Quote:
Originally Posted by luqmaninbmore
Unions are good. They are not a panacea. While benefits for the workers no doubt played a part in the financial problems of those companies, a greater role was played by the incompetence of the management and the rapid change in environment that accompanied Reaganite deregulation. If it were not for unions and other forms of working class organization, the majority of us would not enjoy the protections against work place hazards or exploitation that we enjoy today. And we wouldn't have a weekend or many other benefits. Again, they are not perfect. And the farther they get from the rank and file membership, the worse they get. But they are good and have been a powerful force historically for creating a more just and human society.
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Agreed (although not many people seem to, these days). Unfortunately, the most entrenched unions seem to be the ones that can be held up for their negative examples (the moderate unions seem to have all been eliminated), but the fundamentals of unionization are a good thing (for the workers and management both).
It's too bad that management is being taught to downsize, outsource, and otherwise churn their way through workers. The importance of a stable, skilled, internally-promoted work force seems to have been eliminated from university business classes.