Wake Up, You're Liberal (Part VI)

So even I have gotten tired of the Corbu pretension. Oh well.

I'm going to try to bang through this one, which I've been a little reluctant to address because my opinions on the matter are not terribly "liberal", but I'll do it, because the next one is very important to me.

We have the right to collective bargaining

In which Rall points out that union membership is @ 13% from a historical high of 35%... as my new coworker said today, "that's because outsourced workers don't unionize."

In theory, I agree that employees should have the right to come to the bargaining table level with the owners, especially when the owners aren't owners in the traditional sense, ie: they are deep-pocketed investors who came late to the company and thought they could make a buck out of it, not people who built the company up from a child's dream.

In theory, I agree that it makes sense to have professionals do the negotiating, experts who are good at reading between the lines of these "owners'" settlement proposals.

In theory, I believe people are all interested in the success of whatever they're working towards.

In practice, however, unions representatives are often corrupt and out to shaft both the owners AND the employees they are supposed to represent; they should be working selflessly in the best interests of the workers, and should be trying to increase membership to increase their bargaining power, not to increase their take from dues, and not to help maintain the veneer of credibility.

In practice, employees know that unions cannot prevent massive layoffs when the owners move the plant to China, and they have developed a short view that is inherently selfish, and are therefore ill-suited for collective bargaining.

In practice, owners don't care about anything but quarter-on-quarter increases in profit, and cannot ever be expected to bargain reasonably again while that's how business is done.

I agree that the situation as it exists is horribly wrong and broken. I don't think that conventional unions are the way to go, however. Reforming Wall Street would have a much more lasting impact, as would making changes to the real take-home pay of the average worker.

Hiatus Hiatus

So I sit here, posting for like, the first time in decades, and I am doing so on a shiny new Dell laptop with built in WiFi and Bluetooth (not that I own any Bluetooth devices...). How, might you ask, am I able to perform this miraculous feat?

Well, I seem to have turned my craptacular and somewhat (although not entirely) unexpected second bout of unemployment in 6 months into a new job at my alma mater, the lovely Johns Hopkins University. We are very pleased. The pay is not the filthy lucre I have so richly not deserved for the past umpteen years, but there is the free tuition, and the ridiculous amounts of vacation, and the 2 mile commute... whee! There, I've said it.

At any rate, given that I now have an awesome desktop/laptop and no apparent responsibilities (although they are looming), I am well pleased. Not quite pleased (or non-lazy) enough to actually resume real posting, or, like, post on The Other Blog, but quite pleased nonetheless.