Originally Posted by overstress
The whole point about our industry is that the seniority system means we just cannot up sticks and go somewhere else - we've done that already to get into BA.
Did it ever occur to you that the union bosses engineered it that way, so that you would be eternally dependent upon them, so they could forever keep their hand in your pocket?
If you could market your experience and skills, in the same Free-Market way that employees in other industries do, you could be master of your own fate, and slave to no unions or their bosses.
In the United States, union membership peaked at almost 35% of the working population in the mid-1950s. It has been dropping ever since, in the private sector. Today, it is just under 8%.
At the same time that union membership was declining in the U.S., the Great American Middle Class was growing, expanding and become ever more wealthy. That means there is an inverse correlation between union membership, and the standard of living, in the U.S. That should tell you something about how valuable unions really are, in the long run.
In the long run, unions don't create and protect jobs; they destroy them.
Robert J. Boser