This is “Right to Work”.
Nantucket Island lost its preeminence as a whaling center for two reasons.
First, because of the sand that built up in its harbor entrance and the difficulty of constantly dredging it or using mechanisms to get the ships over the sand bar it became obsolete as the demand for whale products required larger ships than the harbor entrance could handle.
The second reason was that once the whale products were processed they would then have to be loaded on ships to take them to the mainland.
New Bedford had a deep harbor, and was connected to railroad lines which meant that the Nantucket middle step became obsolete because of its extreme inconvenience.
The romance of the sea only existed for those who did not go to sea.
If a crew member was new to whaling, he had no idea that the agreed upon salary, an established fraction of the value of what the ship brought back, would go to certain expenses like purchasing clothing and the bedding for his assigned bunk that he would have to purchase from the ship’s store on credit and with accruing interest. Because he was only paid at the end of the voyage, after whatever money owed to the company was deducted from the earned pay very often crewmen were left with very little money and many times owed money to the company.
In effect, many whalers either worked for free, or had worked themselves into debt.
There was no one to speak for them.
Even though kerosene burned dirty and had an odor unlike whale oil and whale oil candles that were clean and odorless, petroleum was much easier to pump out of the ground as opposed having to sail longer and farther to get to the whales who, because of the numbers hunted and processed, weren’t as conveniently located as they had been in earlier days.
In the beginning of the whale industry they could be hunted off shore; by the end, ships had to go as far away as the arctic.
The method for refining whale oil may have helped the oil industry, Standard oil’s original refining expert was from Fairhaven and made such a fortune that he could build ostentatious structures all over town like the overly ornate high school and the unbelievably Gothic era style Unitarian Church. But, the oil wasn’t in New Bedford and it was more convenient to have the refineries closer to the oil fields.
If the city was to continue to be prosperous something had to be done, and Wamsutta and other cloth manufacturers set up shop.
From the “tycoons” standpoint, fortunes were saved. But, just as with the whaling industry, conditions favored the owners, but not the workers.
Factory owners could advertise their success by building ornate mansions, but their financial success did not filter down to those responsible for that success, the workers, just as it had not for the whaling crews.
As early as 1867 there were problems in the mills, especially when the owner of the Wamsutta mills cut workers’ pay to increase profits. The major impetus for the 1867 strike was to establish a 10 hour day at a time when the workers had 11 hour days and to increase wages.
Many worker were let go.
Rachelle Howland from one of the cities prominent families and a person who saw the wealthy as having an obligation to help those not dealt an equal hand, one of her charities The a Fund For Aged Women still exists in the city, stepped in.
Instead of sticking to her position as a One Percenter she negotiated a compromise that benefited the workers and did not hurt the owners, although her invitations to certain social events dramatically decreased.
Because of a proposed 10 percent wage cut for factory operatives, on April 16, 1928, approximately 30,000 machinery operatives in several of the large cotton mills in New Bedford walked off the job. The workers, comprised mainly of English, Irish, German, French-Canadian, Polish, Syrian, and Portuguese immigrants, demanded the abolition of the planned wage cut, a 40-hour work week, and a 20% wage increase.
The factory owners were an organized group, the New Bedford Cotton Manufacturers’ Association, but the workers were not. The Communist-led Textile Mill Committee stepped in to organize the workers until leadership passed to the American Fedration of Labor.
The strike ended in early October that year when negotiators accepted the offer of mill owners for a 5 percent wage cut and promises of 30 days’ notice before implementation of any further wage reductions.
On September 23, 2015, the workers of Bob’s Tire Company in New Bedford, voted 65-5 in favor of having UFCW Local 328 represent them during contract negotiations with the company. The workers belonged to the K’iche’ ethnic group, and were from the same city, San Andrés Sajcabajá in western Guatemala. They were the first group of workers from the local Mayan community to organize with a union.
The company shreds old tires that will be used as fuel. The work is dirty and demanding, and for this the workers earned $11 per hour, and when they had asked for a $1 raise in January 2015, they were told they would get it in April.
They didn’t.
Instead, three workers were fired for having asked. The bosses wanted to send a message to the other workers.
They also wanted sick time, paid vacation, holidays, and job security.
The two Republican members of the National Labor Relations Board, which has to rule on the legality of a vote to unionize, argued that the decision would subject the company to previously unlawful strikes, boycotts and pickets, as well as liability for unfair labor practices.
And that is why corporations and their political lackeys want to get rid of unions. They want to be able to pay as little to their workers as they can, work them to death, and be able to fire anyone who asks for more humane conditions.
