Senate and UAW just gave up a few minutes ago ..., tomorrow is gonna hurt ... Options

[nape]

Nape, please don't take any of this personally. As other's have said, no one group is to blame, especially the factory workers who are actually "turning wrenches". That said, I do want to tackle a few of your points (again, not trying to attack you, just some things that you brought up, which I have heard elsewhere, also).

You say you don't want a PT person working on your car. Are you more comfortable with them administering your medications in a hospital? What about preparing your food? PT workers are all over the place. I went and looked at a Dodge Challenger the other day (those things are TALL!). It said that the engine is from Mexico. Are you happier with a FT Mexican building your car or a PT American? My point is that PT workers can be just as competent as FT ones. If you have proper quality control measures in place, then it should not matter.

The incentive to work PT is because that's where people start out. When you start working, there are no FT positions available. You gain experience working PT, while learning many different jobs. Then, once a FT position becomes available, you already have experience. I realize that you may not want to do this, but think back to when you were 18 and looking for a job. If you were offered $25 per hour, but only 20 hours of work, would you take that over a 40-hour job making $11 at some shade-tree mechanic place?

The last thing is "contract". I feel that there should not be contracts for workers. I live in an "at will" state. This means that I may be let go for any reason whatsoever. In fact, my employer does not need to even give a reason - they just tell me not to come in tomorrow. This sounds horrible for me, until you figure that I can do the same thing. At any point, if I find a better job, I can walk out.

This is actually a very fascinating system. The reason it works so well is because of what it requires me to do to ensure that I keep my job. It's not good enough for me to show up, turn out average work, and go home. I have to be better than the next guy. If layoffs come, I have to make sure that I am the last person on the list. Because everyone in the company is doing (or should be doing) the same thing, it means that my company is in a better competitive position than other companies. This, in turn, means that my company is less likely to need to lay anyone off.

To contrast, let's look at what happens when you bring contracts into the workplace. People are guaranteed a job, unless they sexually assault the bosses wife (hahaha - just joking). This means that only their personal pride is driving them to do their best work (Nape, you strike me as this type of guy). However, you get the other guys on the line who are just going to go through the motions to collect a paycheck. While they may be protected by their contract from layoffs, it is bad for the company. Then, in bad economic times, the company is unable to cope and has to make some hard decisions.

Then, you get what we have now with companies having to either take handouts or go bankrupt becasue they cannot compete with those other "at will" comapnies.

Oh, and I'm not taking this personally, but I'm also not going to apologize to anyone for wanting to get ahead in life. If I have a chance to move up in my company and become a member of upper management, and I can do it legally and ethically, then I'm going to take it. In fact, I did just that not 3 weeks ago. Yeah, I hurt some feelings, but I did what is best for myself, my family and my company.

I don't take any of it personally, other then when union bashing happens. 94bird is close in his interpretation of "contract". I'm an Electrician and when I refer to contract, I'm talking about my Local's Principal Agreement. The main thing it entitles me to is a certain hourly wage, benefits, and working conditions. There are other things in there about start time, how many tools I need to bring to the job, etc, but I won't go into the whole agreement.

One thing it doesn't entitle me to is a job. That's on me to perform and make the shop want to keep me around. You're right about personal pride making me do my best work and about the slugs who go through the motions to collect a paycheck. But where you're wrong is that our contract doesn't protect them. The shop can decide that the wind blew the wrong way today and to write you a field check, as long as they pay you all the money they owe you, you walk off the job and back to the referal line. That's another area that people don't understand. There is a list that contractors hire from. Your position on the list is determined by when you signed and how long you've been out of work. Right now in my Local, there are 1500+ guys out of work. That means that if you got on the list right now you probably won't work again until May or June, and that's if work picks up like it usually does in the spring. Two years ago, some guys were out of work for 15 months. So, that was long winded but I just wanted to express that just because people are in a union, that it protects them from being laid off or keeps them working.

The problem I have with PT employment is that employers start getting the Wal-mart syndrome. Employers with high PT/FT ratios are saving themselves money at the cost of the tax payers. Working someone just under 32 hours for years on end to keep them from obtaining full-time status is horse shit. I work hard for my money and don't like to have to pay higher taxes to finance health care that an employer doesn't want to pay for because their stock might drop half a point. One employer does it, then the next one has to do it to be able to match the overhead of the first. All the sudden we're in a huge Race to the Bottom. BUT, that's a discussion for another thread and we'll drop it.

Your "fascinating system" sounds like every construction job. Produce or get the axe. It's a fact of life, the people who get a stay of execution are the ones who get shit done.

