With so much argument about the Employee Free Choice Act going on these days, it seems the whole country is dividing up between Union lovers and Union haters. Union lovers see organized labor as the only thing standing between the middle class and mass poverty. And as Unions shrink in size, so does the American Dream. We may be the last generation in a long line of generations where the kids had a higher standard of living than their parents. Our children will hard pressed to get better jobs and benefits than we have. Even the good Union jobs are taking a few steps backwards these days in wages and benefits. 
     As the automakers stumble and fall, the Union haters are quick to point out that it was the Unions that did them in. “High wages and benefits (the backbone of the middle class) forced the companies into bankruptcy”, they howl, “It was the damn Unions.” These same people who seem to loathe the middle class never point their fingers at greedy corporations. They never accuse the carnivorous CEOs of breaking the back of a once successful company. All they can see are those Damn Unions. 
     Well here is a Damn CEO story. You may have seen it on Yahoo. “Judge orders Scrushy to pay $2.9B to shareholders.” Yes, his name is really Scrushy! Richard Scrushy, the former head of HealthSouth. 
      After reading the following description of Scrushy’s activities and using the same thinking that the Union bashers use, I think we can assume that it is management that’s ruining America. Upper management thugs are masterminding it and their low-level goons are carrying out the destruction. Shouldn’t we treat them with the same repulsion that they have for us.

Circuit Judge Allwin E. Horn, who heard the case in Birmingham without a jury, ruled in favor of HealthSouth shareholders who filed a lawsuit claiming Scrushy was involved in years of overstating the company’s earnings and assets to make it appear the company was meeting Wall Street forecasts.

Horn wrote in his ruling that Scrushy “knew of and participated in” the faked reports filed with regulators from 1996 to 2002. He said the HealthSouth founder also “consciously and willfully” violated his financial responsibilities as CEO.

During the lawsuit trial, an attorney for shareholders, John W. Haley repeatedly confronted Scrushy over what Haley described as obvious conflicts of interest. Among them was HealthSouth’s purchase of 19 acres of land next to Scrushy’s suburban Birmingham estate for $1.9 million, then giving him the land three years later. Scrushy said he got the land instead of a bonus one year.

Haley, sounding incredulous, recounted how Scrushy took an $82 investment in a company that purchased property at a discount from HealthSouth and turned it into a personal profit of about $12 million in four years by leasing the property back to the corporation.

“That’s the way it works in America,” Scrushy said.

Haley, said Scrushy was “a man of substantial means” who earned more than $226 million from the time the fraud began until he left the company in 2005. The fraud cost the company $1.8 billion.

        Have you ever gone into the office to represent a driver and had your manager whip out the calculator and start pounding in numbers. He’ll say this poor slob of a driver is not using the methods and he’s not keeping his nose to the grindstone and he’s costing the center money instead of making the center money. The manager will have a stack of reports to back up his claim: the WOR showing the driver is over allowed; Sparky, showing which stops the driver wastes time at; previous OJS rides showing demostrtated levels of performance and so on.
        But the ultimate hammer is the calculator. If the guy is 2 hours over and that’s at the OT rate of $42.25, then he’s literally stealing $84.50 from the company every day. That’s $422.50 per week. Or almost $22,000 a year. If 50,000 drivers did this, that’s……oh my God, all the profit the company makes!! We can’t afford to have you around, you’re going to bring down the whole company! This justifies a 3 day ride and all future harassment…just look at these numbers! 
        But there is some math that managers never do. How about these numbers. Let’s say this poor slob of a driver comes in every day and spends just 15 minutes in his car before his start time looking for misloads and checking out his Next Day Air. That’s 15 minutes he doesn’t have on the end of his day where it would be paid at the OT rate. That’s one and a quarter hours per week at $42.25 or $52.82. Or almost $2700 a year. If the guy works 25 years, he has given the company $68,000 in free labor by looking over his load every morning for just 15 minutes a day.
        Let’s say he also skips his lunch. That’s 5 hours a week at $42.25, or $211.25 a week. That’s $11,000 a year that the company gets in free labor. Let’s say 20,000 drivers are skipping their lunch everyday. That’s…..well it’s a lot of money every year in free labor that UPS is getting. Then there is the tax savings for them because they don’t have to pay Federal or State tax on that amount. The savings to UPS are huge.
         But managers never do that math in the office. Stewards need to do that math and have it written in the back of their contract book so they can quote it. We can crunch numbers just as well as they can.
        Fight fire with fire.

Some hedge fund managers made over a billion dollars [in 2007]. Hedge fund manager John Paulson, who made a clever bet against subprime mortgages, made close to $4 billion.

How much is 4 billion dollars? If you work as a sales clerk in a retail store, you’d have to work 200,000 YEARS to make 4 billion dollars. If you have a steady $50,000 a year job as a laborer and work for 50 years, in all that time you’d make as much as the hedge fund manager gets in one hour at the office.

4 billion dollars would pay a year’s salary for ALL the public school teachers in New York City.

Yet this money goes to one individual.

When something goes wrong with hedge funds or others in the finance industry, executives still collect their bonuses. But think how much you’ve heard about how teachers’ unions are one of the big problems with education today, standing in the way of efficiency. Think how much you’ve heard about auto workers being the problem in their industry—when they work for decades to earn what this one hedge fund guy takes in in an hour. And at least auto workers produce cars instead of the economic crisis that’s been the major thing to come out of Wall Street recently.

It’s time for the traditional media to take a hard look at their assumptions about profitability and fair wages, to recognize that working people are not the problem.

Main Street

DENVER — Just as voting is set to begin on a new union contract, King Soopers is accusing union representatives of disrupting business and intimidating workers by sending groups of union representatives into stores to talk to workers.

In a complaint filed in federal court this week, the supermarket chain claims the union is sending groups of representatives, many of them dressed in black union t-shirts, into stores to talk to workers on the job and hand out union fliers and buttons, a practice the company said is known as “blitzing.” King Soopers asked a federal judge to step in and stop the practice both for the current round of talks and in the future.

U.S. District Judge Robert Blackburn said Friday he would consider the issue during a hearing next Thursday, two days after workers finish voting on the contract. That leaves the union free to keep talking to workers ahead of the vote. Denver area workers are set to vote Monday and Colorado Springs workers will vote Tuesday.

In previous negotiations, Mulligan said union representatives have checked in with store managers and waited to talk to employees on their breaks in the employee lounge. “Union representatives, who are often fellow employees, have a contractual obligation to talk to grocery workers, and we have not had any problems with Safeway and Albertson’s,” union lawyer Crisanta Duran said.

 Lawyers for King Soopers said the aim of blitzing is to disrupt business and intimidate workers and customers.

“While at the facility, defendants have hindered and disrupted operations, threatened, intimidated and coerced employees and staff and the public, and acted in ways that are not peaceful. Defendants interrupt employees who are working, go into non-public areas and pass out union fliers and pins,” lawyers said in the complaint.
7News