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."
Re:An offer you can't refuse. (Score:5, Interesting)
Source [ibtimes.com] So basically, because of her self-inflicted suffering, anyone who doesn't join her has to suffer. Nice.
And the others..? (Score:2, Interesting)
What really pisses me off about union workers is how selfish they are, when they claim to be otherwise - it's become a cartel. Did the (incredibly foul-mouthed) union worker think of the families of the other two drivers? Of course not - all that matters is their own well being and screw the rest of the company / people. I recall working for a top university not too long ago and I was supposed to get a new desk placed for me from an office next door. I offered to do it myself when my boss told me not to touch it, as there was a union guy in charge of that. Turns out that, had i moved the desk myself, we could have faced some serious fines for "taking away his job".
Here's [msn.com] another example: instead of getting fired, teachers are getting paid to do jack shit waiting their union "trial" to make sure they really should be fired. At times, this could take years - that's right, years that teachers are getting paid full salary for doing nothing (I actually think they created a parody of this in Futurama).
Or how in 2005(?) Union workers halted NYC public transportation, significantly affecting the entire economy. My brother was right: all they care about is increasing their share of the pie, not the total size. And people wonder why I'm so anti-union.
mod me troll if you like, i don't care.
Re:And the others..? (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually that's a popular myth. It's a lot more complicated, but the biggest factor was the usual one - in a mature economy the only thing that increases the standard of living is technological advance. One of those advances was that the size of businesses such as the railroads required the creation of publicly-held corporations (a fundamentally democratic institution) and the need for a professional management structure. One can even see the institution of labor laws (which were indeed largely the result of labor lobbying and a popular sense of rightness) as one of those advances.
It's arguable that the unionizing of the late 19th and early 20th century accelerated the process of diffusion outwards from the centers of wealth, but it's not certain. The big labor strikes of the early 1900s can be seen just as easily as the last gasp of the old methods, rather than the first wave of the new.
Re:An offer you can't refuse. (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe it's because someone doesn't have the right to demand that a company not hire a replacement when they don't show up for work? Maybe, if you are easily replaceable, collective bargaining is your only method of getting the wage or benefits you want. But you do not magically gain the right of stopping someone else from working. You don't get the right to blockade the property of another.
Right after this strike, a customer lost their phone line. No dial tone. Just a tad suspicious. Especially when they called the repair line, and they were told "Don't you know we're on strike? Unless there is a 911 emergency, too bad."
After two weeks, this business customer called me about setting up their new internet connection not reliant on the phone line. They already had the equipment. Not as good of a system for them, but I set it up. After some other issues cropped up with not having a tradition POTS line to work with, I contacted Verizon Repair. I was repeatedly disconnected. Finally, I called a residential sales line, and got a real live person. I explained the 2 week outage and the horrible customer service my customer received (Remember, it's the customer's existence that gives that idiot a job). She seemed genuinely sorry that the customer had this extended outage, and explained that while she was in residential service, she was trying to get a hold of someone down the hall in business services. While we waited, and talked, I told her that I had never had someone at a call center offer that kind of service. She expressed disappointment that the people who were making such a fuss were giving the rest of the employees who were still on the job a bad name.
I was shocked by her openness, and based on some other comments, her obvious intelligence and education. I told her that she should not be working in a call center, she should be an entrepreneur with a more direct relationship with customers. In this way, she would be more directly and greatly rewarded for her excellent customer service and focus.
She then told me that in fact, she was filling in. Her normal position with the company was in fact in a more executive capacity (I won't mention what, but it wasn't in the call center arena at all, and was instead in more mid-level non-tech functions).
It all made sense. She is likely a well-compensated, happy employee with some ambition. She strives to improve herself and her worth to her employer, and got rewarded for it. Indeed, she is likely perfectly able to be that kind of entrepreneur who goes on to make peoples' lives better by providing customers with things they want or need, and people with more jobs.
It is the foundation of the most powerful economy in the world. Instead of trying to get someone to pay you more than your position is worth, you make yourself worth paying more by increasing your value.
Re:And the others..? (Score:4, Interesting)
Technological advance => standard of living is Economics 101. You're confusing the mean with questions of distribution. Prior to these technological advances, there was much less wealth to go around, and those who owned outright the biggest companies of the day were orders of magnitudes wealthier than their employees - much more than today. Technology has no inherent force toward or away from capital - for example, much of recent IT tech advances has given individuals much more power over information (vis. the 'Arab Spring'). During the period from the early steel industry through the 1950s much of tech advance had to do with industrial scale, which did have that effect. But that's not always, or even commonly, the way it works. The typewriter is considered by some to have been the single single factor in the emancipation of women and bringing them into the work force (but the need for processing paperwork due to large scale corporatism was also a factor.)