Finally, I don't blame anyone for elevating themselves or their financial status in an ethical way. The issue I have is that a lot of people climb the ladder and forget that they once started at the bottom and that shit rolls downhill. I hope to be running a crew in a few years and hopefully running my own jobs in 10-20, but I honestly think that I'll be a better foreman for starting at the bottom and asking for the shit work so I know that the world isn't all rainbows and rays of sunshine like some of the supervision I've had.

This post has been edited by nape: Jan 1 2009, 02:01 AM

[94bird]

Howdy,

Mark, you pay your taxes and provide a salary to the congress members, and they aren't performing. Is there any difference?

Theoretically, yes. I can vote them out of office.

I still see no big difference. Consumers vote for companies or against them with their dollars. You may say that this method isn't working with domestic auto companies since American consumers have obviously been trying to vote them out of existence and they're still around, and now even getting money from the government to survive. Ever heard of a politician getting voted out of office but then getting an appointed position or becoming a lobbyist? Seems pretty similar to me. Heck, many times a lobbyist is more powerful than a politician anyway.

BTW, I don't think the Senate did their job this time. Corker made a valiant attempt, but the other main Republicans that road blocked the bill, like Shelby, did not listen to reason and let their stubborness ruin a lot of good work.

This post has been edited by 94bird: Jan 1 2009, 07:35 PM

[marka]

Howdy,

I don't take any of it personally, other then when union bashing happens. 94bird is close in his interpretation of "contract". I'm an Electrician and when I refer to contract, I'm talking about my Local's Principal Agreement. The main thing it entitles me to is a certain hourly wage, benefits, and working conditions. There are other things in there about start time, how many tools I need to bring to the job, etc, but I won't go into the whole agreement.

One thing it doesn't entitle me to is a job. That's on me to perform and make the shop want to keep me around.

This sounds good in some ways, but if I understand what you're saying correctly (mainly that you have to be in the union to legally do electrical work in your area and we're talking about a municipality of some sort with lots of jobs, vs. one particular company/contract), it sounds a lot like price fixing to me.

But that wasn't the point I was trying to make. I don't have a problem with unions when they coexist with a successful company and together produce something and everyone makes money. I think its a bit of a shame that you need to have the union overhead to make that happen, but whatever.

I _do_ have a problem with a UAW worker at GM making more money than a non-union worker at Honda or Toyota while at the same time GM is less profitable than Honda or Toyota, to the point that they need tax money to stay afloat another couple months so that they can ask for more money to stay afloat, etc. etc.

I also have a problem with excessively compensated top management, middle management, or whatever else in that scenario.

To me, a reorganization under chapter 11 is _exactly_ what a company should have to go through when they are no longer able to sustain themselves. While I can completely appreciate that a company the size of GM going into chapter 11 at this time is something you want to be darn careful with, the fact that the government has tried to shortcut the process like this just opens the entire thing up to the maximum of the political bullshit that's possible. There were other choices, such as the treasury agreeing to be a creditor if none could be found in chapter 11, tax incentives, etc. But by bypassing a chapter 11 entirely, none of the restructuring that I think needs to occur has the legal foundation to work from.

Mark

[marka]

Howdy,

And since we're talking about politics.... Would your objections to part time work go away if there was health coverage provided for every american?

Mark

[mitchntx]

Sorta off topic ... sorta on topic ....

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123051100709638419.html

MOSCOW -- For a decade, Russian academic Igor Panarin has been predicting the U.S. will fall apart in 2010. For most of that time, he admits, few took his argument -- that an economic and moral collapse will trigger a civil war and the eventual breakup of the U.S. -- very seriously. Now he's found an eager audience: Russian state media.

In recent weeks, he's been interviewed as much as twice a day about his predictions. "It's a record," says Prof. Panarin. "But I think the attention is going to grow even stronger."

Prof. Panarin, 50 years old, is not a fringe figure. A former KGB analyst, he is dean of the Russian Foreign Ministry's academy for future diplomats. He is invited to Kremlin receptions, lectures students, publishes books, and appears in the media as an expert on U.S.-Russia relations.

But it's his bleak forecast for the U.S. that is music to the ears of the Kremlin, which in recent years has blamed Washington for everything from instability in the Middle East to the global financial crisis. Mr. Panarin's views also fit neatly with the Kremlin's narrative that Russia is returning to its rightful place on the world stage after the weakness of the 1990s, when many feared that the country would go economically and politically bankrupt and break into separate territories.

A polite and cheerful man with a buzz cut, Mr. Panarin insists he does not dislike Americans. But he warns that the outlook for them is dire.

"There's a 55-45% chance right now that disintegration will occur," he says. "One could rejoice in that process," he adds, poker-faced. "But if we're talking reasonably, it's not the best scenario -- for Russia." Though Russia would become more powerful on the global stage, he says, its economy would suffer because it currently depends heavily on the dollar and on trade with the U.S.

