Originally Posted by 7thsfsniper

As to the man who paid his people what the market could bear....He was already rich enough to never have to work again (Correct, but what did that have to do with the market. Was he supposed to pay people more out of his own pocket!?)

I worked at a non union shop. i got yelled at for having too many soda bottles on my bench(4). I must be drinking soda all day. i made $5.00 an hour in 1982. I was a kid. i was once stabbed by a junkie working there with a hypodermic needle. I ended up missing 3 days of work i did not get paid for. They did pay for my antibiotics and a couple of Dr's visit when I developed cellulitis and a systemic infection from the dirty needle. They did not file a workers comp claim. The man who stabbed me was a profiecent toolmaker as well as a junkie. he made them money. They didn't fire him because he said he had thought the needle was covered. i look back and say WOW. i didn't know better at 20. I meekly asked for my 60% ins pay when i found out i was owed it from a co worker a few months later. I often used to sneak glasses of milk from the coffee room on Wed and Thur. I didn't have enough to pay for an apt, a car and food all the time and at the end of the week i was hungry. A lot of weeks I lived on Cumberland farms .39 cent white bread and peanut butter. Gas was exploding in price it really sucked driving an old Monte Carlo my Dad had given me.
He( the owner) mostly sold tooling to Textron and Pratt and Whitney. He employed about 30 people. He also told us he would close up shop if we tried to unionize. I was in a skilled trade but admittedly a journeyman. When my Leadman found out how little I made( salary is top secret at job shops) He was flabbergasted and i got a .50 raise to $5.50. In 1983 he said there was no money for raises due to the economic conditions. like i said i was young. it was my first full time job. I worked my ass off from 730-4 everyday sodas not withstanding. I really was in bad shape and constantly under money pressure just to get by. There were no big friday night outs.
Anyway, the straw that broke the camels back for me was when he showed up with a brand new Winibeggo and had me out there cleaning it. how could there be no money for raises but money for a 80k touring van?????? i started putting in applications the next week and 4 mo later got offered a union job for almost twice the pay. They tried to tell me they had benefits other than pay to offer me and enticed me with a $1.00 an hour raise( a bit in 1983 especially since he couldn't give ANYONE a raise that year).

I left and still have the same Union job that has offered me and my family a middle class life working at a profitable well run company that funded it's pension fund when it was reporting record profits unlike Ford. That man did not pay his workers what the market could bear he was a capitalist and tried to make as much money as he could. I believe in American Capitalism and with that i believe in unions which have been an integral part of that for 80 years. I BELIEVE IN UNIONS BECAUSE I WORKED FOR AN EXPLOITVE SOB AND THERE ARE NO SHORTAGE OF THEM OUT THERE STILL.

Originally Posted by ba1025

they don't have experience on the other side of the coin i do. How bad did the economy have to get before Unions got protection from unfair practices....took a great Depression.

How does the median income of Americans being 6% smaller in relation to the Average income of Americans 10 years ago jibe with the picture of Capitol suffering under labor abuses? Capitol's share of the nations wealth has risen in comparison to Labors as evidenced by the growing distance between what the average and median incomes are . It would appear to me the greed is on the high end not the low end or the average persons wages wouldn't be so far behind the average wage.