Horse with no brain spins a union bouncy

[ScubaGuy]

Yet another bouncy.
DUmmy link

Horse with no Name Donating Member (1000+ posts)  Journal Click to send private message to this author Click to view this author's profile Click to add this author to your buddy list Click to add this author to your Ignore list    Wed Mar-02-11 12:10 PM
Original message
Connecting the dots can get a little uncomfortable
   
Edited on Wed Mar-02-11 12:14 PM by Horse with no Name
When I was growing up, my mom worked in a UNION grocery store.

In the mid-70's, she made close to $20/hour with excellent benefits. But to make a finer point, there was an entire store full of employees who had the same deal, and nationwide, there were over 100 stores. You get the picture.

My Dad owned his own small business.

I remember we bought a nice little house. I also remember that their payments were $175 month.
My Dad drove a new Ford. He paid close to $8k for it. My mom drove a new Firebird.

We had horses and took vacations. We lived a normal, comfortable, middle class lifestyle.

I don't ever remember NEEDING anything...wanting, yes of course. I was a kid and that's what kids do.

We moved to Texas.

My mom went around to non-union grocery stores. She had extensive experience in management.
The MOST she was offered was $4.25 an hour (minimum wage was $2.65). No benefits. She refused to give anyone her years of grocery experience and was insulted by the offers. She ended up entering another field, but still made less than $8/hour. In 1978.

Talk about a paycut from a UNION job to a NON-UNION job.

This is why they are union busting. In Texas, they have been quietly union busting for years!
And not just in their state. Conditioning people to believe that they are lucky to have jobs that pay $8 an hour--while creating an atmosphere that UNIONS are bad and evil and that they are the reason that THEIR wages are lower.

Now, there is at least a generation that has grown up believing this is the best there is.

But watching as things unfold, it is starting to get a little uncomfortable.

This morning, I watched the gas go up another .05 a gallon. It made me cringe. This makes an increase of .30 in the last 4 days.

At the grocery store, I am spending more and getting less.

My health insurance just went up--although not nearly as much as I expected. An extra $100 a month.

High energy bills are up...higher.

There is a concerted attempt across the country to bust the unions. They want to take those jobs making living wages down and turn them into $8 an hour jobs.

Corporations are getting richer by the second. The rich are getting richer by the second. But it isn't enough. They want MORE and MORE and MORE.

Shared sacrifice is a joke. There is NO sharing here. Our President needs to understand that. Instead, the workers who have been beat down since the Reagan era want to pull the workers down that have been fortunate enough to make a decent living to their level because of spite and pure jealousy. Mr. President...sacrifice will be noticeable when the profit margins start decreasing instead of increasing to record levels each year. It doesn't take an economist to figure that out.
Quit telling us there is shared sacrifice because it simply does not exist.

It is a race to the bottom.

But, the ingredient for the PERFECT STORM is taking away the social safety net.

It's happening as we speak. Thread by thread by thread.

It won't be long until we find out what hell has been wrought. It is on the near horizon.

People are going to die in the streets. It really is that simple.

But, with world resources diminishing, is that the end game anyway? To get rid of US by instigating us to fight each other, while they sit back and smoke their Black Dragon cigars?

To put it even more simply, we are in the way. The healthiest of us will survive and they will be the worker class. The sick and weak ones will die off because to the rich, they are just money pits anyway.

Wake up America. We are a stones throw from hell and you are carrying the handbasket.

Interesting.  In 1976 I worked in a union grocery store in the northeast and was making somewhere between 4.50 - 5.00 / hour.
My brother was a manager in the very same union chain and was lucky if he was making about $18,000 / year.

2 years later as a 'fresh out' engineer the normal salaries were in the $18-$25K range and she claims her mother was making $40K in a grocery store.

[Ralph Wiggum]

Maybe that's why she's so scared of cabbage.

[delilahmused]

Dear DUmmies...especially those of you who are making up shit...AGAIN...to be part of the conversation or to be hip or cool or whatever the hell you're trying to do, you might want to think about toning down the hyperbole.

For instance...if you're making up a story about a super, wonderful, perfect union job from the 1970's you might want to have things like wages more believable for the time. Company vice presidents weren't making $20 an hour back then. My brother worked for a union grocery store in the early 90's and he only made $10-something an hour.

A good rule of thumb: don't make union wages more than double non-union jobs. And you might want to do a little web research before you start throwing numbers around. For instance, a simple google of "union wages grocery store" brings up the very first link tho the bureau of labor statistics 2010-2011 edition. Under the section for grocery store earnings (this includes union jobs as you can gather from the paragraph below). MANAGERS today only earn $16.90 an hour.

