Union blues

This writer's strike situation really highlights another issue that I have in general, and in writing about it I'm going to reveal some of my political views. Which are views that I keep very closely guarded even to friends and loved ones. The use of unions to squeeze an industry, possibly until it dies, is one of the biggest problems I have with the whole union structure. I'm not against unions, a group of workers banding together to strengthen their interests is fine, in fact it is a completely necessary tool in some industries. However, oftentimes a union gets so caught up in fighting for the little bits and pieces that it fails to see the overall picture. What happens then is that the union begins to bite the hand that feeds it, and sucks life from the industry that the workers serve. Instead of working to better the industry, which would in turn help the workers, the union can, and oftentimes will, cause unrepairable damage to the organism which provides them their precious jobs to begin with. The goal of getting what they want, however small it might be, seems to blind the union and galvanize it against any form of logic or reasoning.

Take the steel industry as an example. The steel industry was one of the major things that this country was built on, a vast moneymaking empire that was a juggernaut for this country and it's success over the last century. Yet for all intents and purposes the steel industry is dead in this country. Where once the steel companies were Goliaths in this nation, now there is only one or two companies in the U.S. (Nucor being the only real one that exists, also the only steel company in this country that has a great philosophy check them out) that survive, the others having faded into obscurity or gone away altogether. The U.S. now largely imports the majority of the steel we use, and if a world war were to ever break out, we would be largely in trouble when it came to our steel needs. Two things (in my opinion) essentially killed the steel industry in this country. Unions, and lack of long term investing.

The lack of long term investing is evident in almost all of the industries in this country. Investors are rarely interested in putting forth the capital to improve an industry for the long term future, this would actually require that the investor remain patient and overall they would make more money in the long run. U.S. investors have historically gone for the quick buck, investing their money and making the quick dollar and then going off to spend their capital gains. The U.S. steel industry suffered from this much in the same way the auto industry is now. What the industry really needed was to upgrade all steel making facilities, make them more efficient, make them better, make them competitive with new technologies. Instead we ended up using patchwork investments to mend what we had, and just keep the great monster moving in small intervals instead of upgrading it for the long journey, and eventually the monster died from age and unions. It also didn't help that the U.S. helped build steel mills abroad after WWII that were more advanced then what we had. But a long term investing strategy of updating plants, and improving things would have helped the U.S. to still be the best steel producing nation in the world. I say helped, because even with those improvements it is unlikely that the steel industry would have survived with the financial pressures the unions placed on the companies.

The unions didn't have the foresight to see what their demands would do to the steel industry in this country. It wasn't all the union's fault, in fact management failings had a large part to do with it because of the unreasonable way that management had dealt with unions in the early part of the industry. The unions in the steel industry demanded high benefit concessions before the 1980's. Such lofty and unreasonable demands by the union put such companies as Bethlehem Steel into an inevitable chokehold from which it could not return, even under favorable conditions. And favorable conditions were not to be had due to foreign competition, lack of innovative investment strategies of steel executives, and the increasing animosity between management and union leaders.

I should of course elaborate on how management had quite a bit of responsibility with all of the problems. In the steel industry's case, management worked the day labourers to the bone with little to no concessions or benefits and wages for years and years. So when the time came for the union to get it's turn, they took all they could get from the management. Also there is absolutely no fucking way to justify the salaries of some of the company executives in this country. $20 million dollars for executives is absurd because there is no way that any of these clowns mean that much to their large companies. So fuck them for the crops they sewed then and fuck them for what they are reaping, both in the steel industry, and now with the writers. Those overpaid penny pincher's had this coming for quite some time.

So we're left with the writer's potentially shutting down entertainment in various forms. Almost 20 years ago when the writer's guild last went on strike it cost the entertainment industry close to $500 million dollars. So assuming the strike is just as bad, you can go ahead and multiply that $500 million by 20 years of inflation. Will this be a huge burden on the entertainment industry, specifically movie and t.v.? You bet. Especially given that new forms of media have already been taking over a large portion of the pie from the more traditional media. This "new media" like videogames and blogs and other such digital media is huge, in fact video games alone are burying the motion picture industry by some measures, and it will likely get worse. Has the writer's guild thought about how much smaller their slice of the pie might be over the long run if they hurt the television and movie industry now? Although the writer's guild is trying to unionize and control much of this new media, which I hope they won't get a red cent of.

So in the end shame on the writer's union for potentially not seeing what kind of harm they could do to themselves and their industry in the long run. I hope the short term gains are enough to placate you before you lose your jobs altogether. Shame on the executives for being so greedy and being way overpaid compared to your average worker. And shame on me for presenting this whole thing in a badly written blog post.