, you name it.

The fact that you don't work like many people did in the 19th century for 16 hours a day is proof that employees have far more rights now than they used to.

   

1) Ummm....almost none of those laws apply to collective bargain agreements, you know that right? Unions work whatever hours under whatever conditions and for whatever compensation they're able to get in writing at the bargaining table, with the exception of some very basic safety laws.



2)

All of that was acheived by labour unions. They struck for 10 hour workday and then later for a 9 hour workday and then for a 5-day workweek and eventually we ended up with the standard 5/8 workweek we have now. They struck for most of the workplace protection laws we have now and in the 1930's and 1940s they were a political force with politicians running with "Conservative-Labour" or "Liberal-Labour" in their title to show their affiliation with the labour movement. It was unions that brought us out of the Charles Dickens era into a first world economy where mere "average" (i.e. common,typical, replaceable, unspecialized) citizens could earn a middle class wage for a hard day's work instead of slaving away for crumbs under some Scrooge-type boss.

Look at the take-backs we've had. Mike Harris raised the work-week from 48 to 60 hours and it stayed there until McGuinty put it back down. Many of the laws and regs have been weakended, watered down, shot full of loopholes or go unenforced. Canadians work more hours now than they did before. More and more people work as "temporary" employees under "temporary" contracts that are exempt from the laws and remain on them for years. LCBO has "temp" employees who have been on the job 15 years!!! Another large number are told "they're not full-time, they're part-time workers who volunatrily put in 20 extra hours every week" another way of getting around the system. Of course if you don't put in the 20 hours, you quickly find yourself without a job for vague "non-performance" reasons.

Every major labour action in the past 20 years since Reaganomics became the normn in the west has been to fight against and employer take back from unions and a give back to the financial interests that own business. It's not about ridiculous CEO salaries and bonuses, its about the investors, shareholder and hedge funds who pay those CEOs to make sure their return on investment is always protected. The financiers are like the mafia, they always take their pay right off the top before anything else gets considered. Its like that line from the movie Good Fellas: "Business is slow? Fuck you, pay me. Costs go up? Fuck you, pay me." The CEOs pay their mafia-like financiers by taking from their employees and as soon as they miss a stock price target or the price/earing ratio is something less than golden, the CEO is thrown out and a hatchet-man is eventually brought in so the company can be pieced out like this one was, even if its still viable, it is no longer desirable to them if its short term performance is not at 100% of the most positive expectations all of the time.

   

LMFAOOOOO and some unions ARE mafia you fool. And those that ain't, sure fucking act like they are.
And the unions themselves are most concerned about their bottom line and nice retirement packages(not for the average worker mind you, just the big-wigs).
They have or had multi-billion dollar pension funds, nice retreats to go to and yet, when they order a strike, why do they only pay a lousy $200/wk strike pay to the strikers? You, know, the guys that actaully PAY union dues?
The big unions are no different than big business. IT's all about money and profit.
Different system, same corruption. Get a clue.

   

That's exactly what I said on the first page...they were necessary at one time, but that time has now passed.

   

Well, first off great job on the name calling and "get a clue" jabs, way to keep it classy, PA.

Yeah, I'm sure there's corruption in unions, like there is in politics or anywhere else, but come on, those "pension funds" for large employers are of course multi-billion dollar, how else do you pay out monthly benefits to 100,000+ retirees? That doesn't mean average workers are worth billions of dollars, it means if they're lucky enough to qualify for full retirement benefits they'll get a grand or two a month from the fund instead of the taxpayer. Of course unions are there to protect their members' bottom lines, what do yo think they're there for, to plan company bbqs?

While I'm not sure the Union "big wigs" have better benefits, I'm sure they get plenty of 'perks' but nothing that compares to the hedge fund managers and financial sharks out there that just collapsed our whole fucking economy and evaporated trillions of dollars in wealth and hundreds of thousands of jobs in a few months!!! Come on man!

