Re: OT

From: Bill Sloman (bill.sloman_at_ieee.org)
Date: 11/04/04 

Date: 4 Nov 2004 03:09:48 -0800

John Larkin <jjlarkin@highSNIPlandTHIStechPLEASEnology.com> wrote in message news:<o07io0phb1emu4i91gisfsebubt37c20l5@4ax.com>...
> On Wed, 03 Nov 2004 10:39:15 -0700, Jim Thompson
> <thegreatone@example.com> wrote:
>
> >On Wed, 03 Nov 2004 09:21:51 -0800, John Larkin
> ><jjlarkin@highSNIPlandTHIStechPLEASEnology.com> wrote:
> >
> >>On 2 Nov 2004 23:10:48 -0800, bill.sloman@ieee.org (Bill Sloman)
> >>wrote:

<snip>

> >Management wanted the workers to make a mild concession in wages,
> >arguing that the company was losing money.
> >
> >The Union refused.
> >
> >INCO declared total bankruptcy and collapsed the company.
> >
> >I note this summer, when I was there for my wife's HS reunion, that
> >the company is back, now called Specialty Metals.
> >
> >Wages are *one-half* what they were and there are NO benefits.
> >
> >Let's hear it for unions ;-)
> >
> > ...Jim Thompson

I imagine that the new company didn't exactly get the pick of the old
workers, and the quality of the stuff the new company delivers won't
be up to the old standards either.

One of the mre comical aspects of Thatcher's England was that Thatcher
was deeply impressed by the economic success of Singapore, and was
hell-bent on lowering the average industrial wage in the U.K. to match
what was then being paid in Singapore, while in the Singapore
government was moving heaven and earth to educate their workers to
improve their productivity so they the wage levels in Singapore could
be increased.

The joke was that industrial workers in the U.K. were already
well-trained and educated by world standards, and - if you figured in
the capital invested per industrial worker - at least as productive as
workers anywhere. Because the capital invested was relatively low,
their raw productivity per head was lower than that of their U.S.,
German, French and Swedish counter-parts, but if you compared areas
where the capital investment was more or less equal, the U.K. guys
came out slightly better.

Or as the unions put it at the time - pay peanuts and get monkeys.

> One thing unions do is add a lot of quantization, or perhaps
> hysteresis, to the economic system. Without them, employees diffuse in
> and out of companies, looking for the best jobs, and companies
> continuously servo pay and benefits to attract the most profitable
> workforce.

The unionised companies I've worked for work exactly the same way.
Even where the base rate per hour is fixed by industry wide
agreements, the good workers are encouraged by more over-time, more
interesting tasks and more opportunities for extra training.

> Unions add static friction to the system, and deliberately
> hardwire inefficiency and contention into the workings of a business.

Not where I've worked. Nobody wants their employer to go bankrupt and
close down. Most of the sources of contention I've run into have been
dumb bosses, who see only the financial advantages of some impractical
cost-saving scheme, and scream about union obstruction when they are
prevented from flushing their careers down the toilet.

> It's amazing that many unions actively seek to do longterm damage to
> their employer every time they go on strike, for example in the
> current San Francisco hotel strike/lockout.

It's amazing that many employers actively seek to do long term damage
to their firms by adopting such absurdly rigid negotiating positions
that they drive their employees to resorting to the strike weapon -
though this is sometimes a delibrate tactic adopted by an employer who
wants to take their business down-market, as was probably the case
with the "Specialty Metals" example above.

> That's the worst part, breaking a company up into "labor" and "management"
> and making them enemies.

The division between labour and management is essentially unavoidable,
even in co-operatively owned businesses - some people have to do the
work, and some people have to work out which work to do, and how that
work is going to be organised.

This division doesn't automatically make the two sides into enemies
and if they do become enemies it reflects incompetence on one side at
least. One of the most important skills in both union organisors and
company managers is mediating those conflicts that do occur so that
they don't hang around and embitter the relationship.

One of the take-away messages of Tony Webb's book, "The Collaborative
Games" ISBN 1 86403 163 8, is that this is precisely where the Sydney
Olympics did a lot better than Atlanta, despite having to servic the
Olympics from a much smaller population base than the Altanta
organisors could access.

--------
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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