Shek

No, MLB itself. They have an anti-trust exemption that has been challenged but never overturned.

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"So little pains do the vulgar take in the investigation of truth, accepting readily the first story that comes to hand." Thucydides 1.20.3

gunnut

I'm against that too. Other businesses don't have this exemption so MLB shouldn't either.

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"Only Nixon can go to China." -- Old Vulcan proverb.

Shek

I should be a little bit more clear - the antitrust exemption is vis a vis players. It doesn't have a monopoly on preventing others from attempting to create their own baseball league.

Dreadnought

Thanks Sir, I was looking for that somewhere in this thread. Have seen the effects of union members against non union members. IMO Unions want their cake and to eat it as well.

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Fortitude.....The strength to persist...The courage to endure.

Shek

I had to join the union in order to get my high skilled job bagging groceries. Would you like paper or plastic?

They negotiated the minimum wage for me and then took some of that for their hard work

gunnut

I think I heard this morning that Los Angeles is contemplating about charging $0.25 per plastic bag at the grocery stores...

BenRoethig

Unions, as they exist today are about using workers to line their own pockets. They're much like sports agents. If they negotiated a contract that's unsustainable and the guys on the floor get laid off, what do they care, they already got paid.

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F/A-18E/F Super Hornet: The Honda Accord of fighters.

7thsfsniper

Greed-Plain and simple, doesn't care about anything else as long as they can have thiers. I'm not a communist or socialist, but I'm not part of the mob either. It boils down to legal, organized, extortion no matter how they want to paint it.

Since I have so many union members in my family I have firsthand experience with longterm union members, teamsters, electrical workers union, plumbers and pipefitters and all but one have looked back with some regret now that they have seen the results of thier actions on the economy over the past 30 to 40 years. The last couple pages of this thread have hit on about everything that is inherently wrong with unions. Can't argue with any of it.

Question: How bad would the economy have to get before unions collapse or do you even think it could come to that and if it did would we have bigger worries, ie. foreign invasion, civil war?

Do you think unions have that large an impact on our economy in the first place?

The article gunnut posted I think sums it up. 40,000 laid off for the greed of 3500. I think that says it all.

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The nation which forgets its defenders will itself be forgotten

ba1025

[quote=7thsfsniper;481515]I think the slams were great but that is what they were slams. I've seen one person try to show me hard reasons why unions were bad and those reasons were anecdotal not statistical. You CANT show me statistics showing me Unions have been bad for workers on a macro level without arguing that low pay is good for people. Right now service worker pay is rising...is it a coincidence the percentage of hotel and hospitality workers in unions is rising?????

As to the man who paid his people what the market could bear....He was already rich enough to never have to work again


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.

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.

Adux

AYN RAND : CAPITALISM, The unknown ideal; There has never been such a revealing book.

Unions are organized gang collecting money from small time and medium scale business men. They are muscle on hire or when needed for its benefactors or the communist party.

Shek

What was LeBron James' wealth ten years ago? What is it today? How do you classify him? Capital? Labor?

How does his rise affect the median? How does his rise affect the mean (average)?

ba1025

I would point to the growing gap between the median and average income in this country as evidence labor has lagged when compared to capitol. In 1996 the median was 26% of the average now it is 20%.

Shek

You're confusing statistics. Income and wealth are not the same thing. I can be wealthy and have no income (think retired) and I can be unwealthy and have high income (think about a 25 year who gets hired onto Wall Street).

Wealth statistics cannot necessarily be used to comment on income statistics.

Also, you avoided the question I posed, although I added in a phrase to make it clearer.

ba1025

I also question whether the non wage compensation is overstated It includes pensions and benefits that companies are going into bankruptcy to avoid paying or re negotiating years after guaranteeing them. Who goes back and adjusts past compensation when that happens. Look at the buyouts at the big three. Those buyouts are paying out considerably LESS than what was originally guaranteed it's just being paid in cash. Is anyone going to make adjustments on previous years based on Delco, American Airlines and soon most likely the big three's shedding of past guarantees of non wage compensation? If it's never going to be paid it isn't really compensation is it?

I also don't have anything but crocodile tears for the big three who have run their business into the ground and scapegoated unions. How come Ford has an underfunded pension yet...


Dec. 31, 1988: Ford's worldwide earnings were $5.3 billion, the highest of any auto company to date.

2000 Ford reports record earnings of $7.2 billion in 1999, more than any other automotive company in history.

PERHAPS THE WORKERS WEREN'T THE ONES SCREWING THE POOCH HERE.. Maybe some of those earnings are non wage compensation guarantees that the workers will never receive? Maybe when Ford was reporting those earnings in 2000 it was just maybe overstating how well funded it's pension fund was? being they were crying it was breaking them a short 5 years later what else could be the case. What will be amazing is if they end up in chapter 11 someday and we the people pay those pensions. Then ALL that non wage compensation goes away.