All the union big wigs in the country put together dont "bring in" more than a fraction of what a CEO or a corporate raider bring in anually,let alone the hundreds of hedge funds and private equity groups looking to liquidate easy prey. You're really talking apples and oranges.

Most unions have a pay scale where the strike pay goes up the longer they are on strike, but they don't raise enough in member dues to fully replace their workers wages, unions have other fixed and variable expenses besides strike pay.

And even if there are people within the union hierarchy skimming out of funds, that's like saying the police are useless because some cops are crooked. they're still out there fighting against -and only occasionally winning- for a good cause, the massive redistribution of wealth from worker to Big Finance. Besides, despite the propaganda WORKERS VOTE to strike or take job action, its not decided by some union 'elite' looking to line their own pockets. Why is hard for you to understand that workers might actually be against having their wages and benefits slashed and might feel that a strike is appropriate.

   

Beaver, why is it that when people like yourself talk about unions or strikes, you always talk about the CEO's, Executives, etc and how much money they make. As if it should be tied to the workers or they should sacrifice for the workers sake.

That's BS.

CEO's and Executives are in that position for a reason. Union members should be looking outwards, not upwards, and comparing their wages to the competition or the private sector.

   

...or more importantly, to their productivity.

   

For making soap $25 bucks is a hell of a lot.

Just another example of where unions do more harm then good. Why was it only the company that had to make concessions? As we can see now, they had no room to because they were broke! The union made their choice and chose greed over their members jobs. Now people with no other marketable skills are out in the cold and judging by their age will be forced to live out retirement destitute as any benefits or pensions they had are now history.

   

Bullshit!

Yeah, to produce profits for shareholders, Period. Look at the statistics for the past 25-30 years. The economy grew exponentially but median income and hourly wages DID NOT BUDGE relative to inflation. So who's making all that new money, if not the average worker???

Well lets see:

1)CEO compensation went from 25x the median income to over 500 x the median income during that period. So there's one beneficiary.

2)The proportion of productive (ie sales) revenue that now goes to stock buy-backs and dividend payouts instead of reinvestment, expansion or growing wages is also up dramatically.

3)The proprotion of public stock (and therefore the companies they represent)that are now owned by financial interests (ie hedge funds, pension plans, mutual funds, etc)-especially global financial interests instead of households has sky rocketed from 4% to 60%. Financial itnerests typcially demand constant high-yield returns.

4)The short-term or quarterly performance of a companys stock is increasingly more important than the long-term performance of the company. CEO's are hired, fired and paid handsomely quarterly based on stock performance, which encourages them to gut employee compensation and ignore long-term company health in pursuit of these goals.

5) The fact that the average stock was held for an average of 7 years and now is only held for less than 1 year: Another driver for short-term performance as investors who have little or no long-term interest, knowledge or relationship with the country hop on board, demand their cut and then dump the stock in search of their next payout.

I understand that talented people can and should earn large salaries, but some of this CEO pay is absurd. $400 million severance to someone in their late 60's. Can you really do something worth $400 million in compensation while simultatneuously telling your workers who have real-life problems and expenses that THEY are the ones who are "overpaid" and must make concessions?

The problems with saying "unions should compare their wages to the competition" is that the competition is now child labour in third world countries and migrant workers brought in from Jamaica, the Caribbean and elsewhere. I mean those trade agreements and migrant worker policies didn't just fall from the sky one day you know, people actually sat down, lobbied government for them, while others drew them up and passed them into law. The financial powers and their government sympathizers have made sure that the game is rigged so that this ideology of "competition" means a one-way redistribution of wealth from middle-class workers to the ruling class where less for us means more for them.

And its not a coincedence that nearly all of this came to pass once the Thatcher-Reagan era began.

