I decided to make a longer post about labor management after a student comment on my previous post. I compared strikes to war. The commecnt was that I was a bit overboard, really?
Read about the Battle of the Overpass on how Ford 'security guards' treated Union Organizers.
Read how many people including women and children were killed in early efforts to organize the
Apparently students are not aware that early efforts were indeed a matter of life and death. Such incidents are still prominent on union web sites. Memories die hard, just like those early strikers.
One recalls that our consitution forbids a monarchy of any kind in the USA. If you think about it, being a subject of a King or Queen was indeed forced servictude. Consider the plight of those affected in the movie Braveheart. This is why William Wallace led a revolt by the Scotch against the King at that time, 800 yeras ago.
Six hundred years later, the Scotch were still not doing much better. Ken Follett details their plight in his historical novel A Place Called Freedom. It may surprise you to learn that the Scotch were in servitude working in mines in England and hijacked on slave ships to do the same thing here. This is a shocking story of brutality of man to man.
charles Dickens describes the horrors of being born into a 'workhouse' in Oliver Twist.
And so the pendulum has swung the other way in a short time from a historic standpoint. But reading of past horors will quickly make one glad to have been born here and now.
Other important events were not only the creation of the National Labor Relations Board and the Taft Hartley Act regarding union organizaing.
Now the gains of unions are being challenged by the right to work laws of non union shop states like Alabama and Mississippi. Alabama has snagged the Hyundai and the new Airbus plants. The entire auto industry has moved south out of union shop states, places where workers must join a union to work. This is why Ohio and Michigan are battleground states in this election. The unions would like to turn the clock back to 1965 when they ruled the auto manufacturers. but as Nissan honda, toyota have gained power and GM Ford Chrysler have lost market share, the fortunes of the UAW have sunk also.
Actually this is a reflection of what the unions wanted, more consideration of the workers. That modern companies have recognized this necessityis actually a triumph but a biter one as companies will no longer readily locate in michigan.
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