Wes
Since I don't belong to a union, and therefore don't have free paid time, I can't take all the time necessary to respond to your well-written post.
As to your overtime issue, the Railway Act conspires with the Fair Labor Standards Act to put you in the situation you're in. I've run into much the same thing with commercial fishermen working on factory ships, irrigation crews sitting in the desert waiting for Colorado River water to be delivered at their designated canal gate in the middle of the night, or tow truck drivers finding themselves "released" but chained to their cell phones and having to stay within a few minutes of the tow truck. I now understand the scenario you're working under...thanks for the info. BTW, you're screwed.
Your OJ/oarsmen examples are fun, but they really are a bit simplistic, aren't they. Maybe if you have OJ pointing a gun to his attorney's head to force him to be his attorney, or the oarsmen threaten a mutiny just before the worst rapids one might imagine, I could accept them as viable comparisons.
The problem is not just with the cost of the contract, the wages or the benefits going into the building of Impalas today...it is the cost of maintaining the benefits of the folks who built real Impalas several decades ago. The Warren Court and the NLRB of the late 50s and 60s did a fine job of making it nearly impossible for a strike to be defended against, and hot cargo actions simply served to completely strangle anyone who dared to take on the AFL-CIO, the Kennedys and the Johnsons. The laws and enforcement have only recently come back to what they were supposed to be: guidelines for a fair struggle between the parties which could lead to fair agreements which make neither suffer at the hand of the other. Easy to blame designers for product, but that doesn't answer the problem of not having enough money to put the good designs into producxtion or raising the prices of the product beyond the competition because of labor costs of folks that don't even work anymore. The PBGC is all but bankrupt from the defined-benefit plans, and yet Taft-Hartley trust funds run by the unions are so overfunded that they could build dozens of replicas of Las Vegas where the Teamsters could only put up a few casinos. Some trust funds even tell companies to take a month off from paying premiums, as if to rub their noses into it.
We are all paying for this. Look at your own industry and compare it with European and Japanese railroads...modern rails and equipment draw folks to ride and rely on that form of transportation. Other than a few Eastern and the San Diego-LA runs, nobody wants to use it as daily transportation. Look at the movement of freight...a megaport is being built south of TJ because our beloved Longshoremen don't want to allow our stateside ports to put in the modern equipment that the rest of the Pacific Rim operates with...because it will result in having to give up a great deal of featherbedding. Modern cargo carriers simply won't go to LA-Long Beach, Oakland or Seattle anymore. So we will get our lead painted toys from China via Mexico within the next decade, probably brought across by Mexican trusk which have no need to comply with the DOT. Stuff like this requires years to plan and build, and investment funds to get it going, neither of which is going to happen when labor negotiations and fellow-traveler environmentalist organization lawsuits step in to slow things down to a crawl. Time is money (more so today than a few decades ago), so why fight in courts for 10 years just to get something started when the Mexican government (or Canadian for that matter) will give you the damn land and water access just so they can develop their own economies.
It's funny, Democrats who write long letters to former territories of the Soviet Union, China and emerging Latin American nations extolling the virtues of allowing free elections for labor organizational rights are the authors of card checks. The folks in Turkistan would understand card checks a lot easier than the concept of freedom of choice in an election booth...he!!, they still carry their Communist Party cards around as momentos...they don't want choice, they just want toilet paper.
Lawyers...yup, the basturds. I was a farmer first...I drove tractor, picked grapes and tomatos and stayed up all night lighting smudge pots and starting up old airplane motors we used for wind machines. But when folks start talking about taking ag water away for a Teamster financed golf course, want to shove catalytic converters up cow asses and won't let us plow because some gawddamn prairie dog who happens to have a white tail instead of tan one lives in the field, it's either grab a gun or a briefcase.
Yet folks get all touchy when the produce they eat starts making em sick...imagine Mexican produce irrigated with sewage water. You're already eating it. More to come...please wash it thoroughly.
We have forgotten how to work...but by golly, we know our rights!
BTW...when can I take a turn at running one of them big badasses down the tracks?
