President (To Win Colorado)
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(D) Kamala Harris
(R) Donald Trump
80%
20%
CO-01 (Denver)
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(D) Diana DeGette*
(R) V. Archuleta
98%
2%
CO-02 (Boulder-ish)
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(D) Joe Neguse*
(R) Marshall Dawson
95%
5%
CO-03 (West & Southern CO)
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(D) Adam Frisch
(R) Jeff Hurd
50%
50%
CO-04 (Northeast-ish Colorado)
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(R) Lauren Boebert
(D) Trisha Calvarese
90%
10%
CO-05 (Colorado Springs)
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(R) Jeff Crank
(D) River Gassen
80%
20%
CO-06 (Aurora)
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(D) Jason Crow*
(R) John Fabbricatore
90%
10%
CO-07 (Jefferson County)
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(D) B. Pettersen
(R) Sergei Matveyuk
90%
10%
CO-08 (Northern Colo.)
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(D) Yadira Caraveo
(R) Gabe Evans
70%↑
30%
State Senate Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
80%
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State House Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
95%
5%
October 27, 2009 05:58 AM UTC
42 Comments
This diary is full of crap. I don’t even know where to begin the blockquotes. Talking about computer programming, Costco, how “every parent knows “the union keeps in substandard teachers, or the statement “Unions are viewed as a negative for our children’s future” where are you getting all of this fine thinking? It’s all so carrrazy! Do you think you could make more leading statements and unfounded generalizations, not to mention irrational correlations between high-tech and grocery workers? I know you don’t like unions… anymore… but seriously, just try.
What will kill the unions is if they don’t see these changes. And I would like to see unions evolve rather than disappear.
Lets start with one simple question – why is it not a single software company has unionized?
and the starting pay is high.
Because they’re in high demand, they’re offered benefits. Plus, they’re decentralized and many of them are contractors.
Yes they are paid well and offered benefits. But the jobs are very centralized and the majority are full-time employees. Microsoft has over 40,000 full-time employees in Redmond. Oracle the same in Redwood City.
If you’re going to say that companies that pay well and provide good benefits have no need of unions, then we may be mostly agreeing. And you can add companies like CostCo and In-N-Out Burger to this list. They do the same thing for the job skills they hire.
But in this case I may be more pro-union than you. I think unions need to try and find a way to make things better for people working for these types of companies. Because the trend is for companies to do the hard work of providing a great work environment.
And that is one of the main reasons why over time union membership is declining.
would create more demand for that sort of job?
had a demonstrable chance of landing a fortune in stock options, the demand would increase. But since David wants to terminate 10 percent of teachers every year, they’ll still be living in fear and — we hope! — bring their A game to the classroom every day.
and say “those jobs are already in high demand! Them teechers should be thankful they have a job! They should strike and when unemployed people take that job, them teechers can go out in ‘the real world’ and see what it’s like to…ummm… not have a unionized job???”
Because King Soopers checkers live in a fantasy world of unicorns and cotton candy.
Gecko’s experience with cotton candy is like this.
It was an accident! Why couldn’t you just give him a new one? It’s just spun sugar!
Oh, the internet. Ample space for my terrible jokes.
btw, that puddle comes from the 4H barns
I didn’t go into software because it paid well, I went into it because I enjoy it. I’m thankful that what I like to do pays well but I would probably be doing this even if it didn’t pay that well. If money was the driver I would have gone to work on Wall St.
As to being fired – that’s a fact of life in the private sector. I’ve been fired. I didn’t like it. But I also didn’t think the answer was to make firing impossible. I just went and got another job.
As to my comment about the teachers, it was fire the lowest performing 1% for 10 years to clear out the deadwood. Big difference.
You guys seem to want a world where everyone has absolute job security and pay scales are set by your value system. The problem is that has been tried and it leads to economic decline. Everyone ends up worse off.
so does that mean we throw it out?
It certainly isn’t the unions fault we have economic decline.
I think you’re going to extremes by coming to the conclusion that I want absolute job security. What I want and why I support unions, is because a unionized workplace is the most effective method of fighting the rampant and destructive greed so many large employers enjoy. If companies had their way, they would all be monopolies and all money would go to them. The problem with that is that it leads to economic decline of the worst kind.
The more I look at health care and now the food system of the world, the more I see that a profit model applied to it is not sustainable. Sustainability is a strategy, not a buzzword. What is the long-term strategy of sustaining life? This is very relevant to the conversation we are having about unions. Inevitably the human race has to come to terms with its impulse to consume everything so they don’t get it. The problem is that when someone is winning the race to consume and “grow their economy” it’s their own demise they are barreling towards.
And because of that we are changing it. The economic system we have is constantly evolving. My point is unions need to evolve with it.
You are correct that some large employers rampant greed has been destructive. But there are many other large employers who never make the news because they take a responsible approach. They are profit focused, but not to the exclusion of all else.
