Trade unions - A force for good or a detriment to society?

[Lemmingwise]

Are you defending child labor?

I am actually attacking the modern mandatory state school system instead. Thanks for expanding on the idea.

There is less crime despite there being more laws. However, alot of those laws are laws that should

Yes, prisons for children. But its the state indoctrination that particularly bothers me. It's interesting when I compare our system to the US, on the one hand our schools seems better and slightly less propagandistic, but on the other hand homeschooling is practically impossible here.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

I am actually attacking the modern mandatory state school system instead. Thanks for expanding on the idea.




Yes, prisons for children. But its the state indoctrination that particularly bothers me. It's interesting when I compare our system to the US, on the one hand our schools seems better and slightly less propagandistic, but on the other hand homeschooling is practically impossible here.

It doesn't help that schools are so fucked up here.

Children have a natural love of learning, but when put into prisons like that, they're conditioned to associated with learning with boredom. It ends up destroying their enthusiasm. They also don't get enough time playing (recess), which is a problem that's been made worse in recent years.

I believe that at this point, the school system is doomed. My Mom works as a teacher and in the past few years, they've added a lot of new rules that have made classes ungovernable. There are some children who they flat-out aren't allowed the punish. They have retards, meth-babies, and psychopaths in classrooms with normal children. They teach a very specific version of Math and ban any other Math that contradicts it, even if it's correct... like, they refuse to let students apply the Associative and Commutative Properties of Arithmetic.

It's done for. The schools are worthless at this point.

 

[Lemmingwise]

It doesn't help that schools are so fucked up here.

Children have a natural love of learning, but when put into prisons like that, they're conditioned to associated with learning with boredom. It ends up destroying their enthusiasm. They also don't get enough time playing (recess), which is a problem that's been made worse in recent years.

I believe that at this point, the school system is doomed. My Mom works as a teacher and in the past few years, they've added a lot of new rules that have made classes ungovernable. There are some children who they flat-out aren't allowed the punish. They have exceptional individuals, meth-babies, and psychopaths in classrooms with normal children. They teach a very specific version of Math and ban any other Math that contradicts it, even if it's correct... like, they refuse to let students apply the Associative and Commutative Properties of Arithmetic.

It's done for. The schools are worthless at this point.

Of course. That's their goal. With "their" I mean the Bill Gates of the world. It's hard to give your children a leg-up, but it's not so hard to give other children a leg-down.

If you doubt that, look into how public schooling was formed in the US, with the John D Rockefeller and such. But try to get a little further than just the wikipedia page.

Besides it's not boredom, it's ADHD and here's a medicine we'd like to sell you for life and you get chronic depression if you try to go off it.

 

[Jack Haywood]

I appreciate and love your comments, but can you try to get back on topic as soon as possible, please? I don't see what schools have to do with trade unions.

 

[Lemmingwise]

appreciate and love your comments, but can you try to get back on topic as soon as possible, please? I don't see what schools have to do with trade unions

I don't have much experience or knowledge of trade unions, so the following comments are more on theoretical level or the concept of trade unions rather than the practice of them. I'm saying that to clearly highlight my ignorance on the subject.

It seems to me that it's good to have a counterweight to big businesses. Where one worker stands powerless, a union doesn't. Over time, I think it's likely and easy for unions to corrupt just as much as big businesses. They need to justify themselves, so it's easy for them to make problems seem bigger than they are in attempts to justify themselves. They can create a lot of market inefficiency.

Particularly for closed shop union arrangements, where essentially people are forced to be union members, it diminishes the wuality control of the union itself, since there is no choice to not be a member.

One of the other problems is that I think it is possible for a union to price its workers out of a job. Let's do a google search.

Yep, apparently outsourcing became so much more attractive due to rising costs and demands of workers.

It's like when Indonesia introduced a minimum wage. This was very beneficial to industry growth in neighbouring countries, as they became more competitive as a result.

Let me know if my thoughts hit the mark or not.

 

[The Gay Banana]

Unions are very effective in industries where workers are skilled and can't be replaced easily. My friend is a mech engineer and the union won the staff members a one time pay off because they hadn't been paying the correct holiday time for overtime. For a single worker to take the company to court over it would be difficult, however it's easy for the union to leverage on behalf of its members and get the company to settle. I note that union membership is not mandatory in that job yet everyone who works there is a union member. But that leverage only exist where the supply of workers is less than the demand, in low paid low skilled jobs they are nowhere near as effective.

 

[mindlessobserver]

It's a balancing act that we have not really figured out. On the one hand employers need to be able to cut their payroll to make ends meet or get rid of useless trash. On the other end employees need to be able to bargain effectively for pay that is commensurate to their input value in the business and to not risk pesky things like dying on the job because management locked all the exit doors to keep people from slipping out for smoke breaks.

Like in the triangle shirt waist fire.

It's a balancing act. Favor business too much and we all become slaves of those who have the capital. And they will use that capital as a cudgel to insure we stay in our rightful place at the bottom of the ladder and not a threat to their power. Favor labor too much however and you end up with situations where companies can no longer turn profits as all their revenue goes to paying for wages and benefits to worker who may not even be productive but cannot be fired.