WASH: Taft-Hartley Act. (ORDERED)

Bush decided to order the Justice Department to seek the injunction after board of inquiry hand-picked by the White House reported that the two-week-old labor standoff has no chance of ending soon, said two administration officials who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The board's brief report does not go into detail about the economic and national security impact of the shutdown, but it does hold out little hope for a resolution of the conflict, said one of the sources.

...But to force someone to work who apparently does not WANT to work is not the responsibility or right of the national government....

The lazy union workers in question can't be forced to return to work. They can be ordered to cease a srike/lockout and resume the status quo. If they refuse to return to work, they can then be dismissed for absence.

The lazy union workers choice is to bitch, bitch, bitch and return to the job. It is wise to remember that they get paid for showing up even if they don't have it in their hearts to work.

If the workers don't want to take it off the ship, then I would suggest to allowing the private companies find someone who does want to and break the strike. But to force someone to work who apparently does not WANT to work is not the responsibility or right of the national government.

I could be wrong .. but I'm thinking it was that easy .. they would have fired a lot of workers long ago

Steve, you strike me as a good man, someone I could sit and have a beer with and enjoy a good talk. So here is my position in a nutshell, maybe you'll have something to respond with.

I used to be about as anti-union as it is possible to be. After seeing a whole lot of dirty deals done by "management" types over the years, my opinion is changing. I'm not even referring to the well known scandles we all know about, like Enron and Tyco and Global Crossing, I'm talking about things that I saw with my own eyes, knives stuck very deeply into my own back.

No pity for me, I've done very well thank you. I've had my own business and been independant for many years now. But after seeing what I've seen in my own life, and after seeing what we all have seen with these recent scandals, I'm changing my way of thinking.

I find myself thinking that maybe a totally free market isn't such a good thing after all. I find myself thinking that maybe unions aren't such a bad thing. After seeing the debacle of electricity "deregulation" in California I find myself thinking that maybe some things really are better off being in the public sector.

So, what do you think?

...since virtually all of the commerce that takes place ata dock is with a foreign nation...

Not even close to being true.

The media can fly a helicopter over the ocean and show ships waiting to be unloaded but they can't get photos of loaded containers in Phoenix or Salt Lake held up because there is no room in the port for storing all the outbound cargo containers. Inland export shippers rely on the ports of coastal states to load their cargo on the vessels.

There will be no mention of lost wages in Arizona or Missouri resulting from production stoppage in inland states. The international commerce is always interstate commerce.

I usually take a VERY dim view on unions, seeing what they have done to the infamous "Rust Belt" (where I am). While there may well be a place for unions, given the unique leverages that they have over companies (can't discipline their members, can't do anything in case of a slowdown, can't permanently get rid of them even after a frivilous strike), we would be better off without them than with them.

Regarding the Kalifornia power crunch, the method of "semi-'deregulation'" that they used is what caused the problem, not the fact that things were somewhat deregulated. Nobody could own more than 2 pieces of the 3-piece power structure (generation, transmission and local delivery), the companies still in transmission/delivery couldn't sign contracts that were competitive, the generators essentially couldn't build new plants unless they were the highly-inefficient "renewable" power plants, and EVERYONE had to deal with a government agency to keep the power grid balanced (the ISO has had serious troubles keeping it balanced related to the fact that it is a government agency; latest in a series of threads here).

One more thing; the retail cost was still regulated. This is bad for 2 reasons. First, any incentive to conserve when supplies were tight (and wholesale prices went up) went out the window because as long as the juice flowed, there was no pain felt. Second, with the squeeze in "profits" (which were also regulated to a maximum but not a minimum), potential projects to increase capacity were discarded due to lack of cash.

No, to an extent, blue-collar union workers have as well. It simply comes down to how much is a worker worth to an employer. If workers here demand wages that would cause the final product a company produces to be so high that people will not buy it, then the company goes bankrupt.

"These portfolio-patriots are hypocrits and undermine our domestic economic stability and national security."

The same could be said about folks who resist efforts by companies to IMPROVE their productivity (making more goods at the same price, or making the same amount of goods at a lower price). Look at this beef with the longshoremen as an example. The port management companies want to use technology to improve the tracking of the stuff going in and out (bar code scanners).

A big problem is the fact that our companies are taxzed and regulated, but another big problem is the fact that a labor union can literally stop efforts to improve productivity in their tracks, and cripple a business by forcing it to use 1930s techniques when competitors are using 21st century techniques.

The people running a corporation have a responsibility to the folks who invested money in that corporation (the shareholders or "portfolio patriots" you call hypocrites) to protect their investment, and preferably, to make a profit so that there is a RETURN on that investment.

What you seem to want is, in my opinion, a form of socialism where labor is protected from the adverse consequences of defending outdated techniques at overpriced wages in the name of "job security". I'm not willing to go for that.

We need to eliminate corporate taxes (which are only passed on to the consumer, along with the salaries for the tax lawyers and accountants used to minimize the tax burden), we need to eliminate the burdensome regulations that set absurd standards that imposts costs that far exceed the benefits of the regulations, and we need to allow companies to replace union labor with people who would be willing to do the job at the price the company is willing to pay.