Mr. Panarin posits, in brief, that mass immigration, economic decline, and moral degradation will trigger a civil war next fall and the collapse of the dollar. Around the end of June 2010, or early July, he says, the U.S. will break into six pieces -- with Alaska reverting to Russian control.

In addition to increasing coverage in state media, which are tightly controlled by the Kremlin, Mr. Panarin's ideas are now being widely discussed among local experts. He presented his theory at a recent roundtable discussion at the Foreign Ministry. The country's top international relations school has hosted him as a keynote speaker. During an appearance on the state TV channel Rossiya, the station cut between his comments and TV footage of lines at soup kitchens and crowds of homeless people in the U.S. The professor has also been featured on the Kremlin's English-language propaganda channel, Russia Today.

Mr. Panarin's apocalyptic vision "reflects a very pronounced degree of anti-Americanism in Russia today," says Vladimir Pozner, a prominent TV journalist in Russia. "It's much stronger than it was in the Soviet Union."

Mr. Pozner and other Russian commentators and experts on the U.S. dismiss Mr. Panarin's predictions. "Crazy ideas are not usually discussed by serious people," says Sergei Rogov, director of the government-run Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies, who thinks Mr. Panarin's theories don't hold water.

Mr. Panarin's résumé includes many years in the Soviet KGB, an experience shared by other top Russian officials. His office, in downtown Moscow, shows his national pride, with pennants on the wall bearing the emblem of the FSB, the KGB's successor agency. It is also full of statuettes of eagles; a double-headed eagle was the symbol of czarist Russia.

The professor says he began his career in the KGB in 1976. In post-Soviet Russia, he got a doctorate in political science, studied U.S. economics, and worked for FAPSI, then the Russian equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency. He says he did strategy forecasts for then-President Boris Yeltsin, adding that the details are "classified."

In September 1998, he attended a conference in Linz, Austria, devoted to information warfare, the use of data to get an edge over a rival. It was there, in front of 400 fellow delegates, that he first presented his theory about the collapse of the U.S. in 2010.

"When I pushed the button on my computer and the map of the United States disintegrated, hundreds of people cried out in surprise," he remembers. He says most in the audience were skeptical. "They didn't believe me."

At the end of the presentation, he says many delegates asked him to autograph copies of the map showing a dismembered U.S.

He based the forecast on classified data supplied to him by FAPSI analysts, he says. He predicts that economic, financial and demographic trends will provoke a political and social crisis in the U.S. When the going gets tough, he says, wealthier states will withhold funds from the federal government and effectively secede from the union. Social unrest up to and including a civil war will follow. The U.S. will then split along ethnic lines, and foreign powers will move in.

California will form the nucleus of what he calls "The Californian Republic," and will be part of China or under Chinese influence. Texas will be the heart of "The Texas Republic," a cluster of states that will go to Mexico or fall under Mexican influence. Washington, D.C., and New York will be part of an "Atlantic America" that may join the European Union. Canada will grab a group of Northern states Prof. Panarin calls "The Central North American Republic." Hawaii, he suggests, will be a protectorate of Japan or China, and Alaska will be subsumed into Russia.

"It would be reasonable for Russia to lay claim to Alaska; it was part of the Russian Empire for a long time." A framed satellite image of the Bering Strait that separates Alaska from Russia like a thread hangs from his office wall. "It's not there for no reason," he says with a sly grin.

Interest in his forecast revived this fall when he published an article in Izvestia, one of Russia's biggest national dailies. In it, he reiterated his theory, called U.S. foreign debt "a pyramid scheme," and predicted China and Russia would usurp Washington's role as a global financial regulator.

Americans hope President-elect Barack Obama "can work miracles," he wrote. "But when spring comes, it will be clear that there are no miracles."

The article prompted a question about the White House's reaction to Prof. Panarin's forecast at a December news conference. "I'll have to decline to comment," spokeswoman Dana Perino said amid much laughter.

For Prof. Panarin, Ms. Perino's response was significant. "The way the answer was phrased was an indication that my views are being listened to very carefully," he says.

The professor says he's convinced that people are taking his theory more seriously. People like him have forecast similar cataclysms before, he says, and been right. He cites French political scientist Emmanuel Todd. Mr. Todd is famous for having rightly forecast the demise of the Soviet Union -- 15 years beforehand. "When he forecast the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1976, people laughed at him," says Prof. Panarin.

[sgarnett]

And since we're talking about politics.... Would your objections to part time work go away if there was health coverage provided for every american?

