regarding the actions of Northwest’s Flight Attendents (sp.).
Statement Link:
Let’s see…My airline competes with your airline…more or less (LCC-legacy differences aside). My airline is financially sound, and yours (like most) is struggling. If you don’t give into concessions that will save your airline mucho dinero, your airline might suffer the same fate as, say Eastern Airlines, and my airline could gain a larger share of the marketplace by default (literally) on your part. You decide to refuse those concessions… Possible consequences:
-
Your airline goes bye-bye.
- **My **airline realizes that if/when things go bad, insulting the FA union will only expedite our demise, so our union gains strength without any labor dispute on our part. .
Conclusion: Way to go!! We’re with you (in spirit, not $$) all the way!!
Seriously, though, those are some pretty raw concessions that NWA is asking for.
Transport Workers Union is about the most worthless union I have ever worked with. They do nothing for the comman worker.
That goes with my feelings that, for the most part, unions are worthless. They have outlived their purpose and promote lazyness!
I worked for Budweiser here in Tulsa (drank my fair share, too) which is no where near being union. Paid great wages, treated all of the employees VERY well. We had a new warehouse manager come in from a corporate distributer that was union in NM. Talk about lazy! He griped about having to get on a forklift to unload a truck, take weekly inventory, which took all of an hour to do, and was mad at the VP because he couldn’t smoke where he wanted to. The one thing I distictly remember him saying was “Man, I miss my union. I didn’t have to do crap and got paid for it.”
Example #2. AA has a maint. facility at TUL. When I worked at Sears, I know a lot of them got portable DVD players because they said theu had so little to do, they could sit there and get paid to watch them because of the union and that AA really couldn’t do anything to them.
Pathetic…
Unions don’t give a rat’s ass about the employer - or the employee, for that matter. All they care is that they get members so the union leaders can have* outlandish salaries and perks.
See unionfacts.com/ for some eye opening facts on unions. Use the drop down box in the “for union members” section to find out how much the top brass of ALPA make.
*Was going to say “earn” but they don’t earn their salaries.
I worked for my father-in-law’s plumbing company for 5 years, and we could always tell when (on commercial jobs) the other trades were union labor, because they were ALWAYS on break, and on the RARE occasion that we actually saw them working, they were in no hurry whatsoever.
Also, we did some commercial work up in a union-heavy part of Cleveland, and we found “mysterious” cuts and holes in our pipes as we were setting the fixtures (as in, when construction is practically complete). We spent 3 days locating them, then cutting drywall, chipping up concrete, and repairing our holes. We got backcharged a buttload by the drywallers for repairing the holes we cut as well. 