CEOs are not really related to the rise of the 'professional management' class - they existed before under different names, but until publicly-held corporations they were either the owner, or answered only to a small group of owners. IOW, that class existed before, and were previously much more isolated from the mundane than they are now (if one can imagine that). But flacid corporate boards (generally composed of the same group) have certainly allowed too much distortion in the last few decades.
I'm not sure of your point re Marxism, but I was a freshman in high school when I did a comparative analysis of communism and capitalism, and came to the conclusion that Marxism can not succeed, as it fails to provide a stable feedback loop - "To each according to his needs, and from each according to his abilities" is constructing two isolated unstable systems that are doomed to fail. In practice, as we have seen in the last century, the feedback loop ends up running through the political structure, engendering a corrupt bureaucracy. In fact one can argue that is the problem with the internal structure of corporations - internally they operate as Marxist centrally-planned bureaucracies that encourage cronyism, corruption and competition based on political machinations rather than competence and performance.
Re:2 weeks? (Score:2, Interesting)
I wish for all fellow men to get all kinds of benefits as long as they are not getting it from my profit.
I am willing to provide benefits to anybody by doing work and the result of my work being the benefit to the society and the fellow man, who is then richer due to the products that I am creating. I want to be richer due to the products that the fellow man is creating.
I absolutely am not interested in any government dictating that some fellow man get more than they are producing not based on market forces but based on government putting a gun to an employer's head. I am absolutely not interested to have my profits taken away and shared among those, who didn't work for them by the force of government.
We all benefit from a working economy, and government intervention does not help economy but destroys it.
AFAIC there must be no public unions of any kind, it needs to be illegal to have public unions, where union members negotiate not with their employers - tax payers, but with their co-conspirators in the great tax payer heist - politicians.
As to private unions - they are fine, as long as there are no labor laws passed by government that change the power dynamic between the private business and private labor. It's their business, they can deal with their matters in court if any contractual obligations are violated. Beyond that there must be no government involvement into labor or business.
Re:An offer you can't refuse. (Score:5, Interesting)
My wife's grandfather had his back broken by union thugs because he was teaching his fellows how to read and write English, which was screwing up the union votes.
My grandfather was beaten up by union thugs because he would not hire any laborers, let alone union, to help him build, paint, run electrical wiring, etc., in his general store and tailor shop. (this would be a building with a single room apartment that my father lived in and worked out of until he was 15, where he and my grandparents were the only employees)
I like the idea of unions. I do not like their implementation.
Re:Don't you understand things change? (Score:5, Interesting)
You do understand that today drug prices in the US are making up for the discounts outside the US, right?
The reason the drug companies are still taking the huge risks they are is because in the US they get to make their money back. The rest of the world is pretty much just riding along because of the profits made in the US.
Sure, the US government could mandate drug pricing as is done in most of the rest of the world. The response would be quite simple - the government would have to be in the drug business because it would be pretty unrewarding. Yes, a lot of research is today paid by the government or other public institutions, but no public institution is doing drug testing - you know, the ten years or so of trials that are needed for FDA approval. The FDA would pretty much have to take that over.
Also, a huge component of health care costs today is the cost-shifting from Medicare and Medicaid. When the government pays 15% of the going rate for care the other 85% is going to be put somewhere. It isn't just that the government gets a big discount. So expanding Medicaid to cover more and more people means more and more cost shifting. Your $1600 prescriptions might have only cost $800 a few years ago but with someone on Medicaid getting it for $25 means someone else is going to make up the difference. Easy to outlaw cost shifting, but what would happen then? Same thing that has happened with vaccine manufacturers - they all quit.
The first thing to understand about US health care is that it is all about old people, who today are mostly on cost-shifted Medicare. Yes, nearly all the money spent on health care (like 90%) is for old people. This is very different from any other country on the planet. All we need to do is stop spending 90% of the health care money on old people and there will be plenty for everyone and health care will be back to reasonable prices. But it seems nobody wants to tell the old people about that kind of a plan. Yet.
