PoAC: A chicken-or-the-egg argument

[velvetpage]

"The unionized (company) had lower worker morale, always had confrontation between management and workers and used more people to do the same amount of work."

Here's the question: which came first, the adversarial management/employee relations and low worker morale, or the unionization?

What do you guys think? Is there a way to get the best of both worlds, and if so, can you give an example of it?

Comments

[siobhan63.livejournal.com]

Living in Quebec, i've become increasingly anti-union because they are simply abusive here - out of control completely (particularly the public sector unions). The best car plants aren't unionised - Toyota. Same wages and benefits as GM and Ford and such, but no union and guess what? They're doing far better than GM and Ford. You don't need a union to have a company that respects its workforce, and when you have company that screws over its workers, a la Walmart, bringing in a union doesn't help - see what's happened in Quebec - they just shut the store down. I don't really see a need for unions much anymore, not in most industries. I've never belonged to one. My parents have as they were teachers, but they both would have preferred to not have had to be a part of it.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

Certainly some unions make the problem worse, not better. In my board of ed, CUPE is a dirty word for the way they protect the jobs of people who ought to have been fired long since for never, you know, doing anything. On the other hand, the reason Toyota offers comparable wages and benefits is that they have decided the union contracts are industry standard, so they fall in line in order to keep their own company from going that route. Toyota would not long maintain that standard if the unions disappeared from the competition. The unions don't have to be everywhere to do the job - they just have to be frequent enough to create an industrial climate where their demands set the standard for the industry. The same thing happens in Hamilton with Stelco and Dofasco. Stelco goes on strike, gets their wage increase/pension increase/whatever, and then a few months later, Dofasco matches it without their employees even asking. The result: people want to work for Dofasco, because they'll get union benefits without the nasty relationship. But Dofasco's benefits are based on those of Stelco's union.