Unifor President – Oshawa GM plant closure to cost Durham more than 5,000 jobs – December 5, 2018,
I want to first make it abundantly clear that I believe that private sector unions have a right to exist, personally I’ve avoided working long term for industries with unions, however I do believe they have a right to exist because there are injuries that happen in workplaces that would otherwise go ignored had it not been for Unions. Personally I think the ability to barter and purchase insurance are far more effective ways to work with an employer rather than joining a union, however make no mistake about in regards to workers safety, unions do a pretty good job pointing out dangers that would otherwise remain ignored, if left to the average busy bodied employee.
With that established, my problem with joining unions is their pushes for higher financial regulations as well as regulations forcing employers to pay their employees more money. What’s now difficult for employees to understand is what used to happen with people’s pay scales when Unions didn’t exist in a workforce. For myself I personally preferred bartering with my employer over collective bargaining, because everybody knows, some employees are lazy, it is what it is and there lazy employees when included in collective bargaining cost companies billions of dollars as the Unions fight to protect these lazy employees.
Oshawa GM plant closure to cost Durham more than 5,000 jobs: union president – Global News
Lazy employees often make the most demands to unions, I remember being at my job, near the where the Oshawa GM plant was located and remember seeing unionized employees simply hanging around, doing nothing, intentionally working slower, banking up their 7.5 hours and leaving the workload on the rest of us. If you’ve never worked in a unionized environment, you’d probably say, well why doesn’t the boss just fire the unionized employee? Not, so fast, that’s basically what the union is there for, is to provide a buffer from the employer and the employee, unless the employer catches the union on camera breaking the rules, the supervisor manager can do nothing and don’t forget part of what makes a union a union is the additional often unnecessary additional training unionized employees receive.
Don’t forget when employees get trained, there’s a cost to do this, they need to get trained by professionals, so as the barrier to entry expands, the cost to run the business expands, which is great while the company is growing, but is disastrous when the company is no longer profitable. So what’s happened in the GM plant is not so much that they can’t build their autonomous or electric vehicles in Oshawa, it’s that the inflated costs associated with building those new vehicles would be too great. Again, while their software engineers create their new vehicles, they’ll have to pay people to design and teach the employees, this is not an easy transition, currently, electric car maker Tesla is not even profitable, It’s profitable only based on the government subsidies it receives for being a green company. Tesla’s current stock value is based on future earnings.
GM’s stock actually went up when investors learned that GM was going to layoff employees, why? Basically because of what I wrote about above. People may think that investors are evil people, but don’t forget that most pensions are based on profits made in the stock market. This is often the part of the story that Union presidents leave out to members when they’re making their pleas to the government or to the company they’re trying to extort.
You see Canada, you can’t get something for nothing, everything is barter, although we live in a fiat monetary system what keeps this monetary system afloat is assumed integrity of the currency. Meaning that the government approved money should have the same or similar characteristics as if we were bartering Gold, Silver, wheat, tobacco etc.. So, if GM continuously needs bailouts from the government and is unable to settle its systemic economic issues, the view of the people investing in GM will be that this companies value is going down and they’ll withdraw their investments, which of course for employers could prove worse than being laid off and could instead equate to GM going bankrupt. The last time GM got a bailout, there was an Occupy Wall Street protest which in turn lead to the United States hiring a Businessman in by the name of Donald Trump, to fix the problem.
So to those of you being told by your unions that this is an easy fix, I’m sorry you’re wrong, for every government action or intervention there’s a reaction by the people, Canada, via the politicians we employ have been picking winners and losers for a long time now and as you can see in Canada the cost of living has continuously gone up.
When the government gives money or picks winners and losers, what’s often not talked about are the unintended consequences, what about the private companies that went out of business because their tax bills were too high, imagine your a small business that had to sell or go face bankruptcy only to find out that the taxes you paid went to a GM bailout?
Why couldn’t the small business person get a bailout? What is it, is it because it’s too small? How did you know that small business person didn’t have aspirations to be big like GM one day? Depression and suicide rates have been going up in Ontario for decades when people have fewer options do people not tend to go insane. Have you ever met a person that spent 10+ years in jail? Aren’t most of them depressed once they come out, often committing crimes to get locked up again? When governments pick winners and losers there are unintended consequences, however, this is something that often goes overlooked by greedy people who are only interested in their own self-interests.
The GM closure is going to cost 5000 jobs, however what people are ignoring are all the businesses GM caused to close down, because they were their governments special child, the governments other children weren’t as important so they were regulated into oblivion for the special government child(GM) who finally decided that it might be time to move out of his parents basement and focus on software engineering. You know software engineering, an area where Canadian businesses are already having a hard time finding talent, which has led to outsourcing.
Sure we can blame GM for this, but maybe, just maybe we might want to consider looking at our own greed, because in Canada we’ve artificially raised the cost of labor at the expense of lowering the loonie, which of course has lead to our most skilled tradespeople opting not to work in or for Canadians. Unintended consequences of greed, they’re showing up more and more now and it looks like the Unions don’t have an answer for it. People accuse the rich of being greedy, but people rarely if ever make internal inquisitions into their own characters, their own greeds.
Was the workers Union I joined a little bit too greedy? Being that Mexico had a lower valued currency was it was for Canada to follow suit? was it even wise for Canada to sign onto NAFTA, I do remember UNIFOR president Jerry Dias involved in what is now called USMCA trade talks with current Prime minister Justin Trudeau, one would have thought that UNIFOR would have been for the ripping up of multilateral trade deals and opting for a bilateral trade deal instead? Nope, it appears that Jerry Dias’s greed helped put the nail in the coffin. It’s interesting how things happen sometimes
Interesting times ahead…
