Pro-labor? A couple too many morning mimosas today Bing?

I applaud you, Bing.

I’m still not sure how the NY Times have been run off my the likes of Craigslist and bloggers, but I suppose that in the last century, had the railroads realized that they were in the business of moving freight and passengers, they’d be operating aircraft and running FedEx. Sadly, they all thought they were in the “train business.”

Now to figure out what those printers will print, once we’re all reading our news”paper” on digital doodads and whatnots.

If I buy a new Kindle, I’m saving the old one to line the bird cage, just in case you don’t come up with anything.

An endowment would not have been the answer this time around anyway. Many nonprofits lost 20%-50% of their endowment recently, including quite a few that should have invested more conservatively (Harvard, for instance). Even after using a rolling 12-quarter average to calculate endowment draw, that sort of loss can mean fundamental changes in an organization.

Not just today, Matt. I’m sort of pro-everybody who has to work for a living, I think. The operational word being: WORK.

Proximity to product is inversely related to corporate prestige.

What were this not so. We’d still make things but somehow we came to the realization that making things is somehow, dirty.

Now we, like the things we used to make, are mere commodities.

“Do not ask for whom the bell
tolls. It tolls for thee.”

…and we need to find a buyer for Playboy Magazine while we’re at it.

good point bing, even those of us who have been conservative regarding business are now thinking the pendulum should swing back a bit and acknowledge the worth of the workers. one thing that i would like to see is a strong set of journalistic standards. we need something between beck and maddow, some seal of approval for accountability and to fact check and not editorialize so much. perhaps that could be the draw for readers because i have this fantasy of the glenn becks of the world going before a review board to be certified to be called a news show or an entertainment show.

i use to dislike unions, which need some work, because they were forcing high school kids to join by threatening to fire the kid if they didnt fork over the dues. in the grocery store, most of the employees are baggers and stockers. many were mentally challenged or under 18 and taking dues from these workers is odious. my kid was hunted down and threatened several times! i will be pro labor union as soon as they get the thugs out. unions do not give a choice and govern to preserve the union over the workers. its just as bad as the employers.

but what do i know about business (other than there are people like you to depend on to do the right thing, you are a sweet heart)

Most people will say they support the American worker with one breath, and then berate American unions with the next. Unions are composed of workers. You can’t attack unions with out attacking workers. How about those managers with the golden parachutes and six to seven figure incomes who agreed to the contract terms under the thought process that they would be gone before it became a problem. The American worker has always just tried to get a share of the pie, and when the fat cats are gobbling down all the cream the workers usually just get the crust.

Ah come on, destroying blue collar wages is the new path to prosperity.

How can Richard Fuld be well paid for wrecking his company and a large chunk of the world’s economy if the damned peasants get decent wages?

On a serious note, Henry Ford I had lots of trouble with unions (including hiring thugs to beat them) but he eventually decided that only when the workers who made cars could afford to buy cars would he be truly successful. But now we don’t seem to need a middle class, it interferes with the rich.

Endowment funds: IRA, 401K, 529, defined benefit plan, 403b, annunity, charitable trust, social security, and plain bank savings accounts are intended resevoirs of funds earmarked for specific future spending.

These funds are stagnated; waiting for their intended use of specific projected spending while the MBA entrepreneurs contemplate highest and best use of these funds, any funds, their funds, your funds, my funds; especially, government funds to churn.

Somehow, somebody will find a way to kill these funds, much like road kill, to make them available to the circling vultures and crows waiting to pick the carcuses.

Time and space forbid reading from the journals of lessons learned to create an awareness of dejavu.

Life goes on as only the fittest exit victoriously…………

So you want to help save a local tree killing, rag factory eh..

They used to call newspapers “rags” back when I was young and had a route,,,course the news guys were called scribes in those days…

Okay I’ll go for that, we should have a working paper on display for the kids to see how it used to be done..just like a thrashing crew and the old steam tractors…very interesting stuff…

We could park it next to the blacksmith’s shop,,, charge admission and maybe it would turn a profit and keep some people employed…

Good idea Bing,,we have to remember our roots in this modern electronic world…besides it’s tough to wrap a fish or train your dog with a key board,,,much easier with a “news” paper…

Can’t you be pro-labor without being pro-union? Kind of like being pro-troops but anti-war.

Note that lots of the white collar folks at newspapers are in unions, too. It’s an odd industry that way. Many of the employees get something akin to tenure, which is a nice perk.

The problem papers face is the same one that Detroit confronted: unprecedented revenue reductions. The solution is also the same: restructuring and/or bankruptcy. Everyone takes a haircut. Everyone.

The corporate greed of these institutions is breath-takingly bodacious. Their argument that survival depends upon squeezing every possible concession from workers defies logic. If the situation is that dire (and perhaps it is so because their owners entertain unreasonable ROI expectations) then all they’re doing is picking their desperate employee’s pockets on the way out the door.

Spokane is a one-horse newspaper town. This well diversified and privately held company has steadily laid off the entire backbone of its news staff, and is no longer capable of reporting news of any consequence. The kind of reporting that required serious investment of investigative effort is long gone. It once provided the sort of information that helped propel miscreants out of public office…..now it reports meaningless fluff.

