That’s not true of all unions and even when it’s the trend of a particular union workers can stand up for their fellow workers in the bargaining of the contract.
I was in the inside and organizing committee for two years while we fought to get our vote, then voted, then worked out the contract. When we originally decided to organize some people at our local were only interested in having a certain large group of workers on the contract. I initiated a motion to include all non-salary employees in the contract from all departments and stipulated all new hires were to be full members protected under the full contract. Today every new hire starts with the same benefits and protections as someone like me, who has been there for 8 years.
The union isn’t going to do it all for you. If you care about your peers then it is incumbent upon you to stand in solidarity with them. Some folks don’t care about anyone but themselves and some folks don’t have the guts to risk something to stand up for other people.
Because it requires no significant skill or education.
Turn that around. Why should the riders of the bus, who will largely make half or less that, make any sacrifices to increase the driver’s wage? Especially when that exorbitant salary is just passed on to them as fare increases.
[quote=“anon61221983, post:58, topic:75030”]
But there is no denying that the income of union members (and often others who worked in unionized enviroment) WENT UP when unions got a seat at the table and a voice.[/quote]
That’s nice. I’ll save my sympathy for the 99% who never have and likely never will have any benefit from a union.
Any job where you think the worker shouldn’t be able to afford nice things because they’re rightly peasants because the job they do “feels” unskilled.
Seriously. You have to safely drive a literal busload of children around. It requires a CDL, which makes you competitive with rates you could be paid to haul cargo instead.
What’s considered “unskilled” really does boil down to peoples fee-fees and prejudices about particular jobs, often when they don’t even understand the most basic minimum requirements of those jobs. Just because you don’t get outside schooling or certification for a job (or even when you do, as the bus driver example illustrates) it doesn’t mean that the management can just go out and pull ten people off the street and expect them to do what you do daily. My manager can’t do my job (I once witnessed our arrogant DM attempt it, poorly, before calling one of my coworkers over) and if our customers could, we wouldn’t have any business. The fact is that “unskilled” labor turns out to be pretty skilled and important in absolute terms. Just ask anyone working for less than minimum-wage below decks on an aircraft carrier.
The reality is that (and I was literally telling my boss this earlier today) I’m going to teach my kids that the most important and valuable skills you learn for any job are never going to be ones anyone teaches you, or that you get out of a school. You learn that shit on your own, the hard way. That’s what makes your labor valuable. The reality since the industrial revolution is that everyone is replaceable and it doesn’t matter whether you have a fancy piece of paper or not, because you have zero fucking control over the economy and there are a lot of people who do precisely zero with that fancy piece of paper except be able to claim they have one. Whenever I tell people my major and their first response is, “I hated chemistry.” I like to smile and say, “Job security.” But the reality is that another recession that hits basic research hard is beyond my ability to stop. As it turns out my career may not be in science but science journalism, because of weird side contacts and experiences I’ve had that I never planned. I will not have had a degree in it. I won’t have any skills in it except those I acquire through experience. Exactly like every “unskilled” job I’ve ever had. Because every job, is on some level indistinguishable from unskilled labor if the criteria is that “anyone can learn it by doing it.”
I honestly believe that people who use the phrase “unskilled labor” in a serious fashion who aren’t economists working with a specific non-culturally loaded definition, probably haven’t worked enough jobs, or worked very hard at them.
Obviously they have never driven a bus before, then they wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss it as “unskilled”.
It may not be a glamorous job but to say it doesn’t require skill or education is just demonstrating ignorance. Many seemingly “unskilled” jobs are a hell of a lot more difficult than they seem.
I don’t get this picking on bus drivers. Clearly the guy has never applied for or attempted to maintain a CDL of any class. Also, whenever you hear municipal employee pay mentioned in many corporate-owned media outlets, they report the loaded rate (because they have an agenda), which includes all kinds of stuff that isn’t take home pay. The bus driver most likely doesn’t take home $60k, that’s just what that driver costs the city per year. Take home is probably under $30k. Every job has a loaded rate and a take home rate. If you’re bringing home minimum wage, that loaded rate isn’t going to be significantly higher, but it includes payroll taxes, costs of maintaining the building where the business is housed and a portion of the pay any non-revenue generating jobs that the business may have. I see a lot of jealousy over raw numbers, but utter ignorance as to how employee costs are calculated or reported.
