This is what happens when you have a corporation executive living in your neighborhood. In this case, a Verizon VP has his house picketed by union thugs at the expense of all his neighbors. (Hat tip Gateway Pundit)
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2011/08/striking-union-thugs-outside-verizon-execs-home-were-here-to-fight-video/
Note to IBEW 1827: I got your contract right here. If I am Verizon, I say to these thugs, "You're fired." If I'm a neighbor, I call the cops and file a complaint for disturbing the peace.
No peace-no job.
The Left loves mob rule. You Democrats should be proud. I liked the comments after the article as well. Several of them were right on: Where were the police? and Every single one of them that can be identified in this video should be fired immediately as well as the union officials who arranged and facilitated this outrage. There are plenty of people who would love those jobs and would act like decent human beings .
ReplyDeleteIs it any wonder that companies want to locate in Right to Work states. Unions may have been valuable at one time but now they are a cancer in the society.
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And if you storm my house the 22 will take care of the problem.
ReplyDeleteIf I'm a neighbor, I provide donuts and lemonade to the brave men and women on the picket line.
ReplyDeleteHonestly, I have mixed feelings about picketing private residences. I did that once, many years ago, at the luxury apartment building which included among its residents the owner of a supermarket chain called Liberals. Seriously, that was the name of the company.
On the one hand, these tyrants tend to step away from the battle lines, leaving the real confrontation to lesser acolytes, and its not a bad thing to bring the battle to their door step. On the other hand, I have some sympathy for the notion that people should be able to leave their work at the office and enjoy peace and quiet at home.
It is a tactic to be used sparingly. For Verizon, as an entity, I have no sympathy at all.
Siarlys,
ReplyDeleteBrave? What's brave about being in a mob? Bravery is for those who cross a a picket line.
The Union blinked:
ReplyDeleteNational Interest
Verizon Workers Going Back to Work, Without Deal
I guess the language, the rhetoric, the violence backfired against them.
There is nothing courageous about crossing a picket line. As Jack London said so well:
ReplyDelete“After God had finished the rattlesnake, the toad, the vampire, He had some awful substance left with which He made a scab.
A scab is a two-legged animal with a cork-screw soul, a water-logged brain, a combination backbone of jelly and glue. Where others have hearts, he carries a tumor of rotten principles.
When a scab comes down the street, men turn their backs and angels weep in heaven, and the Devil shuts the gates of Hell to keep him out.
No man has a right to scab so long as there is a pool of water to drown his carcass in, or a rope long enough to hang his body with. Judas Iscariot was a gentleman compared with a scab. For betraying his master, he had character enough to hang himself. A scab has not.
Esau sold his birthright for a mess of pottage. Judas Iscariot sold his Savior for thirty pieces of silver. Benedict Arnold sold his country for a promise of a commission in the British Army. The modern strikebreaker sells his birthright, his country, his wife, his children and his fellow men for an unfulfilled promise from his employer, trust or corporation.
Esau was a traitor to himself: Judas Iscariot was a traitor to his God; Benedict Arnold was a traitor to his country; a strikebreaker is a traitor to his God, his country, his wife, his family and his class.”
Findalis: the union didn't have much muscle to start with, for all the caterwauling by the right to work for less and less and less crowd. That's the problem. Walter Reuther, of blessed memory, once said "Power is when the might General Motors Corp. wants to say no, and the United Auto Workers can force them to say yes." Today, General Motors doesn't have much to say yes or no about, as they did fifty years ago, and therefore, the UAW can't get much out of them. But for those who are making money, what is needed is the power of their employees to make them say yes when they want to say no.
P.S. Why would anyone want to storm your house? And why don't you have something more powerful than a .22?
Siarlys,
ReplyDeleteIt is that attitude that explains why scabs have their tires slashed or worse.
I have never belonged to a union and I never will. I have never taken a job left by a striking worker, but a company has every right to hire replacement workers when someone walks off the job.
