SEIU wants to unionize workers at bailed-out banks
The powerful and innovative Service Employees International Union is trying to unionize bank workers, saying that if the banks are going to get a public bailout, workers should have a seat at the table.
"We believe there is special responsibility for companies who receive taxpayer dollars to ensure their workers have a voice on the job," SEIU's Lynda Tran said. "And those workers should have a seat at the table at the companies where decisions that impact the future of their families and the companies that employ them" are made.Citing bailout, union wants to organize bank workers
the latest
latest episodes
That sounds like turning a crisis into a disaster! I wonder if Ford, GM and Chrysler would consider doing this with their bailout? Wait, aren't the unions a big part of the reason US auto makers are struggling?
Hey, I'm all for being treated fairly, but SEIU is looking out for itself only. It is pure evil.
RUN AWAY!!!!!
Can you cite an "evil" thing that SEIU has done?
Can you suggest a way that workers' interests can be represented when the banks and the bailers sit down to negotiate that *doesn't* involve a union?
I have a suspicion; those who find unions "evil",never belonged to one.
I'm trying to figure out how anyone working at a bank got the short end of stick...
ZOMG! Now I have to work 3 or 4 hours on Saturday! WTF!
I won't say where I work, but on one hand it's good I'm employed, on the other:
I'm betting my next day off will be Christmas Eve, so far 11 days straight (10+ hour days) and counting...
And no, it's not retail, it's manufacturing.
I have never worked for a union, but I have had the utter misery of having to work with union workers though. I had the extreme misfortune of working with some auto unions. I worked for a company that made auto parts. We were having a part of our part (a torque converter) made at a unionized company. I went over to that company as an engineer to help get the production going and in general trouble shoot any problems.
My first day there I got written up for violating a union contract. A union worker asked me to pass him a screw driver. In clear violation of the contract, I, a non-unionized engineer, touched a tool as I picked it up from the table it was on and handed it to the guy on the ladder. Oh the horror.
It goes beyond that. Getting anyone to do anything was pretty much impossible. The only way I got anything done was by finding the youngest and newest worker possible who still held delusions that merit mattered for something and hadn't yet realized that seniority was the end all and be all of life under a union. You could usually get someone who was still new and didn't have the life beat out of him yet to be helpful. Otherwise, you could expect work to get done at the slowest pace humanly possible. You couldn't even roll up your sleeves and just got the damn work done yourself, as that would violate the union contract. Awesome.
That isn't to say that I have not had to deal with shitty non-unionized workers, but at least non-unionized workers tend to exist on a gradient. Some suck, some rock, some are so-so. My experience with unionized auto workers on the other hand is universally terrible. I am always amazed that such companies are able to continue to function.
I don't have a problem with the idea of unions. I have a problem with how they execute. Here are the things I hate about unions (at least auto unions, maybe I am being unfair in judging all unions by them).
1) The obsession with seniority over all other things is completely absurd. I utterly fail to see how simply being around the longest should result in such a disproportionate hunk of the pie. Seniority rule is a common thing in most industries, but in any worthwhile industry it is also mixed in with a liberal helping of merit. Unions are violently against judgments based upon merit.
2) Their resistance against actually working is amazing. Maybe this is me the engineer talking, but the idea of writing stuff into my contract that spells out what I won't do is so absurd it defies reason. The idea of writing into my contract stuff other people can't do is even more insane. I always worked in non-unionized companies where if work needed to get done, I would roll up my sleeves and pile into the muck with the technicians to get it done. The idea helping someone do their job and pooling resources to achieve a common goal can get you in trouble is so fucking backwards and wrong that I don't have words to express how fucked up that is.
3) Unions at times seem hell bent upon destroying the companies that they infest. If a company is in struggling for air, is it REALLY a good idea try and cripple them with a list of further demands? The UAW should be thanking their lucky stars that the democrats are in power and about to shovel piles of my money at auto companies to keep their favorite host alive of by suckling on the warm tit of taxpayer money. The UAW and some shitty American car companies should be allowed to die the death they deserve to make room for new companies with new ideas. Maybe if the dead would was allowed to die that black pit of despair we call Detroit could even see a revival.
Give me a union that rewards merit, doesn't actively go out of its way to prevent people from working while they are at work, and doesn't desperately try and kill its host like some unthinking parasite that doesn't realize that a dead host is a worthless host, and I'll be all for unions. Sadly, at least from my experience with the auto unions, unions in the US are glorified racketeering rings.
Man, I am glad this is not Slashdot. My karma would be so fucked.
I'm guessing here but isn't banking the least unionised sector? Maybe it's just me but I always thought bankers subscribed to the world view of 'deil tak the hindmost'. That's what makes the whole economic collapse so pointedly ironic.
