East Coast shipping ports shutting down in a few hours

Fireballsocal said:
I'll play devils' advocate here. You are witnessing one of the few and possibly one of the last uses of leverage that laborers have left. The stock market is crazy high no matter where you look. Record profits at many big companies. Eff you money is everywhere but very little makes its way down to the blue collar worker. As our ability to leverage a wage increase is weakened, the middle class will evaporate. I am a warehouseman of 26 years for a large automotive corporation. Ground floor laborer. We are non union and our pay tops the class of warehouse labor in SoCal which means the entire country. We wouldn't have the decent pay we have today if it wasn't for other facilities in the company that were union and the corp. not wanting us to unionize. Because of unions, not only is our pay much higher than it would be without the union threat but those union guys are making a living wage and able to raise families and live a decent life. Without union leverage, labor would be back to a poverty wage. The average SoCal warehouse wage is $25 hourly. I'm paid $37.25. The corporations net profit was 34 billion. If they could make it $35b and bump me down to minimum with no loss of quality, they would do it in a heartbeat and I couldn't blame them. When you see businesses failing because their labor cost is so high, then I'll agree that the labor unions are too greedy but that just isn't happening.
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That’s one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is it’s a self inflicted problem.
Why don’t unions buy or start up their own businesses? Instead of dumping millions into politician’s coffers why not use the cash along with dues money and employee concessions to create employee owned entities?
 
BaBaBouy said:
That’s one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is it’s a self inflicted problem.
Why don’t unions buy or start up their own businesses? Instead of dumping millions into politician’s coffers why not use the cash along with dues money and employee concessions to create employee owned entities?
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They wouldn't be getting 66% raises most likely???
LOL
 
After all that uproar they got 62% over 6 years which equates to a $4 raise over the $39 an hour base salary. Now thank them for continuing to unload your Seafood, oil, cars, auto parts, machinery parts, electronics, alcohol and bananas.
 
Fireballsocal said:
If I ran the company, I would pay as little as possible to get the result necessary. That is the job of the CEO and their management levels. I would pay the same for raw material or production supplies. As little as possible to get the result I wanted. And then I would collect my $15,000,000 bonus on the way to my $100,000,000 retirement stock incentive. The unions are making sure the white collars don't get all of those millions. Boo Hoo.
Now I said devils' advocate. The unions aren't the good guys. There are no good guys. This is business and leverage always wins out.
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As someone who’s owned / ran multiple businesses I understand a balance sheet and know there isn’t a dedicated line item showing the cost of employee turnover.
Keeping employees is a key component in success / profit but there are limits. I used profit sharing as an incentive which was attractive to the people I wanted working for / with me. The employee that was fixated on an extra $1 an hour and didn’t max out my company’s 401K match wasn’t worth my time.
I apologize for a lengthy analogy but an early experience in my working life has always stayed with me,
I went to work for a fencing company. I was in the yard running a saw that “dog eared” cedar fence slats making $4 an hour. I asked the owner if I could be paid by the pallet of finished slats instead of being paid hourly, we agreed on a price.
I was in the yard working when the other employees would arrive in the morning and was the last employee to leave.
I was called in to the office to pick up my first paycheck under the new arrangement. The owner informed me that I had to go back to hourly because I made more money than his yard foreman of 18 years and the other employees were threatening to quit.
I took my check and quit vowing to limit other people quantifying my worth as much as possible.
Unions used to protect good employees from bad management, now they protect mediocre employees from accountability. I’ll shut down everything at any cost before I cave to demands from people that receive a benefit from risk I took, from time and effort I invested to create a solution to a problem (business) I identified.
Not get the eff off my lawn!
 
megadesertdiesel said:
After all that uproar they got 62% over 6 years which equates to a $4 raise over the $39 an hour base salary. Now thank them for continuing to unload your Seafood, oil, cars, auto parts, machinery parts, electronics, alcohol and bananas.
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Meh, people that want / need thanks should volunteer at soup kitchens. Of course they could thank me for purchasing stuff that requires them to unload it…
 
We went to Costco yesterday it was a normal run. We were in the water department and all the toilet paper was gone.
 
ROBERT L said:
We went to Costco yesterday it was a normal run. We were in the water department and all the toilet paper was gone.
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Whats with the Toilet Paper Destroyers? Peace
 
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