Re: Kenimpzoom's troll of the week-Unions
Modern large corporations may in theory exist to benefit shareholders but often in practice they are not run for that purpose.<br /><br />A very few are run for the personal benefit of the person, family or group which always ran them before they became public companies and sucked in public capital to line the pockets of the original crew: e.g. Rupert Murdoch and News Corporation.<br /><br />Most are really run to maximise the ridiculous salaries and other benefits paid to the senior executives who run them: e.g. Meg Whitman and her merry crew at eBay who have plundered stock options and earned fabulous amounts during their very short time there. These people are the modern capitalists, except unlike the classical capitalists they merely control rather than own the means of production.<br /><br />Most senior executives have fairly short term aims. Usually this is because: (a) They want to maximise their own benefits by fooling shareholders and the stock market into thinking they are actually improving profitability while merely meeting the targets they set for receiving their own extra benefits, or (b) Even if they reject those selfish motives and want to run the company for long term gain, they are pretty much forced by industry ratings published every month or quarter by sundry ratings agencies and journalists, all of whom are happily free from such ratings themselves, to try to maintain or improve their company's position.<br /><br />The easiest way to create the illusion of improved profitability is to cut costs. The easiest costs to cut are the wages of anyone below the level of the fabulous amounts paid to the executives who decide who is going to lose their job.<br /><br />It was shown clearly after the 1987 stock crash that the companies which took a long term view and didn't shed staff in a panic came out best.<br /><br />Unions today are a necessary balance to the slash and burn policies and actions of executives chasing short-term aims which often have no purpose but to benefit the executives at the expense of those they sack.<br /><br />Following one of my self-destructive moments during my fairly brief senior corporate career, I was shunned by other senior managers for opposing their decision to sack low paid workers like cleaners in retaliation for the workers taking what I regarded as reasonable strike action to try to force management to consider fair claims for better pay and conditions. I didn't help matters by pointing out that, like the other senior managers, the corporation paid the equivalent of several weeks' wages for cleaners etc for me to be a member of a club where just one meal each one of us often had once or twice a week cost about half of the cleaner's etc weekly wage. My suggestion that if about 10% of us cut by a mere 10% our self-indulgent entertainment budgets we could not only meet the cleaners' demands but even employ a few more did not go down too well. <br /><br />Maybe my views were influenced by my varied occupations. <br /><br />I'd been a cleaner in the buildings of similar corporations. I had a clear understanding of the joys of plunging bare hands down a toilet bowl in executive and other toilets to push out stuck turds and then scrub the bowl with the worn abrasive pads off the floor scrubbers. Other things get stuck in women's toilets, which had to be dragged out with bare hands. If nothing else, these things teach you to clean your hands throughly before you put them anywhere near your mouth, let alone eat.<br /><br />I don't think unions are necessarily the next thing to sainthood or the path to a workers' paradise. When I was a shunter, long before my brief and suicidal senior corporate career, another shunter got killed because he was working a main line engine as a shunting engine and it couldn't pull up in time to stop rolling him around the front step of the engine and a rake of goods trucks standing foul of his track. We'd been opposing using these engines for ages because they had main line brakes that acted a lot, lot slower then shunting engines and were bound to get us killed sooner or later. Those of us who saw him die, which took a distressingly long time for somebody so badly broken and cut up, were particularly hostile to working with the main line engines any more, and the rest were very strong too. At a major railway union meeting we were all for striking and doing other things until the railways ditched the main line engines as shunting engines. The leader of the railways union talked us out of immediate action and promised great results. We took no action, relying on his assurances that we wouldn't have to work with main line engines any more. A while later he was appointed by the government as a railway commissioner, moving from the workers' to the bosses' side. The railways continued to use the main line engines to shunt. <br /><br />On the other hand, despite having been a member of and sometimes screwed by most of the major unions in Australia over the past 40 years, I still believe that they're the only thing that stands between the untramelled power of rapacious corporations and bad bosses over powerless workers. It's why I voluntarily waste a few days' pay every year on union dues for a pretty useless union, because I think it's worth supporting the principle rather than the result. The same way that people support hopeless political parties because they believe in what they stand for, even if nothing they want is delivered. Every now and again one of them gets elected and does something their supporters want.
<br /><br />Ken
