This is like a pendulum...
Posted By: Mythbuster on 2009-03-11
In Reply to: Totally agree. Now with card check, bye bye - sm
...swinging from extreme to extreme. Turn-of-the-century industry was mostly an abusive situation - in favor of management and against labor. Sweat shops, long hours, few days off, low wages, strike breakers with clubs and guns employed to disperse crowds of strikers and protestors, any way they could. Something had to put a stop to management abuses, and we began to unionize. (Russia's Bolsheviks were right on top of this opportunity to gain a communist foothold in America. In the beginning, management fought unionization with the claim that union = commy.)
My dad was a union auto worker for 40 years. I've belonged to two unions, the first in the early 1960s, the second in the 1980s through the early 1990s. Both seemed to do a reasonable job of negotiating contracts and settling grievances. Labor and management were not sworn enemies, but respectful opponents. Nobody was unreasonable.
What's going on nowadays, however, really has me thinking the pendulum has swung to far in the labor direction, will reach the limit and start going the other direction again. When workers see their jobs disappear because unions have run the companies out of business I think that will start the reversal. There's such a thing as killing the goose, and it's happening now. Maybe we will have a few more good decades in the middle again before we get sweat shops back.
It's just human nature that power corrupts. We cannot keep ourselves from abusing it.
Complete Discussion Below:  marks the location of current message within thread
The messages you are viewing
are archived/old.
To view latest messages and participate in discussions, select
the boards given in left menu
Other related messages found in our database
You could be right. The pendulum swings
...and now it's swung to the left.
Interesting - and so the pendulum swings - nm
Glenn Beck is a swinging...um...oh yeah, pendulum.-nm
x
|
