Mott's Strike Illustrates Labor Union Dilemma

[Omaha Steve]

Run time: 08:22 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g57Mg-489KQ   Posted on YouTube: September 07, 2010 By YouTube Member: PBSNewsHour Views on YouTube: 677   Posted on DU: September 12, 2010 By DU Member: Omaha Steve Views on DU: 241

 

http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/6415/why_you_should_earn_less_a_company_rationale/

Thursday September 9 10:41 am

By Stephen Franklin

Tom Michaud is no bargaining expert. He is an applesauce cook, earning $21.80 an hour after working 15 years at the Mott’s apple juice plant in Williamson, N.Y.

But he sensed a problem from what he heard about the way contract talks were going with his company, Texas-based Dr. Pepper Snapple Group Inc. “You could see something building,” he recalled. He was right.

But what was ahead was something that union officials say they had not expected. The giant conglomerate offered a rationale for tough bargaining that you rarely hear from companies today: We’re losing money. We’re being eaten by the foreign competition. Our technology is terribly behind and we need to put the money into keeping the plant up to date.

These are the explanations companies usually offer whenever they say they need to slash wages and benefits. (Watch the recent PBS program above to hear the company’s explanation.)

Mott's talked about the plant’s inefficiency, but it also said that it wanted to “bring the plant’s costs in line with ‘local and industry standards,’” according to a New York Times report.

“This is the first time a very profitable company has come to us and asked for concessions, and I’ve been with the union for 23 years,” says Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU), an affiliate of the United Food and Commercial Workers union.

FULL story at link.

[TxVietVet]

1. The conservanazis want cheap labor and no regulations.

That's what they are all about. IF you work in a plant with a union contract or if you work in an industry with a union contract, you will be targeted the multinationals and their communist-chinese-loving chamber of commerce. They will do anything to destroy the standards that has created a middle class in the United States. When they are finished, there will only be two classes in this society. Those that have the money and those that will probably never get much. It is their intentions to destroy American society as we know it. The business lobby, led by the republiklan's chamber of commerce, want to destroy public education. They don't want to pay to educate someone else's children. They want to drive this country back to the 19th century. So, the future under the conservanazi republiklans will be bleak to say the least. There will be massive poverty, no workers rights and a government that is a wholy owned subsiduary of the conservanazis and their multinational bribers.

It will happen unless we stop them in the elections.

If there is a God, may He help us.