MDenham wrote:
Organized labor is half the reason that there are stupid-*** "prevailing wage" laws that make state governments overpay for construction projects.
I'm so very very sick of people demonizing the unions. Have there been mistakes made in the way unionized labor is dealt with? Yes. Has there been corruption here and there? Yes, but corruption is by no means exclusive to nor a product of unions.
Overall though, organized labor has been a force for good without which in the last century this country would once again have become one which tolerates slavery, in the form of underpaid employees barely able to make a living, forced to work in exceptionally hazardous conditions for a pittance, without benefits such as healthcare or retirement plans.
Let me tell you a story...
In the late 1950s, my grandmother, with 5 kids and an 8th grade education, was working 80 hours a week in a coffee shop for minimum wage (and in the 1950s, minimum wage was not even close to what it is today.) The only thing keeping her afloat was the allotment check from her ex-husband's military pay, but even that came with its own set of problems because her alcoholic ex-husband didn't see why a little thing like a divorce decree should get in the way of him having what he wanted--which is why two of their kids were conceived AFTER they divorced, and why he would, on a whim, drop in and take off with all her saved up money or even the car she used to get to work.
This situation also pretty much kept her stuck in Arkansas in proximity to her ex-husband's family, her children's uncles, at least two of whom were @#%^philes (one of which I know from personal experience.)
In short, she had no future. Her children had no future. Had the situation persisted, my mother and her siblings would have been just another generation of ignorant, uneducated white trash.
So one day my grandmother took her allotment check and bought a bunch of groceries and put them in the back floorboard of her beat up used DeSoto. She put the mattress from the crib over top of them, turning the backseat in a small bed, and piled all five of her kids onto it, and then drove all the way to Flint, Michigan. Since there was no interstate at that time, the drive took about 25 hours. But her sister and brother-in-law were living in Flint, and her brother-in-law said the auto factory where he worked was looking specifically to hire women.
So she got her job at the auto factory and she got into the UAW. And she was able to buy her own home, and put two of her four remaining children (one of the five died at the age of 11) through college. She retired after 35 years, and now she lives a comfortable lower-middle-class life, and some of her children live very nice upper-middle-class lives. My mother, unfortunately, chose not to take advantage of these opportunities, but luckily for me, my grandmother and one of my aunts stepped in and raised me and my brother and sister, and so our prospects are also much better than they would otherwise have been.
So, yeah, about 50% of this success story can be credited to my grandmother's pluck. But the other 50% rests entirely on the fact that organized labor saw to it that she was given a fair wage, and health care benefits, and a retirement pension. It meant that her working conditions in the factory were only uncomfortable instead of out-and-out torturous (you really have no clue how bad conditions in the factories were before the first sit-down strike in the Fischer Body plant took place.)
This story is by no means unique. It happened all over the country in every industry during the early to mid 20th century. Smash is right--without organized labor, we'd have no middle class. We'd have a ruling class of ultra-wealthy industry barons and an enormous underclass of wage slaves. And yours truly would probably be living in a shack in the Ozarks unable to read and pregnant with her 11th kid.
Edited, Dec 7th 2008 10:41am by Ambrya