   

Yes they can, they run a multibillion dollar company, and basically need to make the huge decisions about that company's future. They have degrees up the ass, and a lifetime of experience, and that's IF they didn't have some part in forming the company to begin with. The actions, choices, and decisions they make can mean millions upon millions of dollars. That's worth more than making $45 an hour putting two bolts in.



And you know why? Because union labor prices in Europe and North America are so high. Why should a company like General Motors pay somebody 45-50 bucks in both pay and benefits, when they can pay somebody 10 dollars an hour in Mexico? It makes no sense for any company to keep their operation here. The fact that companies can get screwed over anyway, with strikes and such, just make moving production south of the border, or overseas, that much more valuable.

   

Because then we have to become a third world country and live near open sewers and without electricity to compete, and I dont think you or anyone wants that.

If GM wants to move to some thirdwold shithole, pay their workers a breadcrumb a year and sell their cars to the local peasants for 2 breadcrumbs, I say bon-voyage. But that's not what they want. They want to move the jobs and the costs there where there are plenty of starving peasansts willing to work for nothing and hardly any laws to follow, but sell the cars to Candians and Americans for a fortune. NO WAY.

Our markets are OURS there is no god-given or natural right for a foreign company to sell here. If they want our markets for our products, they have to hire our workers, its that simple. I don't want to live in an open sewer and break my back for a dollar a day just because that's what my "competition" in Mexico and china does. We built this first world country for a reason and it wasn't just to destroy it and go back to the day of massive poverty.

People work for one reason and one reason only: to provide the necessities for ourselves and our family, not out of a sense of civic duty or patriotism. Its a necessity of survival in the capitalist era.

We made this place a first world country not just by making good-paying jobs availableto our best and brightest and most talented, but to the MAJORITY of our working citizens. We decided that the AVERAGE, TYPICAL, NON-SPECIAL worker who was willing to do his job to the best of his abilities every day should be able to earn a 'decent' 'middle class' wage. The best and brightest mentioned above could earn much much more and become millionaires, but that didn't mean the average joe worker had to be poor, and had to keep constantly lowering his living standard in order to keep his job going to somebody more desperate since he is merely 'average' and 'replaceable'.

What you are supporting is the absolute destruction of this model that turned us into this prosperous nation and one where the wealthiest of the wealthy reduce everyone elses' wages for no other reason than to pay themselves more and more out of nothing except sheer and utter GREED. That's what 3rd world countries look like. I understand CEOS work hard and have demanding jobs but $400 mil is so much money I don't think its humanly possible to do any job that earns it. U mean, that is so much money, its meaningless. You can't possibly spend it all if you tried. There is very little in this world that $400 mil gets you that $200 or $300 mil doesn't, really. Its just about getting your name at the top of some Forbes magazine list at that point. And its proof that there is not a "business need" to lower wages or cut costs. They're cutting workers wages for nothing other than their own greed. And because governemnts now allow them to move overseas when previously they prevented this behaviour with tariffs and import taxes.

What you are basically proposing is basically that canada become a third world country because employers will always move jobs to the poorest, most desparate countries on earth. Thats wrong, and it wasn't that way before the Reaganomics philosophy took over governemnt and it doesn't have to be that way.

   

And there we go again.

Who cares where the profit is going. Who cares if the CEO is making 400 million in severance? People who own companies are entitled to as much money as they can get. They are not the average workers, nor should workers even care about what these people are making.

Workers should care if they have a job. If the job pays decently and if the job environment is safe. Stop worrying about what other people have and what you don't.

Talk about corporate GREED, all your arguments are based on "they have it so should we". That's greed.

Publicly traded companies have 1 obligation and that's to the shareholders.

If you're making $50 an hour plugging bolts into a car, or making bars of soap....shut the hell up and work and enjoy something that very few people have.

A good, well paying job with decent benefits. Take a bit of a pay cut to keep your good job and maintain your lifestyle and stop bitching like you're owed something. In the words of Tony Soprano "You're entitled to shit".

   

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