Ok, the contracts embedded horrendously stupid conditions - can’t ship bread and other products on the same truck eg.
But management AGREED to every one of those ridiculous conditions. They’ve got to take some responsibility for that.
For the unions, negotiations were a kind of game they played with management. The little feather-bedding rules that saved a few jobs while denying better working conditions to the people with real jobs, was the way they worked. Back in the early ‘70s, the Auto-unions did not press management to replace the worn-out factories that were hot in the summer and cold in the winter or get machinery to do jobs that were down-right depressing. My wife’s uncle made an art-form of using his sick benefits and perversely passed on crappy product because the company did not want to bear the cost of turning out good stuff.
Yes - like GM which cannot fail but to head back down the path to failure due to it's letting Uncle SugarBama into it's business. Got some new life, but the unions still wield too much power.
“But management AGREED to every one of those ridiculous conditions. They’ve got to take some responsibility for that.”
True, but try being in management’s shoes some day.
...and look at it the other way - if no union, then no stupid conditions like that - it wouldn’t even be considered.
They threatened to strike once too often. In a bad economy you sit tight and be grateful you have a job, under OLD conditions that could never be granted now.
The unions are SOLELY responsible for the death of the steel industry and many other industries, and now Hostess, a less on they NEVER seem to learn.
OK so management may have made mistakes—it was the Union who killed the Twinkee. Unions are nothing but a cancer upon the American business community. They are so corrupt they kill labor—lets see how well you unionize Chinese Shops?