Unions fill deptford mall

[vladtepes 1,060]

Is that the history the union teaches? If you really study your history the 40 hr work week was created by Henry Ford in 1926. He also paid his factory workers twice as much as they could make elsewhere. The UAW wasn't founded until 1935. Ford did this so his workers could afford to buy the cars they built and had time to spend all the money they made. This also forced other industries to pay their workers more which meant more people who could afford to buy Fords cars.

 

Most people, including union people, didn't have a 40 hr workweek until after WWII.

 

win..

[Anselmo 87]

1. There appears to me to be a very strong pro-Marxist sentiment that the unions exist to provide an able, honest, hard-working person with a liveable wage. Or, rather that every able, honest, hard-working person should earn a liveable wage simply because they are able, honest, and hard-working. I'm don't know much about Marxism but that strikes me as exactly the goals of Marxism. There seems to be a sentiment that wages should rise to meet the needs of the workers. This flies in the face of Capitalism where the employee wants to earn as much as he's able to while the employer seeks to minimize labor costs as much they're able to.

 

2. Early in my career I was working on a special project at Squibb as an outside specialist. We used Squibb's facility but we weren't allowed to weigh anything. All weighing had to be done by a union employee. Part of our job was to fill vials with drug. To ensure a uniform and consistent fill, we checked the fill weights every 15 minutes. So, every 15 minutes the union people would weigh a vial and tell us how much it weighed. After 4 hours of this we were almost done. With 5 minutes to go and one last weight check to perform, the union people announced they were going on break. We said, wait 5 minutes and we'll be finished. They said they couldn't wait, it was break time and that was that. We sure as hell weren't going to wait an hour for their return so I weighed the last vial myself. Oh, the repercussions that caused and proved to me the perversion of unions from their original purpose. We also weren't allowed to use any tools as per union rules so we hid screwdrivers and wrenches in our pants.

[Shawnmoore81 623]

Break time is break time. Yes I have moved my breaks to get a job done but some places don't allow it. A lot of that has to do with management. They want everyone leavIng the break room at the same time just for the fact they might not have noticed what time you went on break so you might just be trying to sneak a longer break. I have dealt with before. If break is over at 930 they want you walking out at 930. They don't care if you just got there at 925. Now sometimes you may just get pissed off and proove a point. I had this delivery driver who would show up every day during lunch and expect us to unload his truck right that second. Sure the first few times we did it but gave him a warning. He laughed it off. After that warning we made him sit and wait. He knew lunch was at noon and would show up everyday at 1210 and expect us to jump. call us lazy I don't care the driver was flat out rude.

 

As far as history yea we were taught at the union hall but I also learned it in highschool history.

 

The eight-hour day movement or 40-hour week movement, also known as the short-time movement, had its origins in the Industrial Revolution in Britain, where industrial production in large factories transformed working life and imposed long hours and poor working conditions. With working conditions unregulated, the health, welfare, and morale of working people suffered. The use of child labour was common. The working day could range from 10 to 16 hours for six days a week.[1][2]

 

Robert Owen had raised the demand for a ten-hour day in 1810, and instituted it in his socialist enterprise at New Lanark. By 1817 he had formulated the goal of the eight-hour day and coined the slogan Eight hours labour, Eight hours recreation, Eight hours rest. Women and children in England were granted the ten-hour day in 1847. French workers won the 12-hour day after the February revolution of 1848. A shorter working day and improved working conditions were part of the general protests and agitation for Chartist reforms and the early organization of trade unions.

 

The International Workingmen's Association took up the demand for an eight-hour day at its convention in Geneva in August 1866, declaring The legal limitation of the working day is a preliminary condition without which all further attempts at improvements and emancipation of the working class must prove abortive, and The Congress proposes eight hours as the legal limit of the working day.

 

Although there were initial successes in achieving an eight-hour day in New Zealand and by the Australian labour movement for skilled workers in the 1840s and 1850s, most employed people had to wait to the early and mid twentieth century for the condition to be widely achieved through the industrialized world through legislative action.

 

The eight-hour day movement forms part of the early history for the celebration of Labour Day, and May Day in many nations and cultures.

 

In the United States, Philadelphia carpenters went on strike in 1791 for the ten-hour day. By the 1830s, this had become a general demand. In 1835, workers in Philadelphia organized a general strike, led by Irish coal heavers. Their banners read, From 6 to 6, ten hours work and two hours for meals. Labor movement publications called for an eight-hour day as early as 1836. Boston ship carpenters, although not unionized, achieved an eight-hour day in 1842.

 

In 1864, the eight-hour day quickly became a central demand of the Chicago labor movement. The Illinois legislature passed a law in early 1867 granting an eight-hour day but had so many loopholes that it was largely ineffective. A city-wide strike that began on May 1, 1867 shut down the city's economy for a week before collapsing. On June 25, 1868, Congress passed an eight-hour law for federal employees[4] which was also of limited effectiveness. (On May 19, 1869, Grant signed a National Eight Hour Law Proclamation.[5])

 

In August 1866, the National Labor Union at Baltimore passed a resolution that said, "The first and great necessity of the present to free labour of this country from capitalist slavery, is the passing of a law by which eight hours shall be the normal working day in all States of the American Union. We are resolved to put forth all our strength until this glorious result is achieved."

