Another Fine Friday

It occurs to me that there is a lot of friction between 'labor' and 'big business' in this country. Part of that is because laborers see businessmen profiting off of labor--which is true. A lot of times what laborers don't see is all the time and effort and planning that went into building the business in the first place. The company owner, on the other hand, a lot of times doesn't appreciate the frustration and aggravation of working oneself to death and watching someone else get rich from that labor: The laborer should be glad to be getting a paycheck--and there are certainly other people that would like to be getting paid what this guy is getting paid. Unions came about because a lot of company's took advantage of their employees, gave them 'the opportunity' to work--for low wages and in unsafe conditions. To be honest, unions forced our government to enact a staggering amount of legislation aimed at maintaining fair wages and safe working conditions. It's not a perfect system, but, then, what government-mandated system ever is?
I don't belong to a union, and I don't expect that I ever will. Maybe. I'm not so much against unions as just that, in a lot of cases, I think that they have outlived their usefulness. Unions still claim to be about looking after the workers best interests, and I'm sure some of them still do, but I've noticed that sometimes the unions are exactly the problem that they like to accuse big business of being: Union leaders sometimes collect fairly exorbitant salaries--salaries paid out of union dues collected from workers. In other words, sometimes union leaders get rich off of the backs of the workers that they claim to be looking out for the best interests of.
I want to stress that I know not all unions do this. Unfortunately, there are a lot of union workers who know that this sort of thing happens, but they don't believe that their union would engage in those sorts of practices. Some of them are right; possibly most of them are right. I would like to think that all of them are right--that every union in this country operates strictly for the good of the workers that they represent--but I don't. Conversely, I'm not cynical enough to believe that every union exists solely as a parasitic organism.
I would like to encourage union workers to find out as much as you can about the union's financials: If the president of your union makes more than the CEO of your company, that should be a red flag. If the president of your union makes more than the average salary of the workers in your union, you might want to consider that; it isn't necessarily a red flag, maybe it's more orange... I think I would have a hard time belonging to a union where the union leaders made more money than I did, but, if it was clear that I wouldn't be making the money I was making if it were not for their efforts, i might learn to live with it.
In any case, the relationship should be symbiotic: The company depends on its workers, and should look out for the safety and well being of its workers, whether there is a union in place or not. The workers, on the other hand, depend on the company for continued employment, and should understand that unreasonable demands for increased pay can force the company to either go out of business, or move jobs overseas, where workers are more likely to be grateful for a (smaller) paycheck. Companies should never threaten to take jobs overseas, though.
Something else, too: I've heard a lot of talk about how, in some countries, workers will work for surprisingly little money, because poverty is extreme, and, for example, 14¢ an hour may actually be a living wage. How can American companies compete with that? That's a good point, but I think that you need to consider shipping costs and import taxes. It's not that unusual for a company to move jobs overseas only to find out that they're not making any more profit by taking advantage of lower wages, but they are producing a better product because the person working for less than a dollar an hour has missed more than a few meals waiting to get a job and makes sure that their work is exemplary because they don't want to be without a job again. I'm not saying that every American worker should work as though each and every product needs to be perfect, but it used to be that the pride of the American worker was well known throughout the globe: What happened to it? And, no, I don't think that unions destroyed it, but I do think that the 'us vs. them' attitude that so many unions espouse hasn't helped any. There is no 'them,' there is only us.