Verizon Employees End Strike 591
An anonymous reader writes "Verizon today announced that the approximately 45,000 wireline employees represented by the CWA and IBEW that have been on strike will return to work beginning Monday night, August 22nd, without new collective bargaining agreements. Since the strike began two weeks ago, Verizon has been battling criminal acts of sabotage against its network facilities and union picketers intimidating non-union replacement workers and illegally blocking garage and work center entrances. One union picketer even went as far as to instruct his young daughter to stand in front of a Verizon truck to illegally block it from coming back to a Verizon work center in New Jersey. Verizon said the wireline employees now on strike would be working under the terms of the contracts that expired on Saturday, August 6th. The contracts will be extended with no specific deadline for achieving new collective bargaining agreements so that the parties can take the time required to resolve the critical issues, the company said."
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Lets be sure to place the blame in the right place (Score:2, Informative)
Obamacare [commentarymagazine.com]... for just the same exact reason as I am losing my much loved health insurance plan as well.
"If you like your plan, you can keep it" my arse.
Re:An offer you can't refuse. (Score:2, Informative)
Evil Unions (Score:5, Informative)
Re:An offer you can't refuse. (Score:5, Informative)
In Europe, these union acts aren't illegal at all. After all, how do you expect the right to strike to matter if the company can just hire replacement workers? Unions simply don't have enough power in the USA.
Not sure why people dislike them. Maybe it's another anti-socialist thing.
Re:His daughter??? (Score:2, Informative)
If he believes in his cause so much they he should lay down in front of the truck.
He did. Well, stood in front of the truck to make it stop. Once it stopped, the daughter came to join him in front of the truck on her own. Then he went and yelled at the driver for a minute. After that, the truck drove on.
Re:An offer you can't refuse. (Score:5, Informative)
Can you provide *any* citation or proof for this?
Here's what I found:
"Pickets have no immunity from prosecution for committing criminal offences and they have no right to compel others to stop or to listen to the pickets' views. However, employees and their trade union representatives picketing their own place of work are immune from civil legal action for inducing others to break commercial or employment contracts with the employer involved in the dispute."
The immunity is to *civil* action for inducing someone else to break a contract. There is no immunity for inducement/conspiracy to commit a criminal act.
Try a couple months ago in Wisconsin (Score:4, Informative)
Gov. Scott Walker busted trying to plant fake goons among the student protesters at the WI State Capitol in Madison.
Re:2 weeks? (Score:5, Informative)
Funny, the UK spends less than half of the GDP per capita compared to the US, for a similar standard of care (and encompassing the entirety of our population, not just those who can afford it).
The propaganda machine worked very well to convince Americans that socialised health care systems were backward, stone age, expensive disasters when they are really.... not. They are not perfect, and will never claim that they are - the UK NHS does need some serious attention, but it is light years ahead of the US system. It's not even close.
You're also one to talk about "black holes" in the national budget, keeping two wars off the books. The annual cost of the UK's healthcare provision (approximately 50 billion pounds, or 82/83 billion USD) is nothing compared to that, or the huge hole opened by the bush era tax cuts for the wealthy.
The UK spends 8% of its GDP per capita on healthcare and *everyone* is covered. The US spends 16% of its GDP per capita and there are millions of Americans who are not covered, and a huge number who get into crippling debt if they get sick.
The NHS is far from a "black hole" in our budget - it is certainly one of the most expensive things by a long chalk, but it is very cost effective for the care it provides. It suffered 20 years of neglect under a right wing government in the 80s that wanted to kill it but knew they couldn't do it outright, so they tried to starve it to death, and it is still recovering to this day (with bungling of modernisation by both sides of the political spectrum in the wake of the Thatcher years), but it is one of the shining examples of modern Britain to come out of the post war years.
Don't believe everything the right wing media tells you about "death panels" and "doctor rationing" and "financially crippling to the economy" - they are what as known as "lies".
We certainly don;t have the best example in Europe (Sweden and Norway are far better, as is France), but we are head and shoulders above the US. I have extensive experience of both systems, so I am well positioned to be able to directly compare them.
It's a shame, because the standard of care in US hospitals is excellent, there's just a massive impenetrable wall in front of the entrances, or more accurately, the hospitals are behind huge moats with sharks and rocks. You can buy a boat to get across, or you can pay insurance to be able to rent one if you need it. We just built a bridge over the moat here in the UK, and everyone chips in a few pounds per month from their paycheque to keep the bridge in good repair (but you can still go with private insurance and private healthcare if you like). The fact that everyone pays a little means that the costs are much, much, much lower for everyone.
Re:talk about a one-sided summary... (Score:5, Informative)
So what I see is that a BUSINESSMAN without any unions
Union movement was already in full force for a while by the time Ford started his business. One nice thing about unions (and labor movement in general) is that they don't have to be everywhere to affect business policies. The mere knowledge that employees can unionize already makes a pressure on businessmen to provide a better working environment.
One other thing that had a similar effect was a series of socialist/communist revolutions in Europe, and particularly the success of the one in Russia. For all its flaws, it did scare big business shitless because they realized that they can lose everything, including their lives, practically overnight if they press too hard. Some decided to launch a preemptive strike, and that is how fascism appeared, and why it had such a strong backing among the rich elites. Others have realized that stable society is one where people are certain in their future, and wealth disparity is not so big and prominent - and that is where the modern social democracy and welfare state come from.
No amount of regulations can stop a profitable thing from happening, you see.
Sure it can. That's why government retains the monopoly on the use of force. Those with the guns set the rules. In a properly functioning democratic society, people - through their fairly elected representative - have the guns.
people always employed children in human history, the entire notion that child labor should be abolished only became possible with all the automation and increase of efficiencies in production, which required more educated work force.
The problem wasn't child labor, it was unregulated child labor - as in, 14 hours work day and other pleasantries. If you think that's what "efficient free market" is, I suggest you try it with your kids.
And of course it wasn't automation which abolished child labor. The "nice" thing about human labor is just how insanely cheap it can get in a monopolized buyer's market for it. And when it's cheap enough, it beats machines in many areas. This is still true today, which is evident if you visit any impoverished third-world country. Automation only becomes cheaper when something else is there to prevent squeezing down labor costs.
what are you talking about? Oligarchy and monopolists are direct product of government regulations and intervention.
Yes, big businesses and their supporters all say that. But those of us who know our history know it's blatant falsehood. Monopolies do benefit from government regulation in countries where they can subvert said regulation to serve their goals (aka "government capitalism" - USA, China etc), but they thrive just as well in free market. Economy of scale leads to an inevitable conclusion - the most "efficient" market is the one with a single actor. That is the inevitable end state of any unregulated free market in an industrial society. 19th century has given ample empirical proof for this.
Where the hell do you see "laissez faire" model in USA? Where is it? Telecoms? They are government propped up monopolies. Military? Education? Insurance? Banks? Agriculture? Energy? Utilities? WHAT? Where do you see anything that is NOT a monopoly or oligopoly in USA?
USA itself is not laissez faire today, it's government capitalism (defined as government regulating market in favor of capitalists, rather than to protect the interests of society). However, USA foreign policy does promote laissez faire in other countries, because it is then easier to dominate them economically. Prominent examples of the outcome of such intervention were early economic reforms in collapsing USSR. Another one is Argentina. Baltic states are a more recent victim of the same.
Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia are these Baltic countries, and they have been under constan