Quote:


it will come back for sure.
it is an idea whose time has come and it cant be suppressed because it is the logical "next step"

everything has been exposed to the free market

the banks
the telecommunications systems
the post office
housing
health
universitites
the arts
Uber and Air b and b
Ebay

everything now stands and falls based on its own merit and value in the marketplace.

the merit and value of an hour of your work is NO DIFFERENT.

this is what you HAVE to SELL into the marketplace and how much you get for your hour of work, can no more be regulated then any other commodity which is being brought and sold.

to think otherwise (especially in a global market) is just naive .

Your only protection is to improve improve improve.

Heres a social experiment for you crook.

Go to Ebay and say you are willing to offer 8 hours a day of whinging, whining bitching and complaining and you want to know what the whole of ebay is willing to pay for this service.
Then get back to us 

aquascoot wrote on May 16^th, 2016 at 7:27am:


I worked for a Govt Dpt in the 90s and that was the best way to get a promotion.
After I left it took me a year or so to get rid of that  crippling mentality

From what I can see, it seems that the liberals have learned very little.  We know they cant be trusted with industrial relations.  The unions are awake to them.   

Quote:



Unions will become pretty well irrelevant over the next decade or so crook.
What is a union except a cartel trying to manipulate the price of labor.
You cant manipulate the price of anything anymore.
Not in a global economy.

labor is something people "buy" and they will "buy" it wherever they see it as representative of the greatest "value"

if the call centre workers throw a strike,  a quick call to india fixes that.
if the auto makers throw a strike, thailand is happy to churn out toyotas.
if the retail workers go on strike, i'll buy online.
if the dentists throw a strike, i'll get my crowns done in the phillipines.
if the IT workers strike, koreans will write the code.
if the miners strike, brazil and south africa will get the investment.

pretty much only public servants can strike and they will just be increasingly put on contracts where the union cant help them

i expect most governments will move to contract labor,
most industries will be globalised and if you strike, the factory gets put in a shipping container and reassembled in indonesia.

you are fighting a war that cant be won
the unions are like the little boy with his finger in the dyke in holland trying to hold back the ocean.

Dont waste any more energy on wanting things to go back to the "good old days". I thought the lefties were supposed to be the party that had a clear vision of the future and the righties were supposed to be stuck in the past.
On IR, you are just ancient history. Stop the nostalgia and get to a self improvement course.

aquascoot wrote on May 16^th, 2016 at 8:30am:


Not quite true Scoot. We've already touched on Ricardo and mentioned his work on economic rents. You will find that unions exist as part of the squabble over the division of excess economic rents between labour and capital. As such, they cannot exist in a perfect market. It is in fact the market imperfections such as monopolies, monopsonies, lobby groups etc that lead to their very existence.

greggerypeccary wrote on May 16^th, 2016 at 9:18am:


Wharfies?

aquascoot wrote on May 16^th, 2016 at 9:33am:


More of your astounding ignorance.

When an EBA is negotiated, the wages & conditions in that document are merely the minimum for all employees.

Employers do not have to pay all employees the same rate.

If they feel that any particular employees are more valuable than others, they can pay them any amount they want above what is in the EBA.

There is absolutely nothing stopping an employer paying their best employees twice as much as everyone else in the company.

Every single employee can be on a different rate of pay, according to their productivity etc.

Similarly, better employees can be given extra benefits, such as longer lunch breaks, more annual leave, etc.

You (and many others on here) really do know very little about EBAs and their application in the workplace.