Conservative Yankee: THANK YOU for the links!!!!!!!  I have been looking for that kind of (sensibly researched) information for a very long time.

Perhaps you don’t understand the great disparity of corporation renumeration for CEO’s compared to the lowest employee on the company’s ladder.

  Perhaps you still have your head in the sand

  The current administration, of what once was a great country, will go down in history as the most corrupt. Making the Roman empire look like a girl scout troop in comparison

Rather than “obsolete” as Mr Giacobbe states; Unions are due for a rebirth without all the corrupting influences which made them ineffective.

The Chicken processing business would be a fine place to begin that rebirth. Some workers (mostly African American females) come to work wearing “Depends” because there is a four hour run with no bathroom break.

The cutting floor is covered with blood, no protective clothing is provided, and injuries often (if reported) result in a discharge of the injured worker.

http://watchdog.gainesville.com/default.asp?item=784722

Itinerant farm workers are also abused in their work place. They work on land drenched in pesticide, they often have their children in the fields with them many of the laws intended to protect workers are “waived” for agricultural workers. Their rate of cancer is 50 percent above that of the general population.

http://www.splcenter.org/news/item.jsp?aid=308

http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pmed.0030448&ct=1

Here in Maine woods crews and people imported to work in the “fish farms” are treated so poorly that local churches have launched a drive to get them clothing and medical care. Maybe a decent union could get the companies to issue them a pair of gloves for working outside in January… (the average January temperature in my part of Maine is -0-.

In california, of all places, what’s the intention here?: first, give them what they want(wage increases up to 19% to keep up with hiring and detention). Then later, steathly, abolish the traditional union practices such as union reps, and replaced them with resolution center(the Corporate model). The answer for this: the members are all happy.

I seriously doubt those workers that rightly sacrificed their lives did so such that their comrades in 2008 can have the choice of 3 lunch menus, can be guaranteed a rotating slot in the parking space closest to the plant entrance, can have cable TV in the union’s lounge, can have a covered, climate-controlled outbuilding for smokers, and other highly-critical benefits that are CLEARLY tied to fundamental human rights in the workplace.

I see.  So management folks are the only ones deserving of these perks?  I don’t think so.  Once again, I have to say that your beef with these working conditions should have been taken up with the management of the company who agreed to these terms and conditions in negotiations.  You seem to have no experience in union/management contract negotiations or else you would know this plain, simple fact. 

No, the workplace things that were paid in blood include the right to organize unions, the 8-hour workday, minimum wage, workplace safety issues and child labor laws. If management folks (you know, the multi-millionaires who run the Fortune 50 companies you keep bringing up) agree to give the workers extra perks such as cable tv (which was most certainly already in the management offices), a covered, climate controlled outbuilding for smokers (do you believe that the workers don’t deserve a roof nor heat?) or one parking spot close to the plan entrance (I guess you feel management deserves all of the parking spots closest to the building) then I salute them for respecting their workers in this fashion. 

It’s a good think companies such as Wal-Mart don’t have to put up with such onerous things like providing cable television, menu choices for lunch, covered lounge areas or reserving a single parking spot.  It would probably cause the collapse of that company! 
Your ad-hominem attacks and insults, along with your weak examples of union largess, hardly prove your point that unions are causing their own demise.  To me they just prove you an anti-union person who thinks that these organizations are an impediment. 

Oh, and if you think you are wasting your time with this then don’t reply.  Or keep replying in Italian so you can keep insulting folks with vulgarities.  I’m sure that makes you feel vastly superior.

A management consultant…that says it all.  Union busting has become really big business in this country since Reagan busted the Air Traffic Controllers.  It is your business to denigrate workers and union contracts and to sell the “safe and effective workplace culture” which translate in reality to union free enviroment.  Was your “extensive experience” at Walmart?  ...there is a company that will do anything to avoid unionization…anything.
You are right about one thing.  In the days of the Ludlow massacre, the bosses were up front and ruthless in thier violence and they lost public support.  Now they hire high priced union busters and call them consultants…but the ruthlessness is still there.  The abuses are still there too.  The US has the worst Worker health and safety record of any industrialized country…and employers routinely cook the books keeping those records.  The laws and agencies at the state and federal level to protect people against the abuse of employers are only as good as the enforcement…and that is non existant since the 1980s. 
I don’t know that I believe the examples of union rules you have found so objectionable, but do I need to remind you that union contracts are not unilateral agreements?  The employers have to agree to these rules too and there is always give and take in collective bargaining.
Im a retired labor leader.  I have seen the declining working conditions, along with good union jobs erode for these last 3 decades.  The future of our children and grandchildren as well as USA is not good and I blame the greed and corruptions I have witnessed personally in the corporate world and the high priced management consultants who put a happy face on the whole sorry mess.
We need real labor law reform to create a level playing field.  We are at least 60 years behind the rest of the industrialized world in recognition of workers rights.  This is not an isolated issue.  It was labor that advanced the concept of public education.  It is the Labor Parties that demand universal healthcare in more civilized countries than ours. Labor has a role and should have a voice in foreign policy too.  Every aspect of public policy is the interest of the Labor movement.
American Capitalism is a failure.  It has ignored the other half of the equation, Labor, to it’s detriment and ultimate demise.  It is just a matter of time now unless Labor raises it’s powerful fist again…..but I have little real hope of that at this point in our history.
The Bosses have won….and everyone will lose in the end….including the union busters.