Maybe it's time to give that horse a name and ride off into the sunset. FYI: it sets in the west.

Cindie

[thelaughingman]

When I was growing up, my mom worked in a UNION grocery store.

In the mid-70's, she made close to $20/hour with excellent benefits.

[Karin]

Plus no grocery store could possibly last the fiscal year, paying everyone $20 and hour + benefits in 1970.  Do you know how hard it is to squeeze a buck out of the food business?  The margins are thin as a dime.  Competition is a constant threat, with much of the goods being commodity.

[Ralph Wiggum]

Plus no grocery store could possibly last the fiscal year, paying everyone $20 and hour + benefits in 1970.  Do you know how hard it is to squeeze a buck out of the food business?  The margins are thin as a dime.  Competition is a constant threat, with much of the goods being commodity.

I didn't bother clicking the link, did anyone call her on the B.S. about $20/hour in the 1970's?  That's such a load of crap.

[jukin]

Yet another bouncy.
DUmmy link

Interesting.  In 1976 I worked in a union grocery store in the northeast and was making somewhere between 4.50 - 5.00 / hour.
My brother was a manager in the very same union chain and was lucky if he was making about $18,000 / year.

2 years later as a 'fresh out' engineer the normal salaries were in the $18-$25K range and she claims her mother was making $40K in a grocery store.

I had four years of drafting (I'm old) and designing machines, a BSME and I started out at $22,500 in 1982. That was an exempt position and it was understood I had to put in at least 6-8 hours OT every week. My class mates started out under $20K.  Our chief engineer made $45K, project engineers were $32-36K, designers with 20+ years were $22-24K. No way a grocery store union member was pulling down $40K.

This story is pure fiction.

[franksolich]

Of course the story's pure fiction.

Look at who wrote it, one of the two biggest liars on Skins's island.

If memory serves me correctly, from union jobs in grocery stores circa the mid-1970s, about $4 or so an hour sounds right.

Nobody, but nobody, made $20 an hour in the mid-1970s.

That didn't come until the Reagan-Bush-Gingrich prosperity of the 1980s and 1990s.

[Karin]

No, nobody called her on it, Ralph.  It was a lot of K&R's, some socialistic vomitus from Socialist_in_TN, and the general weeping about how all the billionaires stole all of our money.  Personally, I keep mine in a safe place and am damned careful with it.  

[Ralph Wiggum]

No, nobody called her on it, Ralph.  It was a lot of K&R's, some socialistic vomitus from Socialist_in_TN, and the general weeping about how all the billionaires stole all of our money.  Personally, I keep mine in a safe place and am damned careful with it.  

I think everyone at the DUmp must have glossed over that little nugget of information.  Because the story was the real important part, ya' know, not those pesky details. 

[GOBUCKS]

In 1970, you could easily hire all the degreed engineers you wanted for $6/hour. The only way anyone could make $20/hour in a grocery store was by shoplifting. The guy who owned the store wouldn't clear $20/hour in 1970.

[franksolich]

In 1970, you could easily hire all the degreed engineers you wanted for $6/hour. The only way anyone could make $20/hour in a grocery store was by shoplifting. The guy who owned the store wouldn't clear $20/hour in 1970.

The unappellated eohippus, one of the two biggest liars on Skins's island, a couple of years ago said that her medical insurance premiums--the part she paid as a registered nurse--were $500 a month.

One-fourth of her monthly income, she said.

Like there's a registered nurse around making only $24,000 a year.....

[ConservativeMobster]

My ex made about $12 an hour in a small town papermill in the late 70's, early 80's.  Was a Union job and to make a long story short after a strike and negotiations any new hire was started at 8 bucks for the same title as my ex. How long do you think it took for some of the older guys to get replaced?  Better still, how long do you think it took until the whole mill was shut down?  These unions bargained themselves right into the dirt.

[Texacon]

Whore with no shame didn't address something.  WHY, if life were so good for her family, why did they move to Texas? 

Also, I remember a commercial back in the 80's .... it was about investing if I remember correctly.  Hell it might have been in the early 90's. 

The commercial showed a man and his dad sitting at, maybe a bar.  The son was telling his dad that he got the job.  His dad asked what he was earning.  They hinted at $30k/year.  The dad asked ... what are your plans.  The son kind of shrugged.  The dad admonished him "You're not a kid anymore, it's time to plan."

If a check out clerk at a grocery store was earning $40k +/year .... the commercial from the late 80's early 90's would make no sense.

KC

[Ralph Wiggum]

The unappellated eohippus, one of the two biggest liars on Skins's island, a couple of years ago said that her medical insurance premiums--the part she paid as a registered nurse--were $500 a month.

