I was referring to the fact that unions work with colleges to development training programs. You are referring to something else entirely different from that. It is not just for new hires that these programs exist. Unions use (contract with) community colleges for advanced training, re-certification, and other similar programs. Sometimes, if you have union training, you can transfer that to community college credits if you enroll in a degree- or certificate-granting program.

Zen, read about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of March 25, 1911. Then read about the Imperial Foods Fire in Hamlet North Carolina of September 3, 1991. Do "mere bolt tighteners" deserve safe working conditions? "As to those that proclaim that unions have managed to improve the safety and conditions of the 'working class', that's nonsense and ignores the actual history and factual requirements of industry, obviously quoted and propagandized by those that have little real experience of working in such supposedly dangerous and humanity draining conditions." Google away and let us know when you find a similar horror at a union shop.

Fluke, in reply to your second point, that is why _culture_ is more important than law because it is the _basis_ for law. Your fear is well grounded: if government agents could just go around proactively ferreting out unsafe working conditions, we would suffer "dictatorship of the investigators" worse that OSHA today. Factory inspectors would become hooligans shaking down businesses. I doubt that Rand intended that. The likely scenario is that if an unsafe condition were not remediated, the workers would bring it to the attention of a court of competent jurisdiction. But that is just my own surmise. Rand herself did not elaborate her assertion.

Employers don't agree with you, Mike. That is why there is a huge trend toward outsourcing of skilled trades, even engineering, to entire firms full of people who may or may not be unionized. It is easier to deal with one contact rather than 1000 people hitting your HR department, but it is even easier to outsource all of that. Some places even outsource the HR department, too. Look at companies like Administaff or Staff Leasing.

Flukeman, computering is mind work of highest kind. Moreso than other workers, programmers (analysts, software engineers, database administrators...) sell their ability to generate useful ideas. So, the lines between "worker" and "owner" or "laborer" and "entrepreneur" are fuzzy. I don't know how many computer user group meetings you attend but if you do, you find a lot of people selling ideas, looking for investors, looking for work, looking to hire, all in the same room, sometimes the same person "wearing two hats." They tend to move around, also, from project to project. In the glory days, Detroit was like that for tool-and-die.

Relationships between trade unions and colleges are completely unnecessary. My university contracts all of that kind of work out. I agree with Robbie wholeheartedly on this one.

True enough, Fred Kinnan was painted the most sympathetically among the looters, but only sometimes. The union boss (Was that Kinnan?) who went to see Dagny in AS1 who told Dagny that she couldn't run the train on the John Galt Line got reamed. There were several other times that union thugs got put down in AS, but you are correct in your analysis.

Rearden did have a union, but it was not part of the United Metal Workers Guild. Unions had a noble purpose in that era. Now their purpose is far more political than anything else.

Rand respected anyone at any level who worked hard and used their minds at least a little bit.

Zen, you would have to ask Ayn Rand about that. I am only quoting her. You will find her statements in _Objectively Speaking: Ayn Rand Interviewed_ edited by Marlene Podritske and Peter Schwartz. Rand was deeply influenced by the communist revolution which she saw as a _betrayal_ of the worker. She always gave more emotional investment to factory workers than to farmers, whom she saw as backward and conservative. Like motherhood, farming could be a rational profession, but to her the future belonged to engineers of both genders. In _Objectively Speaking_ she called unsafe working conditions a form of initiation of force by endangerment.

Fluke, culture is a deep determinant. Generally, with government work, you bring your motivation with you because few incentives exist. In the private sector, incentives support positive motives. While many people in government do work at their best level, the broad culture of government work is oriented toward a socialist model of the least work possible. At the same time, I have seen oppressive working conditions for government clericals that would never be allowed in the private sector: the workers put up with it for the guarantee of a job. Anyone with more gumption would quit. So, government unions are the worst sort. On the other hand, I knew electricians who maintained two memberships: UAW and IBEW. They could work factory or construction. I would not "endorse" either of those unions necessarily, but I did see that competition between them kept each a bit more honest. And, to the point, they were craft unions representing skilled workers who generally saw themselves as independent agents. You don't get that too often in government.

Robbie, it is the other way around: 150 years ago, with an open frontier and farmland available, the unions were LESS necessary than today. As inventions made work more complicated and as finance made corporations more complex, unions became useful, perhaps necessary, as media of information about wages and conditions. The relationship between skilled trades unions and community colleges is an example of such positive engagement.

Brenner, if you read _Atlas Shrugged_ more closely, you will see that Rearden Steel had a union. At one point, Rearden and the union steward are walking across the mills and the chief says to the boss that it is not him and Fred Kinnan against Hank Rearden and Orren Boyle, but him and Rearden against Kinnan and Boyle.

(Also, Fred Kinnan was probably the looter drawn most sympathetically, sort of a worse Gail Wynand. Rand had a broad "proletarian" streak in that her capitalist heroes were only workers of greater vision and deeper motives. They all worked at the shop floor level of engagement. It was the looters - Jim Taggart, Orren Boyle, Mr. Mowen - who never got their hands dirty.)