And for each example you list about some nit-picking little detail that makes you so anti-union (Management not buying you lunch?  How terrible!) there are thousands of examples of unions benefitting both management and workers.  The workplace rules you mention had been paid by the blood of the workers and union organizers killed in the past by management militias or management-influenced public servants (army and police).  Those workplace rules were hard-fought.  Just because they are now laws doesn’t make unions obsolete.  Those rules still have to be enforced and there are management folks and government officials who cannot be trusted to enforce those rules. 
As for your complaint about not being able to press a button or your complaint about the work rules at your factory?  You should have realized that your bosses were the ones that negotiated the contract with the union in the first place and established those rules.  Your ire should have been directed at your bosses who agreed to those rules, not the workers who abided by them.  If there were workers who did hate the job and the company, it’s little wonder - your attitude towards them…

“sniveling, chronically-unhappy employees who so hated their company and management that you could qualify their behavior as workplace sabotage; and, unionized workforces that have so retreated into their glass-house union world that they absolutely refuse to share any accountability or blame for their company’s performance, despite them coming into work every day and fucking shit up.”

... tells me you did your fair share to poison the waters. 
You say in one section of your post

Unions are like the appendix…

…an obsolete and potentially dangerous organ that can kill you if it blows up.

, and then in another section of the same post you say

Look, I recognize the need long-ago for unions and the fundamental right to collective bargaining, and I would fight any attempt to completely disband unions or deny their access to a CBA.

.  You sure are confused.

I’ve often wondered why so many assholes congregate in absolutely beautiful areas.  New Hampshire, Maine, Idaho Florida, just chocked full of narcissistic idiots.

This morning Maine’s northern newspaper ran a story about one of our assistant attorney generals. It appears he has a predilection for cocaine and sex with small children.

Mr. Giacobbe is certainly entitled to his opinion. Maybe in his world managers and owners treat their employees with love and respect, and pay them a living wage.

I do hope that hell for scabs and union-busters is an eternity working in a chicken processing plant, preferably on the line.

Like the old Labor Song:
“...without our brain and muscle not a single wheel would turn….”

Imagine a nationwide general strike.  Imagine the power of workers united…..just imagine people who work for a wage demanding the real value of thier labor including dignity and respect…bread and roses.
The Labor movement will never completely be defeated….even the workers on the pyramids organized for better conditions and engaged in the first strike in recorded history.  The bosses always overreact to organized workers because they are afraid of the potential power of real class struggle.  Brutality crushed the miners at Ludlow but it didn’t kill the movement.  It is weakened and demoralized now, but it isn’t gone and never will be. There are more of us than there are of them….“greater than the might of armies magnified a thousand fold”.

I know it is difficult and dangerous, but I often wonder why workers are more not rising up against the injustices and persecutions that we continue to see around the country.  They did in the 30s and before the Wagner Act when unions were illegal in many parts of the country. Employers want slaves, even if they have to pay them wages. Money isnt really the issue…tho they will always say it is.  What they really dont want, and will fight with all thier strength to prevent, is workers rights in the workplace and Labor to have an effective voice on at the national and state level.  It is class warfare pure and simple, but american workers dont seem to recognize to what class they belong.

By Purple Girl, April 18 at 3:38 am

“I stayed - found my replacement, trained him and even continued to help by phone . These companies have failed to recognize their utter dependence of the Workers”

I understand that people do what they have to do, BUT your statement of service to this company is about the most anti-union position I have ever encountered.

Did you get paid when you “continued to help by phone”? Did you get paid additional for serving outside your defined duties by “training your replacement”? 

Of course “companies have failed to recognize their utter dependence of the Workers” How can they when they are being protected from this knowledge by workers with a misplaced sense of loyalty?