Newspapers are obviously a dying industry. We know the standard litany of explanations; competition from other media, reduction in local ad revenue, and reputedly outlandish demands of unionized employees. I think it’s more fundamental than that….we no longer have the attention span, energy, or community interest to stay focused on anything much more complicated than twitter or ‘dancing with the stars’.

Maybe we deserve what we get.

Everyone takes a ‘haircut’ but the turds at the top; they go to the spa to get polished, but they’re still turds.

“And to my readers: Yeah, that’s right, you guys. I’m talking about NOT sticking it to the Unions. You wanna make something of it?”

Sorry, Bing, we have to make something of it. Here is an example.

Freightliner Trucks got tired of dealing with unions in the northwest and moved most of their manufacturing operations to Salisbury, NC. (about 20 miles south of here) The locals finally had great jobs with great money and benefits. Detroit would not work for those wages, but here in the south it was great money.

Then the unions came here and got the employees all fired up. They demanded more and staged a few strikes to prove that they meant business. “We’ll show them, Right?”

Wrong. The German firm that owns Freightliner simply built two factories in Mexico and is now in the process of moving everything there. Out of thousands of jobs in Salisbury, 300 are left.

The moral of the story? Like it or not, this is a GLOBAL economy. A global economy is not impressed with the UAW. If we hope to keep any jobs here, we have to ’stick it to the Unions’. It’s simple math.

ChicagoSail,

You wouldn’t have this pseudo-populist rancor if people believed your conclusion correct. They don’t.

They have seen the perquisites of power largely maintained while the American middle class falls victim to a relentless erosion.

Inevitible? Maybe, but on the other hand, many see this destruction not as a force of nature but the logical outcome of none for all and all for me calculation.

all this is is class warfare. fat cats getting rich while the poor grow poorer breeds the kind of midnset currently held by, dare I fuel the fire, ‘blue-collar’ worker.

this country was built on the men and women who worked 50 hours a week without a thought to vacation time, fringe benefits et al. The money they were paid to do their job was enough. we’ve come to a point where unions go on strike just to squeeze another .25%, comp time and FMLA perks. Employees now ask “I’ve worked here for 7 years don’t I deserve to get as much p;id leave as I want?” Wasn’t the salary you were paid over that time the benefit you got for working?

i say it’s about time the unions started thinking more with their heads and less with their wallets. we might be able to keep the GM’s and Chrysler’s of the world around.

Along the way, I was an International Mineworker, and later a Teamster. Had to join and pay dues. Not crazy about it, but I did because I needed the work. I saw union abuses, as well as company abuses.

I was personally threatened by thugs one time when we obeyed our employer, against union rules. We quickly obeyed the union, over our employer, after being threatened. They were not joking, either. We risked bodily harm. Hoffa did not mess around.

Later in my life, I crossed UAW lines for my (then) employer, to keep the production line going. I got my share of abuse from the UAW strikers.

I’ve seen both sides of it. I didn’t like any of it. Overly confrontational, and out of control on both sides.

Haircuts all around. Evenly trimmed.

How did the young David parlay a mailroom job into being DAVID GEFFEN? Do any such mailroom positions still exist?

I don’t pretend to know much about the Unions at newspapers, but I’ll tell you that we Californians are getting taken to the cleaners by the racket that runs our public employees.
How *much* do we have to pay before our firefighters, police, teachers and prison guards will stop getting on the TV to tell us why we must keep spending?

The answer is “infinity”

Just wanted to throw a couple thoughts out there.

1. In a bankruptcy, even the guys at the top get hurt. They inevitably have a lot of their net worth tied up in the company’s equity, which typically gets blown out (the creditors get the equity in the reorganized company or the proceeds from the liquidation). Granted, top guys don’t end up on the street. But divorce is a not-uncommon side effect.

2. The perks of power are eroding. Lots of management teams have taken pay hits from 10% up to 50% in this downturn, and that includes guys with titles that start with C. And there is no such thing as job security: miss your number a couple times, lose your job. That’s the way it goes.

I have two immediate relatives who are union members: I wish them and every body else who works for a living only the best. My concern is that unions seem to have a nasty habit of making their host companies uncompetitive, especially in a global economy. Steelmakers, automakers, garment manufacturing, etc.

ChicagoSail,

Well considered arguments, however maangement gave away the store in more than one industry mentioned. Its representatives far from the shop floor were dealing in abstractions. To the supervisors on the floor those abstractions morphed into stangleholds.

As for divorce, those not considering it a direct benefit, might be forced to wonder what, other than implants, all that cash and prestige bought?

I do, however, admire the power of your intellect.

Divorce, that’s the most serious occupational hazard for CEO’s? Big deal, they just move onto the next vacuous head-hunting bimbo, leaving a chain of ex-children, ex-wives, and ex-employees, none of which they cared about in the least. For that class of people self gratification is all that really mattered anyway. ‘Tis the MBA way; just slickly primped, pedigreed, and well tailored PATRICKs.

Mike, it’s possible you need to take a week in the deep woods and chill a little. You sound dark and harried, my friend.

You’re probably right, Stanley. I shall depart this weekend to commune with mosquitoes, horse flies, deer flies, no-see-ums and red-necks. Eat your heart out in Manhattan; I’ll be in paradise!