The answer is not protective tariffs. The answer is to get government and the labor unions out of the way.

"I usually take a VERY dim view on unions, seeing what they have done to the infamous "Rust Belt" (where I am)."

Funny how that works. I feel the exact same way about management, seeing as what they did to Silicon Valley with their H1-b workers. If you havn't been there, Silicon Valley is pretty much like Hong Kong nowadays, unless you are in the area that is pretty much like India or Mexico. The moral of the story is that we all fight "the last war", or those wounds that sting most recently are the ones we are most prompt to attend to.

Re California deregulation, no argument there save one. When I used to live there, I went out of my way to buy my house in Santa Clara. Why? Because the city of Santa Clara has a municipal utility! My power supplied from there was more reliable than the power that came from PG&E, and cost about %30 less. When everybody else was watching their power bills skyrocket, ours stayed reasonable. The utility had signed some long term contracts that kept them on a even keel. Although I do agree that their recent "deregulation" (note the quotes) was a disaster from the word go, neither public or private, badly conceived and executed.

Now, if you want to talk about government functions that should be privatized, say no more! Education is number one on my list! There is a government institution that very much needs to be defunded and disbanded. Let communities and individual citizens decide how they want to educate their children.

Electricity, however, is one of those private things that I'm wondering if maybe it wouldn't be better off in public hands.

Eva,

Everyone puts their own economy above the national economy. Whatever you do, it would be better for us all if you did it for half price.

Domestic terrorists? Honestly, is that what you think? Disagree with the gov't and you are a terrorist? Given that we hold terrorists without trial and deny them the Bill of Rights, are you saying that if you agree with the gov't you are off to XRAY?

Be careful what you wish for.

Three Union guys go into a town noted for it's prostitution, and go a house of ill-repute. They ask the proprietor if the girls are union members. When the owner says no, they leave. They go to the next house on the strip and get the same answer. This is repeated several more times until they reach this run-down shack on the edge of town. The owner says all of his girls are card-carrying union members. "Great!" says one of the union guys, "I'll take that young one over there." "No can do", says the owner, "You get the seventy year old woman over there; she has seniority."

No, the Longshoreman Union is disagreeing with the whole country. No one supports their demands or their exorbitant salaries. They are risking destroying the whole economy by their selfish demands that the industry not move into the new millenium and computerize.

I will say it again, the Longshormen are domestic terrorists and Tom Daschle has the power to stop this terrorism, but he would rather sit on his hands and keep the union vote in the Democrat lockbox.

Ones' experiences do tend to color one's judgement. I haven't been anywhere near Silicon Valley (a bit too far from the land of cheese and beer), but I can see that point as well (not that a union would have been able to quash that aspect without quashing the rest of the Valley).

Regarding muni utilities, IIRC, the California ones were exempt from having to go to day-to-day contracts. That gave Santa Clara/LA/et al an unfair advantage vis-a-vis PG&E/SoCalEd/et al. That's not to say that PG&E and SoCalEd didn't royally <expletive deleted> up; just that the munis were set up to survive no matter what.

As for the price differences, I can't speak to the specifics, but a good part had to be because Santa Clara didn't have to go into the speculative market. Other contributing factors probably were the fact that Santa Clara didn't have to make a profit, and they could tap into tax revenues to keep things artificially low (I'll say again, I don't know that either or both happened, just that I strongly suspect the first, with the second having at least a shot of being true).

FWIW, outside of interstate transmission, electricity is still regulated here in Wisconsin (though outside of a couple of small muni utilities, it's private). Because there was a serious disincentive to build until we were looking at brownouts, nobody built. We managed to survive that summer, and the utilities found just enough power to get by for the next few years. Of course, their plans to add capacity are languishing before the government, but at least they are trying to boost capacity.

They are pricing labor out of the market of American businesses

Yeah, like the $120K for an uneducated longshoreman (who's afraid of advanced technology, like, uh, barcodes).

You've put your finger on the crux of the immigration problem too. American labor has already priced itself out of the market, which is why so many industries that cannot move, like agriculture, depend on illegals to stay afloat. In my state, a minimum wage hamburger-turner at McDonalds makes almost $8 an hour. You can get high-technology, skilled, workers in Thailand or China, people who make silicon chips, program software, construct the mouse and keyboard I'm typing with right now, for well under $1 an hour (and in some cases for under a dollar a day).

Do the math.

This action is purely political, there are strikes sprouting up all over the country and I'll tell you why. The union bosses, who I despise, are in an unholy alliance with the democrat party and this is an effort to shift the debate from terrorism to the economy, nothing more nothing less.

Longshoremen making an average 114k per year, with another 40k in benefits and a guranteed 50k in pension is reminiscent of the 60k per year riveter 30 years ago that almost killed the American auto industry.

The longshoremen should be thankful to be amongst the winners in the luck of the draw, not pulling this sh$t during this time.

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