Jumping The Shark

I just read the following this morning in the Neal Boortz “Nealz Nuze”:

While we are talking about unions ... let's move on to the United Auto Workers. A months-long battle to save a General Motors plant in Indianapolis came to an end yesterday. The union at this GM plant was given a choice: accept pay cuts to bring your salaries in line with industry standards or the plant will be closed. The union voted and their decision was that they would rather have the plant close and all workers will lose their jobs then to allow their union wages to be cut.

and it got me thinking. Just how long ago was it that unions jumped the shark? When was it that unions went past improving working conditions to become entities out for themselves? When did they become competitors to successful business?

I remember back in the summer of 1968 I went to work for Safeway’s grocery warehouse filling store orders. Of course I was new and so I wasn’t very efficient to begin with and I felt I was behind on filling orders. When the break bell sounded, I kept working to try and catch up. This happened for the first couple of breaks and on the third day that this happened, a couple of other union guys (it was a closed shop and you had to be a member of the teamsters union to work there) came over and told me I was not to do that anymore. They felt it would give management undue expectations (that’s not the way they worded it). It was at that moment that I realized I wasn’t union material. That they weren’t really interested in the company getting what it was paying for, a day’s worth of work for a day’s worth of pay.

I believe it was a couple of years later I remember watching in the news as a union, I don’t remember which one, struck one of the best tractor/implement companies in the world, International Harvester. It and John Deere were the two biggest at the time, as I recall. They wanted a drastic increase in wages and IH didn’t feel it was in their best interest to pay that high of a salary. The strike drug on for close to a year and a half with IH losing lots of sales and market share to the other companies. No new equipment to sell and parts became hard to find. Finally IH buckled and agreed to the union’s demands for the higher salary, believing it was that or close up shop.

As memory serves, it wasn’t more than about six or eight months before the bottom fell out of the farm industry and farmers weren’t buying new tractors or equipment. There IH was, stuck with a huge contract and nobody buying what they were selling. IH went bankrupt and was bought by Case or somebody (don’t remember just who).

While the name International Harvester is still around, it’s not the company it was. Who knows? Without the union being so greedy, everyone might be talking about IH instead of John Deere, or maybe they would be still competing head to head and we the public would have two great companies to choose between, not just big Green.

The GM plant closing is just another example of unions having lost sight of what is really best for all. They were willing to get NO money as opposed to a percentage of some money. How many workers and how many families will suffer needlessly because of their greed? Not only will the plant workers and their families suffer, but so will all of the ancillary companies and workers who supplied the factory.

The unions are so out of touch that they are hurting themselves. Not only are these plant workers being harmed, but thanks to Big Brother taking over GM and giving the unions part ownership, their strike was hurting a company that they were part owners in. What Were They Thinking???????

Unions were a great thing back in Upton Sinclair’s day, when they were needed to improve the working conditions. In my opinion, they have long since outlived their value to the society. In general, unions have harmed our society over the past 40 or 50 years. Yes union members may have benefited in several cases, but in the long run they have lost, just like the Indianapolis workers have lost. The unions have made companies in the US non-competitive in the world market place. To make things using American union labor causes the price to be so high as to make it unmarketable.

Or at least that’s the way an old farmboy sees it.