I struggled with this too, but then I discovered it wasn’t universally true for all unions. Obviously there are unions abusing their power either because their leadership has an agenda, some unions are driven to perform poorly because the tyrannical management on the other side of the fence, and some are being led by the nose by finance guys and lawyers who are profiting on solidarity.
That doesn’t mean that as an over-reaching umbrella unions have not done more good than bad, the progress of the working class was staggering up until the attitude of unions was flipped and there has been a constant push to crush them for decades. Just because those who are looking to crush unions by highlighting only the problem cases, they ignore the cases where the unions were trained by Japanese automakers only for the US management team to undo the proven progress the unions had in production quality.
I’m fairly certain that is requires some amount of training. No longer term program, but many blue collar jobs have short training periods. Could you do it, right off the street with no training? Think about all the little things that can go wrong in driving a bus. So, yes there are plenty of blue collar jobs that require more skills/training, but this job also does need some level of training.
What precisely are they sacrificing? The company that pays one person isn’t taking it out of some mythical pot of money that all businesses pull from? As for fare hikes? it’s still cheaper to ride the bus/take transit for many urban dwellers than it is to own and drive a car.
Incidentally, I don’t see $60000 as exorbitant - in some places it’s a decent salary, but not outrageous by any stretch. Keep in mind the median income for the US is about $50000 grand - so, it’s only slightly higher than average and I’d guess it’s not the same in all places (a New York City bus driver likely makes more than an ATL driver, due to cost of living, etc). But really exorbitant is CEO pay, which tends to be something on average like 200 or 300 times what the average employee makes.
There is nothing stopping them from organizing their own workplaces. It’s legally protected speech, after all. Plus, again, union shops tend to benefit all employees, not just those who pay dues.
I sympathize with all workers, BTW, unionized and not. We need wage increases across the board, as wages have been stagnant except in a few fields.
Rates of pay and levels of skill have very little relation to each other.
My current job is casual (i.e. no holiday or sick leave, no guarantee of getting a set number of shifts per week) and fairly close to minimum wage.
If anyone thinks that I do unskilled labour, I am happy to drop them into the middle of a wilderness area with instructions to kill all of the invasive weeds without harming any of the native flora.
If they make it out alive, I will cheerfully go through their weed bag and name the several dozen rare native plants that they’ve killed.
[quote=“anon61221983, post:72, topic:75030”]
I’m fairly certain that is requires some amount of training. No longer term program, but many blue collar jobs have short training periods. Could you do it, right off the street with no training? Think about all the little things that can go wrong in driving a bus. So, yes there are plenty of blue collar jobs that require more skills/training, but this job also does need some level of training.[/quote]
Here they’re given paid training, so yes, anyone can do it right off the street.
You’re confusing the median household income with median personal income. The former is $51,939 in the US, while the latter is $26,695; that bus driver is likely making more than twice his passengers.
I agree that CEO pay is excessive, but there’s only one of them. They don’t significantly impact the fare price.
Training is the key word here. If you or I walked up and wanted to drive the bus for the lulz, they wouldn’t allow it. It’s a step above, say flipping burgers or cleaning a toilet (not that there is anything wrong with those jobs, either and they should receive a living wage, even if it is “unskilled” labor - as these are jobs that the rest of us kind of depend on to make life livable - see Mike Rowe, Dirty Jobs). And again, this can be a dangerous job, in a number of ways. It seems like you’d want someone who gets paid a decent amount and actually cares about what they do, given the fact they are driving people about busy city streets.
Don’t some large number of Americans (especially working class americans) live in homes with more than one income? [quote=“namenotreserved, post:76, topic:75030”]
that bus driver is likely making more than twice his passengers.
[/quote]
Raise the wages of the passengers, don’t crater the income of the driver. How is that remotely helpful?
Yet rarely is that imagined as part of the solution to dealing with a companies bottom line - cutting CEO pay. YOu have to shower them with wealth to “attract talent” and when someone sucks at their job, they more than likely are given millions of dollars to take a hike. Save some $$$ and cut CEO (and C-level, across the board) pay and give workers a cost of living increase instead. Give them a reason to be happy about coming to work by putting $$$$ into their pockets. If that means cutting C-level compensation, to something reasonable, why not?
