My dad has been a Personnel Manager at multiple companies, some union, some non-union. He's the lucky guy who gets to coordinate contract negotiations. Let me tell you, stereotypes happen for a reason. I'm not talking about most of the workers themselves, the good ones are just brainwashed by "that's how it's always been." I'm talking about high-level union management.

I'm in total agreement with your second paragraph, though you forgot to leave out that there are a whole host of federal regulations that make unions pretty much unnecessary now. Unions are outdated relics that remain only to extract money from both members and management.

Don't even get me started on Card Check.

No plan to.

Simply saying. I have been in union companies. I have also done union, and management for the SAME company.

I can say, even now, that no matter what you think of unions, management is 100 times worse. It is hard to justify union members take a pay cut, or cut their benefits when you award your CEO and board of directors 10's or 100's of millions of dollars every year in bonuses. Or when your advertisements are on every single Big Ten football game. Or endless other examples.

You can't expect a multimillion dollar company flaunting their money in the faces of the workers, and to keep paying their management and execs absolutely ludicrous pay hikes annually, or bazillions on their ad budgets, and not expect those at the bottom rung not to be asking for their piece of the pie?

Nigga please.

:2 cents:

This is in all of our futures....

http://a.imagehost.org/0215/Lord_Humungus.jpg

Not talking about multimillion dollar companies with multimillion per year CEOs, etc. I'm talking smaller than that, stuff like a regional airport. Union rules add so many layers of extra work that must be done for any little thing, etc. I should note, though, that your problem you detail above exists in BOTH union and non-union shops, so you can't say the union's FIXED that problem.

Anyway, you got your opinion, I got mine. I ain't going toe to toe with you on it. :1orglaugh

Agreed. There is no money in it.

Carry on.
:pimp

I think I know who you are now! Hit me up on icq mang!

thats not 100% true.. the govt allowed banks to shift toxic debt off their primary books, its still there, but the new accounting rules allowed them to shift that without taking an immediate loss..

i am trying to buy 2 foreclosures (triplex) from 2 separate banks and they didnt want to budge on the price..

fortunately for me, one is a freddie mac and they keep dropping the price $7k every 30 days, so hopefully i will get them both for less than my original offer...

There is a house across the street from me that is for sale by the bank. It was a foreclosure so it is just sitting there empty. They have had three different offers on it. Twice the people buying it got sick of for the bank. The bank accepted their offer and the process started. Two months later the bank still hasn't done anything they need to to so in two of the three cases the people just pulled the offer and bought another house. The third person made the offer and it was accepted then they are in a holding pattern. I spoke to the realtor about a month ago when I saw her out there mowing the lawn. She told me the story of the house. Since then the people haven't moved in so I assume the bank is stalling again.

So clearly they aren't in any big hurry to move these things off their books. If they were it would have been sold six months ago.

i know.. i am seeing similar things.. the banks don't seem to care and it makes me mad that when regular people get in trouble, the banks have the attitude of "liquidate your assets" yet they dont want to do the same..

in my case, the banks are going to ultimately take a much bigger loss than if they would have just sold to me to begin with at a bigger profit then they are going to get in the end..

http://www.alternet.org/workplace/14...ust_walk_away/

"Here's a terrible new twist to a housing meltdown tortured by too many of them. Banks are refusing to take possession of houses after the foreclosure process because of the prohibitive cost, from legal to maintenance fees, of being stuck with the same worthless mortgages with which they've saddled American homeowners...."

nice metaphor :thumbsup

that's a very good point also Rochard, I think most of us know a few people like that, it's more common than some people might think

Just had to reply to educate some of the youth out there, the numbers you want to look are called U6 numbers. U3 numbers were put into public view during the great depression. They knew it was going to be long, people were losing their job but yet they kept seeing rising unemployment numbers, and reporting it to the public. This continues to panic the public and create a frenzy, if you look at the crash you could almost see the day they put u3 numbers to public use. Unemployment was cut in half if not more, since u3 numbers only refer to people who are collecting unemployment benefits.

There is a catch thou to the u3 numbers, if you are going to school free on the governments dime, you are not considered on the u3 numbers, the government looks at you as they are paying you to goto school, so school is considered your job. Another thing that you have to remember about the big crash they keep referring to was that the unemployment numbers were considered for any person above the age of 14 yrs of age. If you were working at 14 doing a paper route and you lost your job, you could be in their collecting money for the family.

So the big difference is the spoon fed information to the public, trust me if government came out and said the u6 numbers were i believe last i looked was last month and it was 17.6%, people would flip, they are panicking now that they think it will top 10% on the u3 numbers. Now you understand why the government split the numbers into several numbers, one number is that on which tax payers are paying them a weekly check, the other is those same people grouped up with people who still have not found a job.

K thats all for me, look up the u3 and u6 numbers and see for yourself, only reason i know this stuff is one of my family numbers work for the state unemployment and laughs every time she hears 8% etc.