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seanbrock

Socialist Idea

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What about a program kind of like the military that was funded by the government to place people into training for infrastructure jobs that were also state funded to rebuild and modernize our country? Anyone can sign up. You get aptitude tests and you get some choices on what you want to do. You get right into a union when you complete your training. Or you can go to college still if you want. Why do companies pay for people to get educated? This is a worth while investment that would pay for itself tenfold and make this just much better place to live. Socialism sucks doh.

Edited by seanbrock

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1 hour ago, seanbrock said:

What about a program kind of like the military that was funded by the government to place people into training for infrastructure jobs that were also state funded to rebuild and modernize our country? Anyone can sign up. You get aptitude tests and you get some choices on what you want to do. You get right into a union when you complete your training. Or you can go to college still if you want. Why do companies pay for people to get educated? This is a worth while investment that would pay for itself tenfold and make this just much better place to live. Socialism sucks doh.

Hard pass.

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1 hour ago, Omerta said:

Hard pass.

Good point. I see where you're coming from lol.

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I feel like Ngata and I provided the full  range of responses to this idea. 

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27 minutes ago, seanbrock said:

Good point. I see where you're coming from lol.

You negging son of a bitch lol. Kidding. This was more of a reminder to me, I was busy at the office, but I wanted a reminder for when I took lunch or break to come back to this and revisit it.

 

So as to the explanation, I don't see a good way of implementing what you're saying. There are multiple scenarios in play here, and I don't feel like any of them are good. The biggest problem I have with any of it, is when you said government placing people. What does that mean? I don't like the idea of government being able to place anybody in a profession, no matter how good they may be at it. now those aren't the three scenarios, that was just a big problem I had with the statement in general. However for the next three scenarios I will operate under the assumption that you meant the government will give you the option to choose.

The first, and consequently the largest problem I see with this is that you would take huge metropolises, and make them even bigger. Now there's nothing wrong with that in and of itself if that's where people feel they belong. So I'm not sure how familiar you are with the way the union works, but there is a wage scale that is completely dependent upon where you live, and you're negotiating power. For example and local 46 and Seattle a journeyman makes about $50 an hour, travel 25 miles south to local 76 jurisdiction, and a journeyman makes about $35 an hour. Now the living expenses aren't that much different, it is almost as expensive to live in Tacoma as it is to live in the west side of Seattle. So let's say you go to the Tacoma high school and tell all these kids that hey once you're done will place you an apprenticeship program, or a trade school to teach you an apprenticeship, or a trade school and then graduate you to an apprenticeship, any of the combination is fine. The problem is why would a kid at Tacoma High School want to take that option, if he knows 15 miles up the road he could be making $15 an hour more, and a pension that isn't bankrupt. He probably wouldn't, then you would have to tell that person that they have to stay within the Tacoma jurisdiction or there wouldn't be any Wireman in Tacoma.

Now, when you think about how the union works there something called portability. So what that is, is it only allows you to have a certain amount of people work in a different jurisdiction, and for local 46 I believe that number is 4. So is a contractor, I can only send four of my guys to do work in Tacoma, after that I have to hire Tacoma hands. Now there's nothing wrong with that either, except for that the guys working right next to them doing the same work, but have their money sent to a pension that's fully funded and quite healthy, well they would receive local 76 pay which is much lower, and the pension is bankrupt. So basically they're doing the same work, and they're getting paid less to do it.

 

Now let's say, that you told these people they could go anywhere they wanted to go. Do you really think they would choose to stay in Tacoma? So you would have a complete absence of Union Wireman and Tacoma, but the need for electrician still needs to be filled, so then what? With the rules of portability, all those Wireman who live in Tacoma, are working in Seattle but you can only send four back to service the needs of a large city. So basically, the electrical needs of Tacoma would go unmet, unless you allowed non-union labor.

So now you're saying let's get rid of the portability Rule, and that's all well and good. However, that comes with its own set of challenges. So if you take portability out of the Union contracts, the next thing people are going to do is try to establish new markets and conglomerate operations. So you have for five huge contractors in Seattle that handle all the 40-story work. all the other small contractors usually stick to 20 floors or below, or doing tenent improvements on different buildings. So what would happen is either the large Union contractors would Branch out to as far as they could get let's say on Western Washington on the other side of the Cascades, and they would put smaller Union shops out of business. or let's say that they didn't want to do that just wanted to focus on that work. Then you would have the smaller shop seeing opportunities to be able to expand their operation to become the next big outfit. So you would have immediately a problem because the pension in Seattle is very good, is as the pay, so the local in Spokane can't compete with that, so all of the people in Spokane are going to sign up with 46 to get the pension in the money as they should. The problem with that is is now all of the sudden you have the entire state of Washington governed over by one local headquartered in Seattle. That is going to create a huge Metropolis of people, and it's going to make locals the next conglomerates.

 

That is only one of the issues, there's at least a few more, but they deal more on the contractor side with the logistics, what parts cost wear, putting local Parts houses out of business because it's cheaper to get it from the bigger Parts houses in Seattle, so you would lose those jobs in those small towns that people rely on for a living. Then you would an Essence kill the town, or large chunk of its Workforce and make them migrate to a larger area.