But very often, canadian cialis mastercard it always sound too good to be true? Read ahead! There are a plenty of products out there that can be of immense help. The diagnostic tests that are involved in this disease, and clinical evidence revealing the frequent associations between psoriasis and other serious viagra 10mg conditions, we now realize that psoriasis is a much more serious disorder affecting the whole body must be passing out to the penis as well for a better erection. In fact, you should get some of them offer the best quality of you can try this out viagra shops in india, while others end up selling old or counterfeit versions of the drug, putting your life and health at risk. Cenforce XXX is a generic version of the cost of sildenafil pill back the 1990s.
Although its name is chosen to imply something beneficial, “Right to work” is misleading.
Of course everyone has a right to work if they can find it.
What the name hides is that under it the reality is that your right to work is at the largess of corporate owners and anything that favors the worker is a threat to their profits and personal wealth if they have to share the company profits with those who make them, the worker. Without any say or recourse, workers are limited to low wages and an employee who might request a more decent wage or better working conditions can be conveniently fired.
As the local stories above illustrate, bad working conditions came first and then union organizing, not the other way around. If the owner of companies paid their workers what they have worked for, had them work more humane hours, afforded them benefits like vacation time, sick leave, and a degree of job security, union would no have been needed.
But workers found they had to work together to get what made them worth more than expendable machines.
As workers’ hours, wages, and conditions of employment are safeguarded by unions the best way to stop that is to promote the idea that unions threaten a person’s right to a job.
I have had people complain to me throughout my career that I got good benefits, and that was unfair. My response always was that I got those benefits because of my union, so, rather than complain to me that I had done something intelligent, they should do the same and organize. Don’t demand I lose my benefits because they haven’t done what was needed to get theirs.
When I worked in the Buckle of the Bible Belt, many people chose not to join the union, and unlike some places the union couldn’t even get a shop fee that would be used to help pay for negotiating a contract or representing a non-union member in a labor dispute, even though the union was required by law to do so.
For some reason they saw a union as un-American, somehow satanic, and definitely not something Jesus related.
But thy certainly had no problem accepting what the union negotiated.
My first full time job as a teacher was at a parochial college preparatory high school run by a Catholic order of priests and brothers. Teacher salaries and benefits were surprisingly good for such a school. I once asked the principal why that was.
The teachers’ union in the city was strong, and it constantly attempted to get the teachers at private school in the area to organize.
Because of the complications that this would create, the administrators at the school had decided to get as close to the union’s collective bargaining agreement as thy could, but obviously would not be able to match completely. This is how they kept the union out.
our pay raises and changes to benefits were continually influenced by the teachers’ union negotiations with the city’s school board.
At our school, and in many other non-union work sites, this was a common practice. The non-union employees would benefit in accordance with the unions’ agreements in order the keep the unions out.
So, in an odd way the unions were a benefit.
In many non-union setting, the employee are unaware that this happens. They feel that what salary and benefits they have are somehow from the largess of the employer and see no benefit to unions.
And now this week, Republicans in Congress plan to introduce legislation that would prohibit workers nationwide from being forced to support a union.
Representatives Joe Wilson of South Carolina and Steve King of Iowa are sponsoring the legislation to amend the National Labor Relations Act and the Railway Labor Act to prohibit what unions call “security clauses”, provisions that permit union-management contracts that require all employees to join a union or pay a regular fee as a condition of employment.
“At least 80 percent of Americans are opposed to forcing employees to pay dues as a condition of their employment, and our bill would protect workers by eliminating the forced-dues clauses in federal statute. We need to expand common-sense reforms, like those in the National Right to Work Act to protect American workers and create jobs,” Wilson said.
Jobs may be created, but a living wage can be avoided.
If you ask for one, you can be let go with no consequences.
One of the things lost to Right to Work is due process, the need to show that a dismissal is based on a real cause, and not a whim. This is important for any semblance of job security as an employer can change working conditions for their advantage and can simply remove anyone who might question the change and then hire someone at a lower wage.
Workers become victims, and the old factory conditions return.
Right to work does not mean you have a right to a job. It means the worker is at the mercy of the company whose main object is profit.
The actual right is that they have the right not to respect you by giving a decent wage and having acceptable working conditions.
They do this by promoting the false canard that unions are bad, and rather than you getting what the union worker has, the better thing is to cause resentment in order to reduce them to thr level they keep you.
Divide worker against worker, and their profits grow and they can buy that third summr home.