Unions have had their problems, and may not be part of the final answer, but their efforts when directed at getting the blue collar folk a fair share of the pie and limiting the abuse of management have been just.
You remember engineering used to be a white collar job. Not anymore. Engineering is a "service" which can be shopped to the lowest bidder. It goes overseas or to the incompetent. I've seen CAD go from being done in a room full of advanced-degree nerd-types to current high school grads who don't know a nut from a bolt.
It's part of the great flattening of the marketplace, and it's not pretty.
Jerry (it's me Jenn Turner). Glad to you see you joined the blogosphere!
ReplyDeleteI think that unions have made themselves as useful as the electoral college. Maybe it made sense at one time - but not anymore.
It's unfortunate that business owners continue take the lowest bid. But consumers continue to demand lower prices at the cost of quality.
We live in a society that only sees the end product. Like a raw steak in the grocery store's meat section. We don't care how it got there... we just want to pay a buck less.
Businesses that see increasing government regulations (and unions) that force their prices to rise and their customers to leave, have little choice but to send their work overseas.
Jenn, I think society has been mis-trained to pay "a buck less". I recall how we were taught to compare products ... by unit cost only. Turns out in practice that is easy, but wrong. Look at the poison issues in food coming from China. We focus on extreme short term personal profit at the expense of long term group costs.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comment. My First!
I commend Jenn for her raw steak reference. But I'm willing to take it a step further. I would say that as a society we are a raw steak, butchered, bloodied, and packaged in plastic wrap. Bacteria, growth hormone, and gristle running amuck and demanding the addition of copious amounts of steak seasoning of counteractive action to save us from the repulsive culinary disgrace that is our place in this world.
ReplyDelete:)
Keep on wandering lion.
I find all this steak talk a bit distracting.
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