Posted on 08/24/2009 7:31:39 AM PDT by smartyaz
In a statement the company the said, "Following the union's vote, the company will consolidate much of its Fond du Lac manufacturing operations with its existing operations in an expanded Stillwater, Oklahoma, facility."
Mercury Marine is Fond du Lac's largest employer, with 2,000 workers, and community leaders have expressed fears losing the plant would affect even more jobs countywide.
(Excerpt) Read more at wbay.com ...
Want to give it a try?
Exactly my thoughts. I won't be buying anything from Mercury Marine that was manufactured after this.
This state is in a spiral down a vortex leading to chaos. The governor is doing everything in his power to drive business away. The heat in our tax hell is being turned up in large increments (State, county, local)
Our Congressman, Paul Ryan (R) is having a series of 17 town hall meetings on Health Care. The democratic party, the labor unions, all the usual rabble, are organizing intentional disruption of each listening event.
This latest news from Mercury Marine is another symptom of the rotten disease that infests our entire state.
The pooch is screwed!
60 day rule for plant shut down.
When the shop I worked at layed off most of it’s workers, they didn’t give a s**t.
Then those who were left had a talking to about the bad parts sent out, GM had to had a lot of down time, cost a lot of money.
I pointed out the time stamp on the parts, they were made on the afternoon shift, and I was the only one still there from that shift.
My parts were good, but others didn’t care. Even the day before it total closed my parts were good, I have to look in the mirror and am proud of my work.
I saw this photo on the other thread, do you see any minorities or anyone under 40 in this photo? Generation-X got left out of the union jobs when we got out of High School.
This is the new deal everyone is peddling, screw over your new or younger employees. A pay freeze for 7 years is a bunch of crap too, I will give them credit, this is a reason to reject a contract.
WI, not MI
Trade union members are working within the local and historical conditions for their area, craft, plant and local area. Much that was changed by union organizing in the first half of the twentieth century needed changing. The historical fact that some of the union leadership and central district councils were leftist fronts or used criminal connections to promote their power is something that many union members are disgusted about. But, if someone learns the plumbing craft from their father and they live and work in Chicago, they are going to be working for a plumbing company that is signed up with a union. Then to go to work they need the apprentice training and journeyman card to perform their trade and make a living. They is nothing to be damned in that.
The problem comes as much from the company as it does from the local members.
The incestuous relationship of Ford and GM with UAW was what made the mess, not simply workers organizing to deal with management.
When I had to do a huge amount of plumbing and mechanical in a merit shop state where subs were scarce, I evaluated all the possible labor sources and ended up hiring a huge union workforce in an area where they had been frozen out. They were a great bunch of guys and were happy to have a two year project under a single-project agreement. We beat the non-union prices that were available and did a first class job.
Unions are full of top notch craftsmen that only want to make a decent wage and deal with the conditions that exist in the market area where they live and work. It is when you have militant leftist leadership and an indoctrinated workforce that you see self destruction like this article illustrates.
I worked for a company that shut down for the same reason Mercury is doing it, the Union members voted out the contract, which actually was quite reasonable.
However, a lot of Union members(BTW, I was a Union member for many, many years)have a mind set about businesses that you have to experience to believe. While about 45 percent of the members where I worked were republicans, and this in CA, we were outnumbered by the ones who weren't. The company I worked for decided to shut down without the 90 day noticed required in CA and pay us severance pay instead, they knew things would go to crap in a hurry after the announcement.
We had our own raw materials, the company shut us down and simply moved the materials(as they were harvested)to another plant about 80 miles away, same state, but no Union and they are still doing business that way.
The whole community suffered for years, most of the ex-members ended up with extremely low paying jobs, the plant was replaced( a really nice 40 acre parcel)with "services" instead of production jobs, eventually, but they all pay very low and no benefits and fewer people are working.
I actually ended up with a better job but out of the 700 some odd workers affected only about 10 ended up better, most didn't.