I have no desire to drop to part time employment, but I am concerned by the current tendency to villify healthcare as excess overhead. Ultimately, corporations will probably be forced to shed that burden to be more competitive, so I think socialized medicine is inevitable. Of course, that only transfers the expense to the taxpayers, and the transition will be ugly.

I'm biased, though. Cancer is very expensive. Pensions are obsolete, and my wife's treatment expenses would burn through my retirement savings in no time and drive me into bankruptcy. It's still a substantial hit to the budget even after insurance.

[Rob Hood]

Typical Russian stupidity....

Going off topic and returning - one of the reasons the Russians lost the Cold war was (and still is) their peoples' inability to survive economically. The US has invested more in its people than any other country due to our basic freedoms. Russian leadership cannot see the big picture, IMO. Case in point - in spite of the US submarine force's communication system being compromised by the Walker spyring from the late 60s to the mid-80s, Russian sub commanders and their command and control heirarchy remained wholly frustrated at our tactics. They (the Russians) knew our tactical manuals, yet we tended to violate them (their words) when we had to "deal" with Russian sub confrontations. In other words, the Russian leaders have not, do not, and will not, know how to adapt, overcome, and improvise when faced with unfamiliar situations, because the phrases "all men are created equal," and "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" are incomprehensible to them.

Now - are we, the US, perfect? No. Do we have serious issues ahead? Yes. It can be dealt with. What we need to do collectively as a nation, is adapt, overcome, and improvise. This will mean that everyone must give up something in order to survive, that credit cards no longer mean "free money," that you actually have to have a budget and stick to it. We also need to reshape our politics back to a more limited government, hold lawbreakers accountable - not increase oversight on the law-abiding, and that bailouts are nothing more than corporate welfare. We have congressional leadership that doesn't have to live with a balanced budget, because they look at the taxpayer as "Joe the Subsidizer," i.e., an endless supply of money. The sooner we vote out these fiscally ignorant individuals, the better the country will be. The next six months will be very telling.

[Blainefab]

MOSCOW

California will form the nucleus of what he calls "The Californian Republic," and will be part of China or under Chinese influence. Texas will be the heart of "The Texas Republic," a cluster of states that will go to Mexico or fall under Mexican influence. Washington, D.C., and New York will be part of an "Atlantic America" that may join the European Union. Canada will grab a group of Northern states Prof. Panarin calls "The Central North American Republic." Hawaii, he suggests, will be a protectorate of Japan or China, and Alaska will be subsumed into Russia.

"It would be reasonable for Russia to lay claim to Alaska;

Well, Dammmn! Sarah get your guns!

Mr. Panarin's theory sounds like a grade school thesis. Having grown up in the 60's, I see the current level of civil unrest paltry in comparison. IMO, most Americans' world view is driven by economics, and I don't see any indication of emigration towards any of his conquering 'republics'. The beauty of the American system is its checks and balances: politics and economics will swing fairly wildly, but always around a center. Transitions are painful, maybe ugly, but we'll be OK. Russia didn't 'quite' make the break from the old guard.

Somebody ask Mr Panarin what car he would drive, given a choice.

[cccbock]

MOSCOW

California will form the nucleus of what he calls "The Californian Republic," and will be part of China or under Chinese influence. Texas will be the heart of "The Texas Republic," a cluster of states that will go to Mexico or fall under Mexican influence. Washington, D.C., and New York will be part of an "Atlantic America" that may join the European Union. Canada will grab a group of Northern states Prof. Panarin calls "The Central North American Republic." Hawaii, he suggests, will be a protectorate of Japan or China, and Alaska will be subsumed into Russia.

"It would be reasonable for Russia to lay claim to Alaska;

Well, Dammmn! Sarah get your guns!

Mr. Panarin's theory sounds like a grade school thesis. Having grown up in the 60's, I see the current level of civil unrest paltry in comparison. IMO, most Americans' world view is driven by economics, and I don't see any indication of emigration towards any of his conquering 'republics'. The beauty of the American system is its checks and balances: politics and economics will swing fairly wildly, but always around a center. Transitions are painful, maybe ugly, but we'll be OK. Russia didn't 'quite' make the break from the old guard.

Somebody ask Mr Panarin what car he would drive, given a choice.

WOW! I just checked this thread after staying away awhile.

Who does Florida belong to? Cuba I guess.

It certainly has evolved........my guns are loaded.

Bock

[94bird]

Wow, if WSJ printed a story like that, it must be good news for our economy. The story is so much rubbish it could have only been meant as filler, meaning there wasn't enough serious stuff to write about that day.

[mitchntx]

Who does Florida belong to? Cuba I guess.

Bock

I think it will be abandoned in place ... (IMG:http://www.frrax.com/rrforum/style_emoticons/default/cool2.gif)