Tag Archives: jobs

Featherbedding

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It’s not just for railroads, or auto unions. It seems to have come to the Writers Guild of America. The WGA and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers appear to have reached a tentative agreement, wanting only fleshing out the details and then a WGA rank and file vote.

The tentative agreement appears to include these items:

  • a minimum number of writers per television show
  • guaranteed employment for those writers from conception to postproduction

If those really are included, they would be just naked featherbedding. Not even TV and movie production needs a guaranteed, fixed numbers of writers, or of any other type of employee, nor should these businesses need to provide guaranteed employment, whether or not the employees are needed at one time or another.

Instead, those items should be matters agreed in contracts between employee groups or their representing unions and the particular television and movie production company.

This wastefulness—and increased cost to consumers—is part of the price a union shop inflicts on the rest of us.

Temp Workers at Car Manufacturers

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The UAW objects to American car manufacturers having temp workers on the payroll.

The use of temporary factory workers at the Detroit car companies has long rankled the United Auto Workers union, which wants fewer of them and a faster path to full-time status.

Never mind that

Automakers say they need the flexibility that temp workers provide, especially as they manage a tricky and costly transition to electric vehicles and confront the ups and downs of factory production.

The union pretends to object on the grounds of the different pay levels temps earn compared to union workers. This is cynically disingenuous. The temps know, going in, that they’re getting a lower wage than their full-time, unionized neighbor on the assembly line. They still take the gig, because they’d like to have the income. That’s an income the UAW wants to deny them, along with denying the car manufacturers these labor gap fillers.

The union boss, Shawn Fain, claims to want to help the temps:

UAW President Shawn Fain has said he wants to get temps better pay and limit their use. He also wants to accelerate the timeline to full-time status to 90 days.

But he doesn’t want them working at all until he and his union get their way. This is demonstrated by the outlandish demand of full-time status for temps within 90 days. That’s far too short to evaluate a worker’s fitness over the longer haul, and it’s far too short relative to longer-lasting but still temporary labor gaps.

In the end, temp workers are the most reliable workers on the car makers’ factory floors—the UAW’s strike, especially as damage maximizing as the present one is designed to be—demonstrates this conclusively. Fain’s demand regarding temp workers is just another union power grab.

Nice Company You Got There

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Shawn Fain, UAW union boss, is extending his threat to Ford, GM, and Stellantis, the three major American car companies against which he’s taken selective strike action, a selectivity he’s said he’s using to maximize current damage to the companies.

…what the union calls a “stand up strike,” in which specific locals are asked to go on strike at their facilities. The union has said that strategy will give it flexibility in escalating the strike incrementally up to a potential nationwide strike if negotiations do not deliver sufficient progress in its view, and will make it harder for the auto companies to predict its next move.

Give us what we want, or else:

further strikes will be announced if negotiations do not yield sufficient progress by Friday.

And so they did. The union struck additional plants at GM and Stellantis. Not Ford, though–Fain is claiming that Ford was “serious about reaching a deal,” and so he didn’t order a strike expansion there. Sure. More likely, this is just an attempt to sow dissension among the automakers and thereby add to pressure to surrender.

Be too bad if something was to happen to your company(s).

Greedy UAW

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The United Automobile Workers Union, per its president Shawn Fain, is threatening to strike the three automakers GM, Ford, and Stellantis (nee Chrysler) simultaneously after midnight Thursday (as I write Thursday midday). The union is demanding

  • 36% pay raises over the next four years
  • raises to correspond to the cost of living
  • an end to tiered-wages for factory jobs
  • a 32-hour work week with 40 hours of pay
  • pension increases

Some of those would seem legitimate, or at least open to discussion, and typical union wants that most employers could find some sort of agreement on. The pay raise demand is egregious, and the demand to be paid for hours not worked is simply greedy, glorified featherbedding.

Furthermore, the strike is a direct attack on the companies’ ability to function at all: by the design and purpose of the strike, it closes the businesses and prevents it from earning any revenue. From that, it closely approaches extortion. In the present case, the UAW plans to maximize the damage they intend to inflict with what Fain is calling a “Stand Up Strike:”

“…keep the companies guessing as to where and when the next local walkout would be,” Fain said.

The car companies need to stand tall and refuse to negotiate as long as the union holds this metaphorical gun to their heads.

Aside from that, in a world where unions weren’t given special considerations—they’re even exempt from antitrust law, even though they have a monopoly on workforces in union shops and in unionized industries like the auto manufacturing of Michigan—such overt attacks would invalidate any contract to which management is coerced into agreeing.

Update: The UAW has, indeed, struck all three automakers, one major plant each. The union has shut down GM’s Wentzville, MO, plant, a 4.25 million sq-ft facility that was producing mid-size trucks and full-size vans under the GMC and Chevrolet brands; Stellantis’ Toledo, OH, 3.64 million sq-ft facility that was producing Jeep Wranglers and Jeep Gladiators; and Ford’s Wayne, MI, 5 million sq-ft facility that was producing Rangers and Broncos.

Union Evidence Tampering

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The Jefferson County Education Association, the teachers union representing the teachers of Colorado’s Jefferson County school district, has instructed its members to destroy

evidence of students’ transgender information

Leaving aside the fact that the union has no authority to order this—that’s the sole purview of the school district’s board and superintendent—there’s this much larger problem: it’s evidence tampering, which is a serious felony.

The union even anticipated the fact that the docs might be called into evidence in some future proceeding:

The email said, “if you do a questionnaire, please make it a paper and pencil activity – any digital records are more permanent and may be requested under federal law.”

This is another teachers union that needs to be decertified.