http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/10/education/10education.html
Basically, unions have made it so difficult to fire or discipline teachers that the management resorts to a "reassignment center" where teachers while away months or even years. Very quickly, education professionals are reduced to fighting over the best chairs, just like jail.
I'm not sure what's worse. The "rubber room" is someplace you go involuntarily. The UAW created the Job Bank voluntarily.
I don't know if we can blame unions, exactly. Without them, management would have overwhelming power. But we need something else too -- a way of resolving differences that doesn't incent management or union leaders to plunder the organization.
Hint: "dehumanizing" was not the word you were looking for, there.
Curious that you didn't point to the billions of dollars "extracted" on salaries, benefits, and golden parachutes for executives who have mismanaged that industry into ruin over decades.
And here's another hint: "free market" effects and "competition" take a toll on real live human beings. It's not some abstract little academic and mathematical simulation of "efficiency". When businesses screw up, people suffer. Workers who may not have the savings and golden parachutes and the perks and a ton of resources to fall back on have to somehow continue to put food on the table, pay mortgages, and buy braces for their kids teeth.
The efficiency and good work of American labor has never been in doubt. The same cannot be said for the intelligence and ethics of business owners.
Dehumanizing is exactly the word I meant. The lure of safe income was used to render incapable and irrelevant a great many human beings. Now they are scarcely fit for work. What now?
"I felt like I was useless -- like I was put out to pasture," he said. "It's just like how they treated the veterans. During the war, we were heroes. When we came back ..."
We are all party to stupid choices that these industrial behemoths have made. But laying blame won't solve all the problems. We need to specifically confront and dismantle the practices, organizations, and mindsets that lead us into this mess.
Board positions!
Not all management is necessarily clueless and incompetent. Alan Mulally was a brilliant engineer and manager at Boeing ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Mulally ). He was recruited to come in and essentially fix Ford. He doesn't need to work. He is already a multimillionaire from working at Boeing. The reason management is well paid is because you need a way to motivate the very small group of managers that are qualified for the job. If you are worth millions - why would you ever take a job that pays one dollar a year and makes the entire world hate you? Well because if they do pull this off - the stock will recover and everyone will make a lot of money. And management could be credited with saving the industry. I know this is hard to imagine but every executive manager I have known worries about their employees and how their decisions effect the community and world they live in.
I've known a number of engineers who have been laid off, including myself and it almost always comes out as a huge improvement to the individual. Anytime you leave a failing company and enter a company which is hiring it's likely to be a big big improvement.
The real question, assuming it's unavoidable with a democratic congress and president incoming, is how do we make sure the US tax payer doesn't get screwed. We shouldn't be giving ANYTHING away. I agree with you there.
I've worked for a number of big businesses and know some upper management personally. I've also worked two union jobs and come from a town that was/is mostly union labor. I can tell you that the unions of today that I saw are corrupt. Management is rarely corrupt - but since managers have greater influence it gets far more media attention. I don't know and can't think of the last time I've heard anyone that I respect say anything positive about unions. This is coming from someone who lived within 20 miles of a Chrysler plant for the majority of my life. The responsibility to fix the current situation lies with management. The blame lies with unions and the management of the past.
The efficiency and good work of American labor has never been in doubt.
Unfortunately this is in doubt. Unions do not recognize efficiency or good work. I agree most employers recognize this, but Unions prevent it. Ask any above average teacher, police officer or UPS employee.
(And for the record - yes this is entirely my opinion - I don't claim otherwise. My conclusions are my own and at best anecdotal++, but none the less they are still my conclusions)
Wrong. There is not a "very small group" of people who are qualified to be CEOs at F-500 companies. There is a very small group of people who have enough connections to finagle their way into an F-500 CEO position, and that is why these positions pay so well. "CEO talent" is not some rare natural gift that very people have. The percentage of people who have the necessary talents isn't huge, but it's on the 1-10% order of magnitude, and there are plenty of capable people-- small-business CEOs, public-sector executives-- who would do a stellar job of it, given the opportunity. By and large, those people are not pulling down million-dollar salaries.
If this was true, don't you think some business somewhere would have figured it out? It' naive to think businesses and their stock holders don't do what's in their best interest.
As for small business owners - I know a few that pull down million-dollar a year profit. I think small businesses are often more profitable for the individual than being an executive at a big business. I think being an owner of a successful small business is infinitely more desirable than an executive manager at a large company from a personal perspective. I think it's comparing apples and oranges.
"CEO talent" is not some rare natural gift that very people have.
I markedly disagree. It's difficult job. Emotionally, physically, mentally. As the size of the company increases so does the demand on your time. Every moment of your time is taken up and you almost exclusively deal with difficult problems and marginal decisions. Likely these problems and decisions will require broad understanding of many technologies and meta knowledge about unions and politics. When making most of these decisions you will know partial information (which is in contrast to hacking where you likely can know all information available and understand it completely in many cases). On top of this you are setting the focus for the company both internally and externally and are responsible for all P & L goals set for the market. You are telling me 1-10% of capable people can do that? Or would want to do that for less than a million dollars a year? I haven't even gotten around to family, friends, social events, volunteering, vacation, etc. It's not like a moment of time passes where you aren't the CEO of a large company.
The board sets the CEO salary-- not the mom-and-pop value investors, and not the traders who are shareholders one hour and short the company the next. Who's on the board? The CEO's friends, many of whom are CEOs in other companies, in which the aforesaid CEO a board member. So, invariably, they vote up each others' compensation. They get away with this because, although the CEO salaries don't need to be that high, it's not especially relevant to the company's success or failure whether it pays the CEO $500k or $5M per year. From a large company's perspective, that's chump change.
It's difficult job. Emotionally, physically, mentally.
Sure it is. So are a lot of jobs.
When making most of these decisions you will know partial information (which is in contrast to hacking where you likely can know all information available and understand it completely in many cases).
If you're doing anything interesting in technology, partial information is a permanent state. APIs and languages change, new libraries are built, and it's impossible to keep an intimate knowledge of everything that might be useful to the next project.
You are telling me 1-10% of capable people can do that? Or would want to do that for less than a million dollars a year.
Yes, and yes.
Wrong and wrong. If it's so easy then tell me when you are CEO of a fortune 500.
No more excuses. You say just about anyone can do it, so do it.
... that's what I thought.
I said that at least 1% of the population has the capacity to do the job. I didn't say that I'm in that 1-10%-- although I probably am-- and I didn't say that I have the social connections necessary to get a F-500 CEO position-- I don't.
There's a difference between being able to do a job and being able to get the job. I will agree with you so far as that far fewer than 1% of the population can get a F-500 CEO position, but that's not because they lack the necessary competence.
Yes, good for them -- while it lasted. But since they, like the executives, chose short-term comfort rather than enduring competitiveness, the profits they split with those executives are long gone.
Both the auto executives and auto laborers now need to find other gainful employment, like the rest of us. Maybe some will find work in a reorganized domestic auto industry -- but we don't owe them that, and we shouldn't shut our eyes to how they both reached this reckoning.
The "steal all the lifeboats" mentality shown by most of the dogshit passing for corporate executives is much worse than any "job bank", of course.