Not all unions are the same. It's almost like saying that all systems of government are the same. The fact is unions are organisations that have the capacity to engage in collective bargaining and defend workers rights. We didn't get the 8 hour day and 40 hour week by rolling over.
As for the reason for the situation of the auto workers, that isn't the result of the unions so much as a result of the collapse of Keynesianism and the rise of neo-liberalism. The neo-liberal agenda involved allowing total free flight of capital to any region, regardless of the environmental and worker rights situation. Basically, neoliberalism uses capital flight to ensure that all externalities (side products of production such as worker injury and pollution) are not accounted for and wages are low. Race to the bottom anyone?
The solution is for workers around the world to organise in democratic ways. Provide international solidarity and defend workers rights. We have the right to have reasonable lifestyles!
Workers under neo-liberalism have gotten totally screwed. While the economy has grown around 30% since 1980, workers have gotten almost none of those gains. Instead we've been trying to maintain our standards of living by going into loads of debt. At the same time the top 1% has taken almost all of the increases in productivity. We work more and yet get by about the same as we did decades ago. Which way change? Democratic organisation to defend our rights and livelihoods!
@#5 Companies are parasites that try to make profits while exploiting workers for profit. The company abandons the workers when it can no longer suck enough blood. You're blaming the victim for not prostrating themselves to be sucked dry. Honestly, look at any country that hasn't had a powerful labour struggle, and I'll show you a country in which workers have no rights and work horrible hours.
The problem is the idea that profit should organise society. What we really need is for desire to organise society. We need to try and balance the desire to work with the desires for goods and the desires for a high quality life. The entire structure of work shouldn't be defined in terms of the way that the owner of the means of production can maximise exploitation. And workers absolutely should *not* feel that they need to give themselves up to exploitation.
It is true that unions can destroy a companies profitability, in fact the 70s were a period of falling profits which sent the rich casting about for some way out of increasing organisation in the class. They found a way, the free movement of capital to authoritarian regimes that don't care about workers rights and are willing to bust unions by force.
The market for labour doesn't satisfy any of the qualities that neo-classical economists would pretend it does. That is, there are not many employers, and because of this, there is very little competition for quality of work. A few companies hire lots of people. That means that there is a gross asymmetry in bargaining. If you don't join a union, you have a week bargaining position. Those who don't join a union are actually parasitic on the increasing quality of life that the unions have forced to be the norm.
As I said above, not all unions are the same. It's best if the union is structured horizontally and democratically. This means that you can actually avoid a lot of the corruption that can exist in horizontal organisations. The same kind of corruption that is endemic in corporations.
This is one of my favorite UAW stories:
'On an early afternoon in mid-March, GM workers who build big Chevrolet Suburban sport-utility vehicles sat elbow-to-elbow on bar stools, smoking cigarettes and drinking Milwaukee-brewed Miller beers and shots of scotch. Zachow's sells deep-fried pork rinds and 24 beers for $24. A sign in the corner reads: "Finish your beer. There are sober kids in India."
Scenes like this worry the GM brass as they grope with spiraling health-care costs.
Spiraling health care costs? This isn't afterhours--it's the middle of the working day for some of these GM people. How about worrying about the quality of the assembly work they do when they get back to the plant? The bar owner's defense:
Mr. Zachow said workers don't get drunk when they hit his bar during breaks. "They only have less than a half-hour for their breaks. If they can get two or three beers down, that's about it," Mr. Zachow said.'
Unions are a counterpoint to corporations. Corporations single-mindedly pursue profit at the expense of the well-being of their workers, the environment, the country, or anything else.
Unions pursue the interests of the workers at the expense of management, corporations, consumers, and sometimes the economy at large.
Sometimes they're not pretty, but when our entire economic system is designed to reward the exploitation of workers, Unions are unfortunately the best tool anyone's come up with to combat that exploitation.
If anyone's got a better idea, let's hear it.
Funny, the big auto corps haven't lobbied for universal socialized healthcare. They'd rather piss and moan about their healthcare costs, I guess.
Now here's something interesting that was on Democracy Now! a few months back.
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/10/27/puerto_rican_labor_struggle_teachers_vote
Interesting. I have nothing else to add to this thread, plenty has been covered.
#12 Jackbird
Actually a few years back the chairman of GM took out a two page letter in the NY Times asking for universal health care as a way to help insure that American businesses can remain competitive.
Not a huge fan of unions, but I know why they are there and have little problem with most of them. Some seem to be blind to how good the workers actually have it an keep demanding more. I swear there hasn't been a teacher's union contract in 20 years in British Columbia that didn't go to a strike. Apparently starting at 30k a year and 8 weeks vacation is akin to living in a cardboard box. (Whether teacher deserve more is another argument altogether, it's the "poor me I can barely feed myself" routine the union puts on that bugs me)
Now in this case I think there should be someone representing the workers at any bailout negotiations mainly because banks are notorious for the "greed is good" philosophy and highly doubt that the bailout money would get much farther than the top 10% of management. And the banks might still fail.
