garment factory

• If you were 21 in 1929 - historian
  • Recollections of my mother - Backwards typist
    • garment factory - historian
  • Nightmares Of My Mother... (long)sm - m
    • That's excellent- I agree with poster below - Kaydie
    • You could make a great article with that (sm) - MeMT
  • Not being able to buy anything without ration tickets....very scary stories! nm - MeMT
    • My mother still has one of those ration books........ sm - m
      • And everybody did newspaper drives and - Backwards typist

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for 30 years at GM.  He was a salvage worker so he wasn't one of those guys who sat on his butt all day long making a ridiculous amount of money.  My dad retired in his 60s because his health didn't allow him to continue working or he would have.  I know how unions work and how they "protect" the employees.  I've also seen the proven statistics about how non-union states are more production and have higher job growth and as far as protecting your job.....no ones job is protected especially nowadays.  People are getting fired left and right so where is the protection.  What good was that auto bailout when all that money pretty much went to pay off the unions.  Unions are nothing but democratic pushed BS. 

Here is a tad bit on unions:

The truth is that unions are essentially parasitic organizations that thrive only by draining and ultimately destroying the companies and industries they control. The essential goal of the unions is to compel the payment of higher wages for the performance of less work and less productive work. Unions are notorious for their hostility to labor saving machinery and to any form of competition among workers, for featherbedding practices, indeed, for “making work” by deliberately and arbitrarily increasing the number of workers required to accomplish a given task and sometimes even by compelling the disassembly or destruction of products already produced.

It should be no wonder that the percentage of the labor force controlled by unions tends progressively to decline. Where the unions hold sway, companies cannot compete. Their market share falls and they ultimately go bankrupt. The only way that unions can maintain any given share of the labor force is by finding new victims to replace the ones they have sucked dry. The finding of new victims, by means of new government intervention is the unstated agenda of  Mr. Stern, Ms. Milkman, and The New York Times.

The actual effects of labor unions are arbitrary inequalities in wage rates, mass unemployment, and substantially lower real wages for the average worker. Labor unions are aptly described as a leading vehicle of what von Mises called “destructionism.”

Whenever a union succeeds in obtaining above market wage rates for its members, it also reduces  the number of workers who can be employed in its field. This is because of the operation of one of the best established principles of economics: Namely, the higher the price of anything, including the wage of any kind of labor, the smaller is the quantity demanded of that good or labor service.

Thus, workers who could have been employed in the lines controlled by labor unions are instead displaced and forced to seek work elsewhere. The added competition of these workers in other lines then serves either to depress wage rates in those other lines, thereby resulting in an arbitrary, union-imposed inequality in wage rates, or, if those other lines are also unionized or are forced to pay union wages in order to avoid becoming unionized (which is often the case), to cause still other workers to be displaced. It should be clear that to the extent that the effect of union activity is to depress wage rates in other fields, the union slogan “Live Better, Work Union” turns out to mean “Live Better by Forcing Other Workers to Live Worse.”

If wage rates in all lines of work are forced above the free-market level either because labor unions are able to impose their wage scales everywhere, or because upward union pressure on wage rates is joined by minimum-wage legislation, the effect is mass unemployment. In this case, there is simply no branch of the economic system that is allowed to pay wage rates low enough to make possible the absorption of workers displaced from elsewhere by the imposition of union wages. The result is the kind of situation presently existing in France and Germany, where unemployment is in excess of ten percent. And, of course, the cost of supporting the masses of unemployed falls mainly on the workers who manage to keep their jobs. Here higher taxes are their reward for “working union.”

For the full article:  http://mises.org/story/1861