 

During the 1870s, eight hours became a central demand, especially among labor organizers, with a network of Eight-Hour Leagues which held rallies and parades. A hundred thousand workers in New York City struck and won the eight-hour day in 1872, mostly for building trades workers. In Chicago, Albert Parsons became recording secretary of the Chicago Eight-Hour League in 1878, and was appointed a member of a national eight-hour committee in 1880.

 

At its convention in Chicago in 1884, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions resolved that "eight hours shall constitute a legal day's labour from and after May 1, 1886, and that we recommend to labour organizations throughout this jurisdiction that they so direct their laws as to conform to this resolution by the time named."

 

The leadership of the Knights of Labor, under Terence V. Powderly, rejected appeals to join the movement as a whole, but many local Knights assemblies joined the strike call including Chicago, Cincinnati and Milwaukee. On May 1, 1886, Albert Parsons, head of the Chicago Knights of Labor, with his wife Lucy Parsons and two children, led 80,000 people down Michigan Avenue, Chicago, in what is regarded as the first modern May Day Parade, in support of the eight-hour day. In the next few days they were joined nationwide by 350,000 workers who went on strike at 1,200 factories, including 70,000 in Chicago, 45,000 in New York, 32,000 in Cincinnati, and additional thousands in other cities. Some workers gained shorter hours (eight or nine) with no reduction in pay; others accepted pay cuts with the reduction in hours.

 

 

Artist impression of the bomb explosion in Haymarket Square

On May 3, 1886, August Spies, editor of the Arbeiter-Zeitung (Workers Newspaper), spoke at a meeting of 6,000 workers, and afterwards many of them moved down the street to harass strikebreakers at the McCormick plant in Chicago. The police arrived, opened fire, and killed four people, wounding many more. At a subsequent rally on May 4 to protest this violence, a bomb exploded at the Haymarket Square. Hundreds of labour activists were rounded up and the prominent labour leaders arrested, tried, convicted, and executed giving the movement its first martyrs. On June 26, 1893 Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld set the remaining leader free, and granted full pardons to all those tried claiming they were innocent of the crime for which they had been tried and the hanged men had been the victims of "hysteria, packed juries and a biased judge".

 

The American Federation of Labor, meeting in St Louis in December 1888, set May 1, 1890 as the day that American workers should work no more than eight hours. The International Workingmen's Association (Second International), meeting in Paris in 1889, endorsed the date for international demonstrations, thus starting the international tradition of May Day.

 

The United Mine Workers won an eight-hour day in 1898.

 

The Building Trades Council (BTC) of San Francisco, under the leadership of P.H. McCarthy, won the eight-hour day in 1900 when the BTC unilaterally declared that its members would work only eight hours a day for $3 a day. When the mill resisted, the BTC began organizing mill workers; the employers responded by locking out 8,000 employees throughout the Bay Area. The BTC, in return, established a union planing mill from which construction employers could obtain supplies — or face boycotts and sympathy strikes if they did not. The mill owners went to arbitration, where the union won the eight-hour day, a closed shop for all skilled workers, and an arbitration panel to resolve future disputes. In return, the union agreed to refuse to work with material produced by non-union planing mills or those that paid less than the Bay Area employers.

 

By 1905, the eight-hour day was widely installed in the printing trades – see International Typographical Union (section) – but the vast majority of Americans worked 12-14 hour days.

 

On January 5, 1914, the Ford Motor Company took the radical step of doubling pay to $5 a day and cut shifts from nine hours to eight, moves that were not popular with rival companies, although seeing the increase in Ford's productivity, and a significant increase in profit margin (from $30 million to $60 million in two years), most soon followed suit.[6][7][8][9]

 

In the summer of 1915, amid increased labor demand for World War I, a series of strikes demanding the eight-hour day began in Bridgeport, Connecticut. They were so successful that they spread throughout the Northeast.[10]

 

The United States Adamson Act in 1916 established an eight-hour day, with additional pay for overtime, for railroad workers. This was the first federal law that regulated the hours of workers in private companies. The United States Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Act in Wilson v. New, 243 U.S. 332 (1917).

 

The eight-hour day might have been realized for many working people in the U.S. in 1937, when what became the Fair Labor Standards Act (29 U.S. Code Chapter 8) was first proposed under the New Deal. As enacted, the act applied to industries whose combined employment represented about twenty percent of the U.S. labor force. In those industries, it set the maximum workweek at 40 hours,[11] but provided that employees working beyond 40 hours a week would receive additional overtime bonus salaries.[

 

 

There goes your "win" believe it or not that battle was started way before Henry ford.

[rightisright 3]

Copying and pasting without proper acknowledgement is plagiarism.

[Shawnmoore81 623]

Fine Wikipedia

[vladtepes 1,060]

There goes your "win" believe it or not that battle was started way before Henry ford.

 

I was referring to this..

 

He also paid his factory workers twice as much as they could make elsewhere. ........This also forced other industries to pay their workers more

 

I have a good job.. with benefits.. and good pay..

the sales staff beneath me.. good hours.. good pay.. lots of time off.. good benefits...

 

WHY do we pay these people well?

not because a union has nudged us to.. instead because they are WORTH what they earn.. and we want them to work for us as opposed to going somewhere else... because of that.. out incentives are aggressive.. no union involved..

 

if you are good at what you do.. honest.. and work hard..

you will find work.. that pays you fairly... without anyone lobbying on your behalf..