[carver]

Originally Posted by Big ugly

I have supported the unions several times right her on this forum and I will til the day they plant my sorry carcass. It wasnt the Unions that broke the American workforce it was the corporate (PG13)'s. That beeing said there is no doubt in my mind that there have been some currupt members of some of the Unions but for the most part what they done and what they stood for up until Reagan the Unions was a good thing. In the 80's the Union Jobs was the ones to have. But we started to see a loss of popularity in the mid to late 80's. What killed the US work force was NAFTA and that sewage Clinton shoved down our throat and along came Baby Bush to seal the deal.

Big ugly, you are mostly right, IMHO. I have belonged to many Unions over the years, and have been steward, and chief steward for some of them. But while I was a member of the IBEW at AT&T I was laughed out of a meeting hall one night for suggesting that we take a cut in pay to keep our jobs. You see the Union wanted more pay for it's members, even though the Company had already told us that they were thinking of moving to Thailand, or Singapore. The Union stuck to it's guns, and demanded more hourly pay. AT&T closed the doors to the Shreveport plant, and the plant in Ind. Over 10,000 jobs were lost in short order. I know about the history of AT&T and our Government, and I know that this did not help us any, but the Union is what drove AT&T from America. Realizing that they could make a lot of money by moving over seas, and could avoid the U.S. Government's involvement, and get away form the Unions.