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

[ghostwes.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Who's to say that the unionized company did have lower worker morale? The company, no doubt? (You didn't attribute the quote, so I'm just assuming...)

There should be confrontations between management and workers. This is not inherently a bad thing. Unions only increase worker confidence in addressing issues that would otherwise be suppressed or ignored by management. If the managers/owners can't take the confrontation, that's their problem. They'll get no sympathy from me.

I think it's fairly obvious that the crappy conditions that most workers have had to endure gave rise to unionization. I tend to look at the history of unions as an ongoing affair, rather than something that occurred in the distant past. The fact that we are losing a lot of the rights that we fought for in our earlier struggles is an indication to me that a lot of people have forgotten why we fought in the first place. It is, or should be, an ongoing struggle.

[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.