Labor vs. management, or, people vs powerful
Published by Mike Stark April 9th, 2006 in UncategorizedBackground for this call:
The local television station, WRGB Channel 6, is owned by Freedom Communications. Freedom Communications decided to play hardball with NABET, a union for certain television station employees. Amongst other demands, they asked workers to take pay cuts of up to 15%.
The union started a “Turn off channel 6″ campaign. They posted signs across the broadcsat area asking people to, oddly enough, turn off channel six. They also pressured politicians to refuse ad buys and interviews on channel 6.
When Eliot Spitzer decided to honor the union’s request, management blinked.
Certain other things should be known as well. The union believes that the company got tough because of a recent capital infusion from a Wall Street investment firm named Blackstone. Evidently, healthy profits aren’t adequate - they insist on double digit returns - even if it means squeezing labor to cut costs.
Finally, you should know that “Jenny”, mentioned in the call, promised to never watch channel 6 again because the workers fought the company. She had mentioned something about union secretaries being paid a whopping $17/hr (I’ll bet she didn’t realize $17/hr works out to about $35,000/yr…)
Additional note: Posting might be light for the next coupla days. I’ve got some things I’ve got to get done. I’m going to try to keep up with posts by concentrating on the evening shows, but we’ll have to see. In the meantime, if any of y’all want to take a stab at making some calls, email me the results. Take this as a reminder: I’m happy to listen to anything you send me. More likely than not, I’ll post it.
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Great phone call Mike, I’m so glad you speak out on what is going on in the disappearing middle class in this country. Union labor has dropped to barely over 12% of the workforce. I’ve witnessed its decay and dismantling by corporate America firsthand.
A great article (I’ll post the link) states that productivity AND wage increases have accelerated at the same rate from 1947 to 1973. However, what has happened since? Wages have dropped while productivity has increased, squeezing the wage earner like never before while the wealthy 10% become obscenely wealthy.
Two words: Corporate Greed.
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=11300
Mike, just a quick comment regarding your call to the O’Reilly show where you mentioned Olberman. O’Reilly plays dirty. Im not suggesting that,but I do wonder why democrats and liberals take it up the a** from O Reilly all the time. O’ says a lot of good things, a lot of logical things, and argues and speaks very persuasively. but he also says some things which are not consistent with democracy, he often distorts and mischaracterizes, often contradicts his own statements, and as you found out, his practice does not necessarily come remotely close to what he preaches.
anyway, think this was posted in the wrong place, not sure where to. but on http://www.blogghogg.com (think it is in the link above) some basic points, along with a bunch of cites, are made that perhaps ought be be made mainstream