Really, with banks and the auto industry- let them fail. If one of the workers in these industries spends their money stupidly buying hottubs and so forth, and extends their debt beyond all reasonable measure, it's not like anybody helps them out. Yes there are workers dependent on the companies, but there's other jobs out there. The government would do better to just pay the salaries of the employees for 6 months than sink a pile of cash into a dying company.
What is up with all the union bashing here? I've had a bad experience with a book before, but I still love to read. Unions are organizations, of workers, for workers, to advance the voice and power of workers at the bargaining table and in larger society. Have there been problems with unions before, of course, but to blame the failings of the auto industry on their workers is crazy. Maybe years upon years of planned obsolescent cars had something to do with it?
We live in society, largely unregulated, of monster capitalism. It feeds on crisis, war, and poverty. And every sector of society that tries to push back, be it unions, lawyers, community organizers, whatever, it just directs mountains of bile. This isn't hyperbole: Bush's Secretary of Education once referred to the Teacher's union as a "terrorist organization." Back off. If we want to have a reason critique of unions alongside other areas of civil society, but acting like the hugest banks in the world, who've destroyed the economy gambling away billions before begging for handouts for their bonuses, are going to somehow crumble because they have to pay their tellers a living wage is weak. Go SEIU! Go outside your house, internet complainers!
(and now back to silently lurking and enjoying boing boing).
>> Unions are organizations, of workers, for workers, to advance the voice and power of workers at the bargaining table and in larger society.
Nope, that may have been how they started but it's not how it is anymore. Now it seems that unions like the UAW exist to serve the management of the unions - not the interest of the workers they represent. Unions are just another kind of industry.
"Can you cite an "evil" thing that SEIU has done?"
How about this:
On Nov. 10, Blagojevich, his wife, Harris, Governor General Counsel, Advisor B and other Washington-based advisors participated at different times in a two-hour phone call in which they allegedly discussed, among other things, a deal involving the SEIU.
Harris allegedly said they could work out a deal with the union and the President-elect where SEIU could help the President-elect with Blagojevich’s appointment of Senate Candidate 1, while Blagojevich would obtain a position as the national director of the Change to Win campaign and SEIU would get something favorable from the President-elect in the future.
http://www.suntimes.com/news/metro/blagojevich/1321363,Blagojevich-Obama-Senate-Seat-illinois-120908.article
But of course, the SEIU was only trying to help their members, right?
Yeah, the forty hour work week, workplace safety laws, child labor laws, time limits on how long pilots are required to stay in the cockpit and truckers are required to stay behind the wheel, sick leave, vacation...organized labor really sucks.
Have you ever been standing around the water cooler talking about some crap the boss is trying to pull, and you say "...he can't do that, it's not legal.."? Well, the reason "...he can't do that..." is because workers before you organized, and took a stand, and changed things for the better.
UAW members could start working for free, and it would drop the price of US autos $200, max. All they're doing is bolting together the increasingly expensive parts. At the same time, states around the country are offering huge tax incentives for foreign auto manufacturers to build assembly plants.
Competing against countries that offer universal healthcare while requiring US companies to pay for overpriced health insurance is stupid. Allowing China and other countries to sell slave labor products next to American made products on the same store shelf, without charging them any import tariff, is stupid. And blaming U.S. auto workers for incredibly myopic management decisions, and Republican's magical "global economy" trade policies, is REALLY stupid.
"Not all unions are the same. It's almost like saying that all systems of government are the same. The fact is unions are organisations that have the capacity to engage in collective bargaining and defend workers rights. We didn't get the 8 hour day and 40 hour week by rolling over.
As for the reason for the situation of the auto workers, that isn't the result of the unions so much as a result of the collapse of Keynesianism and the rise of neo-liberalism. The neo-liberal agenda involved allowing total free flight of capital to any region, regardless of the environmental and worker rights situation. Basically, neoliberalism uses capital flight to ensure that all externalities (side products of production such as worker injury and pollution) are not accounted for and wages are low. Race to the bottom anyone?
The solution is for workers around the world to organise in democratic ways. Provide international solidarity and defend workers rights. We have the right to have reasonable lifestyles!
Workers under neo-liberalism have gotten totally screwed. While the economy has grown around 30% since 1980, workers have gotten almost none of those gains. Instead we've been trying to maintain our standards of living by going into loads of debt. At the same time the top 1% has taken almost all of the increases in productivity. We work more and yet get by about the same as we did decades ago. Which way change? Democratic organisation to defend our rights and livelihoods!"
Wow, someone copied the Marxist manifesto and passed it off as his own ideas. Get real.