Once again, it is based upon what you encounter. I think your generalization is too broad.
My exposure is with construction unions all over the country. In forty years I have probably dealt with close to twenty thousand individual subcontracts, both union and merit shop. I see less idiot militancy now then I did fifteen years ago.
The issue varies greatly depending upon which market you are in. I have seen many merit shop subcontractors with very poorly trained workmen because the subcontractors started out in the union era where they were used to union apprentic programs training their workforce and when they had to do it themselves and pay for it they simply failed in their management responsibilities to train their workforce. We now have local merit shop apprentice training in some areas, but funding and cooperation in getting the training done is always a problem.
Often, getting away from union work is just a way to cut wages and try and get more work by price cutting alone. That is the honest answer from someone who has had areas where he has “gone open-shop” and withdrawn from contracts in certain areas due to economic necessity and issues like the subcontractor-clause that prevented him from hiring subs he wanted to award to.
The instance I cited in the prior post ended up with 120 men and 12 million dollars in mechanical work being done at absolute top quality compared to what the non-union subs that froze me out were doing elsewhere in that market.
Do I love unions? Hell no.
I have had vehicles vandalized, death threats and faced illegal pickets and work stoppages with 150 pickets trying to improperly stop a concrete pour. My dad had a bomb blow up in his office entry fifty-two years ago as he was opening his office. I know the criminality and the marxist poison that flow throught the union central committees better than most here.
We just need to remember that not all people working in union jobs are tainted by it and american workers in general are our countrymen, deserving an honest individual appraisal.
IMO, it should not. Unemployment is temporary with no benefits. Can't say how a union member may think about it though.
It appears that the real offer was either to keep a job with a going concern or guarantee the loss of that job.
f anyone voted against this contract thinking that another manufacturer will come in and set up shop in a closed shop state like Wisconsin they are in for a rude awakening.
This is a sad moment for the town.
It seems to me, if one were to exercise even the smallest amount of charity in crediting the speaker for any sense, rather obvious the comment was intended as a anecdote, not an assessment.
Your answer makes no sense. You say workers are a local resource, I agree. You then go on to say a company cannot “use” them with impunity. What does that mean? You appear to be saying\ the co. cannot exist without the workers, true enough to a point but the workers have no jobs without the company(s). You can make the point workers can leave a company but then so can a company leave the workers as we are seeing here.
Until such time as we allow slavery in the workplace, i.e. a sort of indentured servitude, it is not possible for a company to “use a worker with impunity” as you put it.
I believe what is lost on many people is the reason for business. There is but ONE reason to start up a business, that is to make money. I never heard of an individual with money who decided to start a business just to employ the good people in the area. Sure the relationship between owner and worker are symbiotic but make no mistake the very seed that starts the business tree growing is the cash of the owner/investor. As the saying goes, a poor man never created a job.
The business owners today are governed by enough rules and regulations to make the Unions wholly unnecessary. They exist due to the laziness of workers and the greed of people who can use the lack of intelligence of the worker to hijack part of their check to line their own pockets. No one who has a decent work ethic needs to fear being fired unless economics dictates a workforce reduction. A business adds and sheds workers based on it’s need to survive and grow, it’s called the “market”.
Nobody should ever be guaranteed a job. When that happens we wind up getting what the automobile companies got and we see what happened to them.
I can tell you stories about the union strike around here.....they lived like kings and many worked second jobs while they collected....
hubby's union cowtowed to the stinking company by taking away huge benefits and vacation from younger members, all the while ensuring that the older ones got $400 extra a month along with their retirement to retire early..they got their medical and got to cash in all their sick time and vacation time...meanwhile, the younger employees lost tons of vacation and had pay freezes...all in all..it was a $900 a month turnaround.....that is not right nor fair...
so since that time, I have realized that is all about income redistribution.....take from one person and give to another...just like SS...make the younger and middle age people pay more, work longer, and get less....
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