Obamacare is a complete government takeover of health care, whether they understand it or not. When every single employer understands they can pay $10,000 per employee for health insurance or they can pay a $2000 fine per employee (or less), they are going to choose to pay the fine. This puts the entire load onto the government for everyone and the plan will no longer be revenue-neutral - the cost will be in the trillions. The only way to make it affordable, even for the government, is to kick old people out of the system and stop spending 90% on old people. Bring it down to 20-30% like everywhere else and we can have government-funded health care for everyone without even raising any taxes.
But someone has to tell the old people about the new plan.
Re:2 weeks? (Score:5, Interesting)
I wouldn't be jealous either. You have to consider what you are dealing with when talking to Americans. Its a country heading downhill at breakneck speed toward fascism. The 2012 elections here, provided we make it to them without imploding, will tell the tale of our future, which looks grim either way. We are an incredibly polarized country with a propensity towards violence which promises to be volatile in the near future.
Our trade policies, which the rich corporations have fostered through our corrupt politicians, have gutted our entire industry. The jobless are growing, tent cities are springing up outside of our cities and people are homeless. Yet we continue to whistle past the graveyard, ignoring it all. We just had a showdown in our congress where the rich won, badly needed social programs will be cut so that the rich can enjoy the lowest taxes in decades.
Why aren't we rioting in the streets? Chalk it up to weapons grade propaganda, a police state second to none, and an under educated population that worships the rich and corporations like a cargo cult.
If you think you are immune to our evils in Britain, you are dead wrong. From this madness, multinational corporations have grown to power that aren't content to suck the marrow from our bones, they want everyone's, including yours. Corporations have been allowed to grow into monsters here. We were their egg. They are beyond our control now, because they control us.
All in all, it was our ignorance and greed that took us down. If nothing, we are a cautionary tale. So, make a snack, and watch as we sink into oblivion. We are collapsing under our own weight while locked in a vice grip, strangled by those in power. My advice to your country; Burn every Wal-Mart you have to the ground. Hound those who run them down and hang them from light poles down town. Protect your jobs, protect your industry or bow to your Chinese Overlords, they are the real winner when the smoke has cleared.
The Chinese are laughing their ass off (Score:5, Interesting)
The discussion on these kind of topics is so vitrolic, so filled with hatred from all sides that you got to wonder how long it will be before the US just tears itself apart. Personally for me the flag waving alone is enough, nobody has to shout out that hard they are a nation standing together unless they known that it is all a lie. No American cares anything about another American unless that other person might be getting a penny that the first doesn't.
So, some people have health care benefits and you don't. Is that a reason to hate all unions? Maybe you should fix your own issue yourselve and not demand everyone else has the same shitty contract you do.
When even South Africa is now moving to national health care, perhaps it is time for Americans to realize the most expensive system in the world that scores as one of the worsed just isn't working.
But hey, continue to fight each other to death over things that other countries solved over half a century ago. Meanwhile US production is going down and down and you country is falling apart around you. Fixed those bridges yet?
2012 going to be interesting. The republicans did it this time, every single one of them is utterly batshit insane. The democrats? They can hardly get rid of Obama but the racist, oops right wingers hate his gut just for being black. Even if he gets re-elected the senate cripples him, the old US idea of both houses keeping each other in check has become a strangle hold on the nation with the tea party putting in the final squeeze. Everyone with a brain knows their ideas will bankrupt the US but they can't be ignored as the lunatic fringe they are.
The US won't fall because someone else was smarter, it will fall because it kills itself from within. It is funny to see from the outside, you got extreme right wingers trying to determine who is the least or most extreme right winger. Mean while the roads are falling apart, education is going to hell and production has ground to a halt with everyone buying Chinese.
Re:2 weeks? (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course, there's the fact that your military and France's combined don't even have the ability to control the airspace of the third world country that entirely controls your supply of ultra sweet crude oil for more than 2 months without running out of munitions. That doesn't even consider that you decided to get rid of all your aircraft carriers and depend upon the french for carrier platforms until what, 2016? You think your health care scheme is so grand, fine. How about America withdraws entirely from western Europe and says that Britain, France, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Portugal, Spain, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, and Germany are ripe for the plucking for anybody who cares to do so and we will offer exactly ZERO assistance to them. We'll continue guarding Finland, Poland, Georgia, and the Ukraine of course, but will allow the Russians and any other interested parties passage through said territories for a small fee. Moreover, any pharma corp that deals with any of the above countries at prices under what the drugs command in the US gets all their assets seized. Be fun to see the fallout from that particular maneuver.
Re:Eh, I bet Big Red begs to differ.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Verizon is at least 50% to blame for the destruction of their equipment.