And to speak to the issue of food, yes there are problems with the present model. But for the first time in the history of the human race starvation is no longer common. And the few places it does exist it is more a political weapon than a lack of food. That is a great accomplishment.
Don’t let the fact that things are imperfect blind you to the advances we are making.
Maybe they could be more of a partner with businesses? Businesses could vow to be more accountable to their employees and the employees would know when their bosses are taking advantage of them and when they aren’t distributing the fruits of labor ie wealth. Businesses could spend more money on improving the quality of life for the people whose lives and bodies are spent working for them. Businesses could convene regularly to talk about how the long-term goals of sustainability are actually beneficial to the overall business environment.
And then the skies will part and God will rain gifts of forgiveness, cleansing us on every level; spiritually, psychically, and physically and say “God, I love everything.”
Just kidding. And I didn’t write that last bit, Bill Hicks did.
And a lot of companies try to do exactly that. We consistently ask everyone what they would like to see us do differently. At times we give everyone a morale budget and require they buy something that will make people here happier (I bought nerf guns for all with mine).
These are things many companies would embrace.
about “Hollywood unions,” I hope he’s aware they’ve been operating pretty much the same way since the 1930s.
Not to mention that unions mostly concerned with protection of intellectual property produced during itinerant stints have little in common with unions representing grocery workers — except both unions understand why workers benefit from organizing.
What’s wrong with using Hollywood as an example? They hit changes decades before the rest of the economy. We can learn from those that go first. Same with the unions for professional athletes.
Let’s talk companies that hire people mostly for their brains – software, hardware design (manufacturing is different), marketing, doctors, lawyers, etc. Unions need to find a way to provide them something of significant value to get their interest. I’ve yet to see it.
At one time there was an effort to create a guild for game programmers. A lot of discussion went in to it and most game programmers were at least aware the effort was being made. But at the end, the result was that the programmers did not see that the guild would do anything notable for them.
The people involved were not anti-union, they just didn’t see any return for the effort. If unions can’t address that, then the number of jobs they can unionize will continue to decrease.
Case in point – National Semiconductor has a chip plant that when a big snow storm approached they had everyone go home but left it running. When everyone returned – it had kept producing wafers with no issues. Manufacturing is going to require fewer and fewer people ongoing.
they could stop what they do. We would have no food to buy at the grocery store. Would that give you something of value?
Maybe they could stop cleaning schools and everyone could get swine flu. Here, watch this
No, David, SAG and the WGA were formed to represent entirely different kinds of workers with entirely different relationships to management than other (equally traditional) unions. Those unions are as much a relic of their histories as old-school unions are. That they perform a valuable function in their rarified industries — they’re better than the Hobbesian alternative — doesn’t mean they translate to other industries or other kinds of workforces as easily as you suggest.
My point is a lot more jobs are now similiar to what used to be unique to Hollywood. My point is the relationship of a software developer to the company they work for is much closer to the relationship of a screenwriter with a studio than it is to a grocery clerk to the store.
And I think one of the big problems unions face is they don’t realize that. They are trying to fit a model designed for the factory, the mine, and the construction site to a job that is very different.
And because the unions aren’t adapting, they’re failing to make any inroads in the industries of the future. And we’ll be poorer for that failure.
at the same time you were writing this, David was writing this about the screen actors guild.
Or any of the unions in Hollywood. They operate very differently from a standard union. And by doing so they don’t get in the way of creating the product, but do provide value to their members.
(my last post of the night).
You guys can tell me I’m wrong, cast aspersions, shout out the wonderful things unions have accomplished, and more. But at the end of the year there will be fewer private employees in unions. At at the end of next year, even fewer.
You can shoot the messenger but it won’t change the facts on the ground.
Yes, there are an increasing number of jobs where unions wouldn’t provide a valuable service. And there tend not to be unions for these jobs. That all makes sense to me. Unions are there to support the rights of workers in non-professional job environments. They do an imperfect, but pretty darned good job of it, most of the time.
I think perhaps you’re missing the ways that professions without unions do often have employee organizations that support some of their goals; organizations like the ACM, which in addition to supporting computer science research also had a whole arm devoted to helping establish professional standards for software development companies. We don’t need unions to evolve to fill these roles, because frankly, that approach is wrong, and there are already other organizations doing it right.
Of course, you’re way off the deep end with this “every parent knows” stuff about unions keeping substandard teachers in schools. I think quite a few parents are very aware of the complex issues here, and few of them have such a hostile view toward their kids’ teachers. I’m really somewhat surprised to hear you use that kind of rhetoric, frankly.
Comes from spending several years on a committee where I saw first hand the devastation they cause to poor kids. The poorer the student body, the crappier the teachers. And the kids going through those systems are then stuck in a cycle of poverty.
We rich parents bitch about the occasional bad teacher our kids hit, and then teach them that subject ourselves or hire tutors. The poor parents without a college degree do not have those options.