I also have no problem crossing a picket line to shop where I please.
It was the United Auto Workers, along with the government with their CAFE standards, that brought down GM, which was once a great company. Once anyone starts demanding more than their economic value for their services and commits mayhem like these Verison thugs to get their demands and the company agrees, then it is on the road to ruin and bankruptcy.
ReplyDeleteI'm thrilled that the Verison union workers lost in their attempt to bully Verison into a contract. I hope Verison proceeds to fire the union thugs. They would be like the parasite that eventually kills the host.
I once ran a company that had a plant in West Virginia. It merely constructed finished pieces from parts shipped to them from other locations. Once they started talking about forming a union, I closed the plant down and moved that operation to Haiti. I had P & L responsibility and didn't want the aggravation. They wanted more money and so did I. How is it that their desires were more honorable than mine? They lost about 100 jobs in West Virginia and 3 of the employees went to Haiti to be supervisors at the new plant. I doubt if they are making any more threats to management there anymore.
When I need them more than they need me, then things change but until that time, there are economic facts of life to learn. They have to be valuable and as close to indispensable as they can be to the employer to make demands, much less assault their employers at their homes(!). If they were, in fact, valuable and indispensable, there would not be a contract problem.
It is simple supply and demand. Once they employ those kinds of tactics, they are not likely to be viewed as valuable employees who help produce a product, supply a service, or make a profit for the owners, who, by the way, put up the money on the chance, the chance, that a profit could be made. They didn't supply the capital just so 100 or so people could have a job in West Virginia. Maybe that is a noble endeavor in some Obama type Left Wing wet dream, but that is not how the way the world works.
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I could refer to scabs having their tires slashed as "collateral damage" with at least as much justification as any military PR officer ever used the phrase, probably more. If you have no problem crossing a picket line, a man who has put everything on the line to win a better life for his family (or a woman) will bear you considerably justified bitterness.
ReplyDeleteMiggie, its capitalists like you that give socialism a good name. Those hundred workers you dumped should have had 51% control of the decision, and you wouldn't have moved the operation anywhere. Supply and demand are not the ONLY factor, although in any economy, including a hunter-gatherer one, they are ONE factor. The fact that they can be the PRIMARY factor rests on a foundation of laws that prioritizes them, not on some objective condition written into the fabric of the universe by the Creator.
Maybe there was a slight increase in anti-Semitism in West Virginia when you left too. It is too bad that Jews in general have to take the rap for the likes of you, but you sure exemplify the stereotype. (Plenty of gentiles do also, including that hypocritical Baptist Sunday school teacher, John D. Rockefeller.)
Collateral damage is not intentioanlly directed toward anyone other than the target. Slashing someone's tires is deliberate targeting.
ReplyDeleteYour theory sounds like it came out of Das Kapital (Just joking. I never read it.)
I did read Das Kapital, and it says nothing about trade union tactics. It is a heavy tome of statistical analysis, relying on material at the British Imperial Library. I have also heard that the data was worthless, because British civil servants didn't actually count anything, they just filled in numbers on the forms, picking them at random like some of the contrived body counts from Vietnam.
ReplyDeleteTaking someone's job when they are on strike is an act of war. The most openly violent wars were fought without the slightest familiarity with Marxism, by homegrown American coal miners, and the companies hired gun thugs first. But, most of the guys did exercise their second amendment rights. This stuff today is tame, which is a good thing, but its still a war.
Siarlys makes uneducated, ignorant assumptions and proceeds to make false proclamations. You would think that ignorance alone would preclude him from expounding on broader claims.
ReplyDeleteFirst of all 51% of the workers there were incapable and incompetent to any decisions beyond their assembly work. They did not put up any of the money or take any risk in creating the enterprise. They were paid for their work, which is what they contributed. (Unlike the UAW that now owns some 51% of GM because the bondholders were cheated out of their investment... thank you Mr. Obama. Let's see the next time you get an investment from me.)