Ed, do you suppose that I am an angel or demon that I am "completely out of touch with how the real world works"? (What other world exists, but the real one?) Generally, these past 40 years, I have been a contractor. I have also been an employee. Inspired by Ayn Rand's fiction and non-fiction works and the insights of pro-market economists, the details of employment are not essential to the culture of craft: I am always "self-employed" - given that every entrepreneur always works for other people. That is what a market is.

As you say, employment is "at will." It cuts both ways. Workers fire their employers all the time.

Beyond that, you and I are painting broad pictures of different aspects of the general economy. When you say that "enlightened employers engage their workers to help make operations efficient and sensible" you not speaking of General Motors. One of the reasons for the success of Michael Milken was that so many corporations had fallen into the hands of careless, thoughtless managers, who operated contrary to the best interests of the real owners. Those owners took the companies back, sometimes liquidating them entirely.

Your model seems to be the classic 19th century sole proprietor. Henry Ford ran his company that way. But, again, General Motors was always intended as an impersonal, self-operating organization not dependent on entrepreneurship. I have worked for many small firms, tech start-ups, and such. They follow the entrepreneurial model. The Fortune 500... not so much...

In a free market, an employer would be free to enter any contract he wants to, or to refuse to enter any contract that is not in his interests. Your language implies that somehow a contract is alien to a free market, which of course is absurd.

You are so completely out of touch with how the real world works. According to you, the 90% of non-union workers in the private sector simply can't work with management to negotiate pay or to enforce safety standards. Most workers in the private sector are hired "at will", and that includes most hourly as well as exempt workers. Every job I've had over more than 40 years has been "at will". There is no "new contract". The relevant issues are, for starters, performance, merit, competition, and success in the market place. Employers and their insurance companies have huge financial incentives to enforce safety standards. And for the most part, it is indeed the employers, not the workers, that establish and enforce safety standards. Enlightened employers engage their workers to help make operations efficient and sensible. Completely contrary to your assertion, the wise employer pays his employees well and communicates with them effectively. He has a strong incentive to provide good working conditions so that he can keep good employees and effectively compete. And employees at such companies, which are the majority, consistently rebuff unionization. In no way does union membership, at least as it is currently practiced, provide an advantage to an employer.

Just to interject here...while unions have rolls, they should fulfill certain roles.

I'm not sure where you get that 'closed shops' are illegal in the US? There are some states that have Right to Work laws, but by no means all. Hiring halls are not allowed for public employees, but are common for nearly all trade union contracts.

The purpose of government is to protect the rights of it's citizens and therefore that is the duty of it's employees.

Public unions seem to bring about a conflict of interest. Is it protective of citizen's rights to negotiate for a near impossibility of firing a non-performing employee or protect feather-bedding? Is it protective of citizens' rights to provide public union employees better health insurance than that available to the citizen? Is it protective of citizens' rights to negotiate better vacation and sickbays than available for citizens? Etc., etc.

Wage rates and legal sanctions and fines 'whether or not anyone actually was injured' doesn't sound very laissez faire or Objectivist to me.

Why would you propose that the employer's power needs counterbalancing? The employer brings the capital, the resources, the needed equipment, the ideas, the organizing and management systems, the marketing and transportation systems. The employee brings his skills and hours of labor. At the end of the day, what is the comparative risk between the two? The employer has risked everything, the employee has risked what? The old adage of 'I was looking for a job when I found this one' seems to me to apply.

Too many today mis-define unions. They've been with us since pre-history, even in tribal conditions as clans, beginning with any specialization in crafts, primarily as value protection of the individual craftsman and control, and secondarily to ensure the training of future craftsmen. As trade between tribes grew and concentration of populations grew, guilds which spanned beyond the tribe came into being. Weavers, Smiths, Masons, Woodworkers, Farmers, etc., etc.

It's only with the advent of the machine age and the production line of the latter 19th century, combined with the 'commons' concepts of Marx that guilds became less relevant and today's destructive 'unionism' took over and began it's takeover of labor. Now, not only the trained craftsman could exercise more control over his worth and value, but the common laborer and machine operator and bolt tightener with little if any skill or training could join in and obtain his piece of the 'commons pie'. Today's Unionism is in fact nothing more than Marxism, and by permitting unions, first to nationalize beyond their local association by partnering with those in government, and then into government employment, the technocrats of socialism in bureaucracy gained control of the government and much of the economy.

You ask to 'highlight how unions can be fully deserving of the term monopoly', but in doing so, you drastically minimize the truth and the true danger of today's unions. Today's major unions are not for the most part composed of men who've spent years of study, training, and practice to become proficient in their craft or trade - but instead are primarily composed of those with at most a high-school education and have learned the necessities of their job with a week or a month's training, mostly called familiarization and have gained promotions through seniority.

As to those that proclaim that unions have managed to improve the safety and conditions of the 'working class', that's nonsense and ignores the actual history and factual requirements of industry, obviously quoted and propagandized by those that have little real experience of working in such supposedly dangerous and humanity draining conditions. Pure economies of obtaining and keeping workers and maintaining productivity have done as much or more than any supposed activities by unions or regulations by technocrats of bureaucracy. Those supposed activities and regulations for the working conditions of the working class have only served to gain control of industry, impose massive burdens on productivity, and drained trillions of dollars from society.

That's enough for now.