Without some sort of evidence to back up your claims, it appears as though it’s completely based on your personal experience. That’s all well and good, but I really don’t think it’s germane to the discussion of unions. Anecdotes don’t equal data.
The cycle of poverty has a lot more to do with the fact that union jobs for blue collar workers have gone away, and almost nothing to do with the fact that teachers are unionized.
Teachers work extremely hard for very little pay, and I think that you should back up your claims with facts and figures before you start disparaging them. Just because you, your kids, or the school where you had your bad experience, had a few bad teachers doesn’t mean that it’s their fault that class disparities exist.
You’re essentially blaming the gap between rich and poor solely on teachers. While there do need to be improvements in the way we evaluate teacher performance, the entire education system is complicit in its problems. I agree that education is at the root of why there is such a disparity of wealth in this country, but to blame teachers is utter nonsense.
Talking to numerous activists for minority schoolchildren issues, spending hours in meetings, etc. on these issues, talking to principals, administrators, teachers, etc as part of that.
And trying to effect any real change was like hitting a brick wall.
I appreciate that this is an important issue to you. Please show me some data to back it up. Until you do, it’s just an emotional appeal. You’ve got no shortage of pathos, now give me some ethos.
http://www.davidthielen.info/p…
but with or without teacher’s unions, poor school would get bad teachers. The union isn’t the problem here, it’s the scapegoat. The problem is that we don’t actually support our school systems.
The problem is people like the former superindendent of school district 12 in Colorado Springs, who stood up in a meeting I attended a couple years ago and told everyone that district 12 receives “the same per pupil reimbursement as district 11”, without mentioning that he was using a technical term for only one part of the school’s revenue… or that PPR makes up less than 50% of district 12’s budget, but nearly 80% of district 11’s budget (in the last year I checked).
There are people out there working very hard to maintain the illusion that money doesn’t correlate with school quality, but citing anecdotes that are the exception rather than the rule, but flat-out lying or misleading about the money, basically pretending that it’s all about the ideology, that money doesn’t matter. All the while, schools in poorer communities are trying to do a harder job, educating children with more barriers to learning — behavioral, social, language, nutritional, parental support, what-have-you — and we’re giving them a little over half the resources to do it with. And we wonder why those schools are having some pretty serious problems.
Frankly, buying into the right-wing “blame the teachers” rhetoric is just so wrong, it needs to be stopped. Bad teachers are there because the schools can’t hire better ones. Yes, the union supports all of its members without looking at their job performance. They are one party in the bargaining process, and that’s their job.
The entires system is a mess. And most teachers do a really good job in spite of, not because of, the system they operate in.
What is frustrating to me is they keep trying variations upon the same failed themes.
It should be “whither unions?” “Wither” away and die is what Walmart would like to see unions do…
or a Freudian slip. Sorta all of em, maybe.
via Bill Moyers Journal
State of the Unions with Bill Fletcher and Michael Zweig
With public support for labor unions at its lowest point in 70 years, Bill Moyers talks with experts Bill Fletcher, co-author of SOLIDARITY DIVIDED: THE CRISIS IN ORGANIZED LABOR AND A NEW PATH TOWARD SOCIAL JUSTICE and Michael Zweig, director of the Center for the Study of Working Class Life at SUNY Stony Brook, about the state of organized labor.
…to software programmers, or at least those whose programming entails some creative input to solving problems.
One reason unions appear to be “in decline” is that manufacturing is manifestly in decline–in large part because factory owners succeeded in moving jobs overseas where unions were not an issue. Unforeseen, perhaps, was the simple fact that Henry Ford recognized a century ago: he was making cars for the very people who worked at his factories! I suppose manufacturers who moved jobs abroad figured the laid off workers would keep on buying their products–with what, well, who knows?
Bottom line: a blanket discussion of “unions” is entirely besides the point. They are useful for some, not for others.
Just like corporations are not all the same. A grocery workers’ union is different than the Teamsters, just like Microsoft is different than Google.
There is also a major difference in union strength depending on what part of the country you live in. Colorado has unique laws that makes union organizing much harder than in other states, for example.
I suspect software workers don’t unionize for the same reason that tons of college professors don’t (or if they do, unionize with the relatively tame AAUP instead of the NEA) — because it’s a class bias. Unions are seen as working-class, and not something ‘professionals’ do. The fact that the professions are ever becoming more tenuous in their status (tenure’s withering away, software work is contracted out) doesn’t change the bias.
Teachers are certainly professionals, as are actors and athletes. And if that’s not enough, there are also unionized engineers (SPEEA for example).
The discussion about creating a game developer’s guild was all around what was the ROI, not was it appropiate. And that was all programmers, artists, program managers, etc.
However, teachers are professionals who are paid poorly, so there’s a meaningful incentive to take collective political action. Professors (those lucky enough to enjoy tenure) and engineers (to say nothing of actors and athletes) have more comfortable salaries, so they can claim immunity (not that it’s smart, given the direction higher ed is going these days — just that they do).