I did not live in West Virginia. It was one of the plants the company I worked for owned. The ONLY people the workers knew were their supervisors and foreman. They got nice jobs in Haiti so perhaps the workers' anger would have been directed at whatever religion the supervisors had. Maybe some of them more appropriately blamed the union agitators for the loss of their jobs.
In any event, the episode fits neatly into your "Jewish capitalists" cause anti-Semitism theory even though you know none of the facts. On the other end of the spectrum, according to Hitler, "Jewish communists" cause anti-Semitism. Whatever works for you.
One thing that has been shown NOT to work time and again is Socialism. It did not work in the Soviet Union, Cuba, or any other country where it has been imposed for very long. Even when communist and capitalist countries are side by side, the difference is stark. Compare the GDP in North Korea to South Korea; East Germany (when it was communist) to free market West Germany. Countries that have switched their economies from socialist to capitalist they start to do better economically, from giant China to tiny Israel.
When you expand nanny state dependence on the society you get the situation in Greece and England. Once you start to steal from one to give to another because you know better what is good for the society, you doom everyone, specifically future generations to unsustainable debt and generational sloth.
Back on topic, the Verison labor thugs will eventually get what the West Virginia ones got. It they would be more productive workers (and better assemblers in my case) they would have been paid the value of their work. Everyone would have been better off.
"From each according to his ability and to each according to his need." sounds very nice and utopian but not for this world. The closer you get to that kind of economic philosophy the more joblessness and misery, as demonstrated in this administration. There is lower incentive, more government interference which begets lower economic opportunity and outlooks, lower GDP ... but more food stamps!
More people dependent on government is Siarlys' perfect world! Worker's Unite! Up against the wall, capitalist pigs! (Especially the Jewish ones)
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Ho hum... Miggie whips up his personal fantasy about the world, then accuses anyone who doesn't quite see it as uneducated. Don't dare quote from a history book, if Miggie hasn't read it, and he doesn't seem to read much at all, it can't be true.
ReplyDeleteI didn't so much say that socialism HAS WORKED as that YOUR METHOD HASN'T. When some absentee landlord whisks your job away because the serfs had the temerity to say "Please sir, I want some more," one thinks about how to removed the landlord's power to do such things.
Actually, there was a chemical plant in Poland that continued to operate in the post-communist era, making a good quality product, turning a small profit, and sustaining, without loans or subsidies, all the medical, child care, and other services it had always provided to the workers in the plant. The hot-shot liberal economists (and they were liberals) who flew in to "help" the new government bemoaned "It still operates like such a typical socialist enterprise." So what? It was paying its own way.
I'll settle for a distributist approach rather than a socialist one (read up on John Medaille at Front Porch Republic). I'm not sure it can be developed in a practical sense. That plant in Poland could have been a beacon to the world.
Now I'm sure you know, unlettered though you appear to be, that the Nazis ran propaganda about the "Bolshevik Jewish Capitalist Conspiracy," because everyone knew there were more Jewish communists than Jewish capitalists. On the other hand, the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire was caused by the negligence and indifference of Jewish capitalists for their mostly Jewish workforce. So much for Jews taking care of their own.
It is also worth noting that the huge debt in Greece was run up by a CONSERVATIVE government that didn't want to bother collecting taxes. Then they left the mess for a socialist government to clean up.
Your arrogance in claiming that 51% of the workers invested nothing in the plant is what gives substance to the notion of class warfare. To you, they might as well have been expendable inventory. They invested years of their life and possibly passed up other job options to build that business. Maybe they couldn't have managed it, but they are entitled to more consideration than some out-of-state coupon clippers.
Bottom line: the market was made for man, not man for the market. Adam Smith undertood that, but you have raised the market up to be an idol, which you worship before all other gods. Not very impressive for someone who claims to be Jewish.