 

then there's the problem of certain local specializing in things, and Seattle there's a large chunk of our local that doesn't Marine electrical, now that's not necessarily needed in the midwest, what's needed in the midwest is motor controls for irrigation Motors and electric pumps. So why would a guy and the Midwest settle for $22 an hour for a journeyman benefit package, when he could go up to one of the large conglomerates, and all he would have to learn as a few motor controls in a marine environment. Now all of the sudden we're starting to lose parts of the trade, or expertise in those trades because the service is needed in the midwest, or not the service is needed in the ones that pay well.

 

I am all for unionizing the workforce, but I think the way the union does its thing right now is the ideal way to do it. The problem is we have a large influx of undocumented immigrant labor that we need to have a path to citizenship so we can legitimize that Workforce, and stop allowing people to pay them one V what they would pay anybody else. We need to take all the huge corporations like Amazon, Walmart, Google, Kmart, and all of these places and smash them into a million pieces so that way when companies not so big that they can have their own electrical force, their own Plumbing Force, basically an entire self-sufficient organization on to themselves, we need to stop paying all these legislators to get the right to work states going. we need to stop telling kids that college is the only way you're going to be successful in life, to get that six figure salary, or even strike it rich. There's a lot of electrical contractors that are multi-millionaires by the time they're 35, because the workforce is hurting so bad that anybody that can do a halfway decent job can run a shop. We need to start getting all these endowments two colleges comment all these tax breaks, and start giving them back to the trades. If you go to the Bureau of Labor Statistics construction is one of the markets it's far outpacing the people we have, and that trend is only going to continue as we grow as a nation. We need to start going to high school trying to recruit there, we need to take some of those military budget that were using to fight other people's words for money, but that budget into recruiting in promoting local unions, we need to get city city council some local Meijer out of the pockets of these large non-union contractors, there's so many things we can do that does not necessarily involves government help that we can do to promote Union and get people on track with decent paying jobs. The fact is that all these corporations and Technology, biopharmaceuticals, Supply Chain management, Logistics, don't want people to stop going to college because they want to recruit the best young talent, and they do that with the promise of great paying jobs will they don't tell you is only a few will get that, you will end up and a cubicle somewhere working a dead-end job where you're going to top out at $80,000 a year maximum.

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As long as the government is also funding better materials so our roads last longer, I'm happy. It seems most highway jobs are band aids nowadays.

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for the people who don't feel like reading that wall of text, the general summation is that we don't need the government to interfere anymore than they already are. What we need them to do is the job that they're paid to do, nothing more nothing less.

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I mean, I just came up with the broad strokes of an idea. There are semantic issues but there are always semantic issues in the private sector as well as the state. I think that colleges would be forced to compete with the government as far as providing opportunity and training which would work in people's benefit. This wouldn't be something anyone would be forced to do and if nobody wanted to live and work in Tacoma maybe you make so they want to, know what I mean? You're shooting holes in this as if the problems you mentioned just are unsolvable. If the private sector can handle this, then why hasn't it?  

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23 minutes ago, seanbrock said:

I mean, I just came up with the broad strokes of an idea. There are semantic issues but there are always semantic issues in the private sector as well as the state. I think that colleges would be forced to compete with the government as far as providing opportunity and training which would work in people's benefit. This wouldn't be something anyone would be forced to do and if nobody wanted to live and work in Tacoma maybe you make so they want to, know what I mean? You're shooting holes in this as if the problems you mentioned just are unsolvable. If the private sector can handle this, then why hasn't it?  

To do what you're proposing you would have to get rid of portability language in contracts. You literally cannot do that without tearing unions apart. If you took away portability then you would be displacing people from their homes by creating wastelands for work, at least as far as unions are concerned. You would probably end up with more non-union contractors than you would Union.

 

I'm not shooting holes in this, just to do it. But you literally cannot do what you're proposing with the current Union laws, and if you were to dismantle the portability rules, then you would tear the union apart. Or, you would at least tear apart the weaker Unions.

As to why the private sector hasn't fixed it, it's very simple. The government absolutely refuses to do its job. This goes for every president since the 1960s, they absolutely refuse to do their job. The idea that the government can come in and fix their mistakes, and improve on them is something they haven't proved the ability to do in the last half-century, I don't think involving them more is going to help. If they want to help start doing the job that they're paid to do, and enforcing the law already on the books. If they do that and things don't correct themselves, then okay, let's are talking about different issues. Until they do that though there's no point in discussing anything else, at least as far as the private sector being able to fix itself.

Edited by Omerta

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Idk you definitely know more about the laws than me but how often is there only one way to skin a cat? Being in construction as long as you have, I think you can get what I'm saying. I think before anything like this happens we need to destroy the establishment. This to me is a reachable goal, though. We have landed a space craft on Mars. We can do this, trust me. 

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What if instead of placing people into unions you place them in community owned and operated co-ops? They can't be owned by the mob and are self determined and democratic so they're not going to vote to send their jobs overseas or across the boarder.

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They might not do that, but eventually certain people will gain power in those co-ops and turn them into cash cows for themselves and screw everybody else. 

You're placing too much faith in people, in my opinion. I like the general idea of this thread, though.

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