Unions - geared up to oppose everything?

[anonymous-user]

legzr1 said:

Mandalore said:

I think you will find... to many-many people working in and around London, Bob Crow was a self obsessed thug with a Napolean complex.

Its just a shame that somehow all the [u] ordinary people [/u] he and his members fked over for their own personal enjoyment couldn't get payback and refuse to serve them for 48hours at a time.

As already stated ,his job was to better the wages and conditions of his members.

This he did very well.

Which part do you find confusing?

Both of you are right. Crow did an outstanding job for his members. At the expense of everyone else.

[legzr1]

fblm said:

Both of you are right. Crow did an outstanding job for his members. At the expense of everyone else.

Perhaps things will change with slightly less confrontational characters leading either 'side'?

[Talksteer]

speedyman said:

otolith said:

speedyman said:

The government only gets a majority in parliment because of our first past the post system. More people did not vote for them when all votes are counted nationally, so how democratic is that.

Which of the other smaller minorities would you like to get its way?

Proportion representation would seem to me to be a better way to represent the electorate rather than the fake democracy we have which is only geared to a two party system.

There are many issues with proportional representation. Lets imagine we live in a fictitious country, in my country there are two main parties but neither ever get enough votes to form a majority government. However 10% of the population vote for the racist and the hippie parties.

To form a government the main moderate parties must go into coalition with one of the extreme parties and must adopt a number of their policies which actually do not have even close to majority support. This makes the politics vulnerable to concentrated interest groups, good example of this is Israel where settler parties defend a minority interest to the detriment of the rest of the society.

The net effect of the UK system is that while it gives power to the party that wins the plurality to win that plurality you actually have to be pretty moderate as the system does not give any power to minority parties (Take out the tribal identity politics and the two main parties have historically had very similar policies). What is does do is over represent small parties who have strong regional support but these parties generally don't get to wield any power anyway.

The STV and second preference systems may have some merit in that they are more proportional but also don't give power to minority interest parties like PR does.

[a_bread]

hairyben said:

I hear constantly of how the striking British worker killed the british car industry, but british workers build loads of cars very successfully - under the management of ze germans, le french, re japanese. Oh look, all countries with massively strong union cultures too. Tell me, who couldn't do their job again?

The British workforce isn't the same as it was 40 years ago. Had you taken the British workforce of those days with its entrenched attitudes and transferred it to management teams from one of those other countries (where unions are more prevalent partly as a result of having larger manufacturing sectors as a share of the economy), well we don't know what would have happened, but you would probably not have had the peaceful and productive outcomes which have resulted in more recent years. Or another view would be that they have chosen to build cars here where union culture is weaker....

Germany made a bunch of Thatcherite-style reforms of its union laws in the early 2000s, some decades after Thatcher made them. Obviously recognising that there was some use in trimming union power, UK-style.

Taking a look at how many of the "industries" most affected by the deluge of strikes back then were nationalised is quite telling. How would public sector management be anywhere near equivalent to that of the private sector, with their total different incentive structures?

[ralphrj]

hairyben said:

I hear constantly of how the striking British worker killed the british car industry, but british workers build loads of cars very successfully - under the management of ze germans, le french

Remind me how Rover got on under BMW and how well the Peugeot plant at Ryton is doing?

[Derek Smith]

a_bread said:

The British workforce isn't the same as it was 40 years ago. Had you taken the British workforce of those days with its entrenched attitudes and transferred it to management teams from one of those other countries (where unions are more prevalent partly as a result of having larger manufacturing sectors as a share of the economy), well we don't know what would have happened, but you would probably not have had the peaceful and productive outcomes which have resulted in more recent years. Or another view would be that they have chosen to build cars here where union culture is weaker....

Germany made a bunch of Thatcherite-style reforms of its union laws in the early 2000s, some decades after Thatcher made them. Obviously recognising that there was some use in trimming union power, UK-style.

Taking a look at how many of the "industries" most affected by the deluge of strikes back then were nationalised is quite telling. How would public sector management be anywhere near equivalent to that of the private sector, with their total different incentive structures?

I'm not sure how old you are and whether you were part of the workforce of 40 years ago but from my memory, most of the workers in the factory I was in were critical of the car unions. In fact, one way to really irritate the workers was not to pull your weight. I entered the workforce at the age of 15 with the inherited view that you should look upon your job as something I should work hard at. The best praise you could get from your immediate, union member, boss was that you did a 'good job.'

Sickness levels were far, far lower than they are now. It was felt wrong to go off sick unless you were really ill.

My union was only too willing to be flexible. My union pushed for modernisation of the industry and they encouraged new methods. The only problem was that the owners wanted to keep all the savings to themselves.

You should not view all, or even the majority, of unions as copies of the, for instance, car unions. Remember that the credit for the failure of the final Miners' Strike was earned more by the steelworkers refusing to join them than Thatcher. If they had taken part, the government would have failed.

The intention of the unions was to not only improve the working conditions and pay but to secure jobs as well. You could argue that Scargill killed the jobs of miners, but the evidence seems to be that they would have gone anyway. Scargill frequently said that he was protecting the job of mining for the children of the members.

This was in conflict with the old miners' toast: to the last miner coming out of the last pit on his last shift.

At the moment the unions have little power in this country. What has changed in my time is the middle class unions becoming militant. Doctors striking would never have happened just a few years ago. It was unthinkable. Teachers were so right wing in my days that my communist uncle used to question me about what I'd been told in history.

It seems likely that police officers, the last vestige of a role non-unionised by law, will be striking in a few years, not to mention nurses, unless attitudes of those in charge change.

[otolith]

Derek Smith said:

Sickness levels were far, far lower than they are now. It was felt wrong to go off sick unless you were really ill.

Are you sure about that? I can't find any figures going back forty years, but levels of sickness absence declined markedly from '93 to 2013.

http://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/pe...

[crankedup]

From what I gather from media people are actually frightened to take sick leave for the worry of losing the job.

[Jockman]

boxxob said:

Then there are gems such as this: http://www.solicitorsjournal.com/news/legal-profes...

Looks like a straight forward case. As an Employer I understand what the word 'statutory' entails. Just as those on maternity leave still accrue holiday entitlement.