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Chairman-Mao said:
mrstickball said:
Chairman-Mao said:
The Ghost of RubangB said:

Chairman-Mao said:
If there weren't so many social programs that make it too easy for people then we'd be harder workers.

Oh also if there weren't unions workers would work harder.

Are you kidding me?  If it weren't for unions we'd still be putting 12 year olds in factories and chaining them to the machines for 14 hour work days 6 days a week.  The first unions were hereoes who fought for worker's rights... TO THE DEATH.  Factory owners shot them all the time.  If you're working less than 80 hours a week, you have unions to thank.


Unions suck ass dude. They make it near impossible to fire employees even if they are the laziest not hard working idiots on the planet, and they can go on strike whenever they feel they need a raise. Unions are a nightmare for business owners.

Both are correct, though.

Unions were initially great causes - worker conditions were atrocious in mines and gas fields during the early part of the 1900's. Unions really helped them out.

However, as unions grew and became more commonplace, they began to wield too much power, which has caused many problems in the past few decades.

So its a mixed blessing. Unions have done a lot of good, but a lot of bad too.

Well put.

I totally agree initially they were needed to protect workers; but nowadays, as stickball said, they are just too powerful and they abuse their powers. Eg. Their ability to go on strike whenever they want. I don't know if it was Ontario-wide or just in my City but from Summer 2009 to A month or two ago the people who do the driving tests (so people can get drivers licenses) went on strike and it inconvenienced tons of people. And of course they wanted pay increase and more time off.

Hmm... talking about strikes, in my country austria, the last strike we had was a one day teachers strike. Okay, we don't strike often over here (see our statistic), but we have a good working union and so called "Sozialpartner", supporting each side, industry and workers, to balance out the unions and the bigger companies powers.