Close to a thousand machinists in Texas recently voted to unionize under the banner of a union. They will be part of IAM local 2916. http://www.goiam.org/index.php/news...s-win-back-to-back-organizing-drives-in-texas Non-union American workers are starting to sit up and notice what their unionized workers have and they don't. You'll see more and more of this as time goes on.
No you won't. I suppport private unions (not public) but lets face it they make up something around 12% of the workforce now and are shrinking. They will get new members here and there but overall it is on a downward trend.
I'll be posting victories on a regular basis here so we'll see. People I know where were intensely anti-union are starting to admit they were wrong. It may take time but I believe down the road labor will be back stronger then ever.
Unions are great in principle but have no concept of a braking system or truck with the notion of 'enough is enough' and so they always keep pushing for more and ever more goodies, driving the cost of doing business through the roof and convincing the owners to . . . look overseas for economic relief. Been there, done that, was part of a union that fluking destroyed its own company, putting everyone out of work. Oh joy!
Not all unions are like the one you belonged to. My union has had a working partnership with the company for over 70 years and the company hasn't moved overseas or out of town to another area in the country for some reason.
Except that when Wisconsin Act 10 past which required Unions to recertify every 2 years virtually everyone dumped their unions like a fat girlfriend. Keep in mind the law only said that unions had to have a vote every 2 years to recertify, it didn't ban unions whatever propaganda lies might have been spread. I know some people that actually though Act 10 banned private unions...........it didn't even ban public unions it just limited their bargaining rights. But that is what they were told by their union reps. Having worked in both union and non-union shops I can tell you from at least my personal experience that the best place to work is a company that is union competitive meaning that they are not union but some of their competition is union therefore they have to offer similar compensation in order to get decent workers.
My experience has been very positive otherwise I wouldn't be touting the benefits of being union. I've been 35 years with my current union and have no complaints about them other then they do not educate people as to what our union is and does for the membership; otherwise I've been very happy to work union.
A number of years ago I attended a collective bargaining training course in Austin, Tx. The strong point made by the chief instructor was that the company had to hand over the financials to the union bargaining team so that there was transparency and hence no chance of a contract being so onerous that it would break the company and members would lose jobs. Makes sense to me.
Not all unions are the same, machinists could unionize because they have special skills and this gives them bargaining power. The weird obsession with unionizing fast food workers and so-on shows either a total lack of understanding of economics or a desire to produce a class of perpetual victim-unions that are always tragically losing. It's a fail either way since these unions of victims would be getting their strikes broken by the next wave of immigrants and I can't imagine that working out so well for the Democrats because their entire gig is pretending that pro-union and pro-immigration are reconcilable when they're actually fundamentally opposed.
But those who are low-skill are exactly the ones who need union representation. Regarding fast-food workers. I was surprised to see so many people who were in their late twenties and upwards working in fast-food places in the US. My experience in Australia is that most employees on the floor as it were are young and working on an entry-level job. They get employable skills. It's rare that I've seen someone in their thirties or older working at one, although I'm not suggesting it doesn't happen nor am I suggesting that won't be the case in the future. From this it seems to me that the fast-food industry employment at lower than management level here is about entry to the workforce and building skills until a person can move into another industry or go upwards in their own. If older workers are in those jobs then they definitely need union representation.