One-fourth of her monthly income, she said.

Like there's a registered nurse around making only $24,000 a year.....

Actually Frank, a part-timer could make that.  Some RN's only want to work part-time, and a lot of companies in the medical field grant benefits as long as you work at least 20 hours a week.  And that would mean that Horse With No Brain would be making about three dollars an hour more than her mom did 35 years ago.  As a union grocery story worker.  Yeah, I buy that.

[DLR Pyro]

She might have grossed $20.00 after working a 4 hour shift, but there is no way in hell she or her co-workers were making $20.00 an hour in the 1970's.

[FreeBorn]

Another load of lies from the funny pages of the DUmp. Grocery stores have a very thin profit margin. They clear about 3 cents on a can of soup. The loss due to "shrink" from damage, expiration, theft, is enormous. Even today almost nobody is making $20.00 per hour in that industry. The regional manager of a 100 store chain might have cleared that in those days, maybe, but certainly not even the individual store managers.

I had a grocery job for a few months when I first got home from the marines in '89, waiting for school to start. I earned $5.15/hr stocking shelves. My immediate supervisor showed me her pay stub one day. She was an assistant store manager who had 18 years with the company, her pay rate was $9.50/hr.

My wife is an LPN. After nursing school, in her first job in '83 she earned $2.50/hr. Today she makes $20.35/hr, still an LPN but her pay rate did not crest the $10 mark until the late '90s.

Employed as a welder through the 90's I earned an average of $11 to $15/hr. Today in an industrial blue collar non union position I earn $16.70/hr, guys I work with who were doing similar work through the '70s tell me $5/hr was considered good money in those days.

My dad retired from the government in the early '90s as a GS15, by the mid '70s he had reached management level and believe me, he made nowhere near $20/hr then. The '70s were tough for everybody, certainly not the good old days" by any stretch. There is no way in hell this person's mother made what he claims she did at that time.

Here's a novel idea for the DUmbasses to contemplate- If you can't manage to subjugate your employer to pay you unrealistic wages with your union thuggery then open your own business, enter the market place with a product or service wrought by your own ingenuity and the sweat off yourbrow and back, hire employees, make payroll, be sure to not forget your roots and ideals though and pay them whatever they demand of you, no matter how much that may be. See how long you last.

[AllosaursRus]

When I was growing up, my mom worked in a UNION grocery store.

In the mid-70's, she made close to $20/hour with excellent benefits.

Anybody remember the Nixon wage freeze? I think it was '74, not sure. I was makin' $3.25/hr wiring mobile homes in a factory.

I had just had my first child and told my bosses I was gonna have to leave in order to find greener pastures. They invented a new job, that kept me doin' the same thing but with a different title because according to them, I would be impossible to replace. They had to do this because Nixon put a wage freeze on everyone in the country! To this day I never understood how that was supposed to help the country economically!

I think it was about 40¢/hr! It kept me there for one more year and I had enough! I bought a kilo of some decent Mexican weed and moved to Oregon. The weed was to bribe my brother in law for a place to stay while I found a job.

Took me about 5 years to get into a position to be able to buy a new car and a house. Best thing I ever did but it was damned hard for a few years. I told ya about loadin' boxcars outa freezers in the rail yard. Times were damn tough in the '70's, but it got me outa Kalifornica and well on my way to a construction career. I didn't make $20/hr until the late '80's! And that was as a working foreman!

This DUmmie is so full 'o shit, her eyes must be brown! If not, just means she's a quart low!

Also, the only Grocery chain back then that was union, was Safeway, and the wage was $4.50/hr for cashiers! Good money in those days, but the union ended up damn near bankrupting them If I remember correctly, they went from union to employee owned, at least on the west coast. It's the only thing that saved them!

That was in the days when the warehouse markets started showin' up. Put a hell of a lot of Ma and Pop stores right outa business! Now these asshats bitch about Wally World. Hell they got the idea from places like Costco, and Sams!

[thundley4]

Whore with no shame didn't address something.  WHY, if life were so good for her family, why did they move to Texas? 

KC

That is my question too.  Why move from Utopia?  The grocery store went bankrupt and other dealers started undercutting her dad's prices?

[vesta111]

That is my question too.  Why move from Utopia?  The grocery store went bankrupt and other dealers started undercutting her dad's prices?

Lets see I came up from Tenn. in 1988, minimun wage was $4.11 ph.

This state it was perhaps $5.10 ph   After 3-4 years I was making  close to $6.00 ph--with a lot of over time not too bad.

I asked a worker who had been there for 15 years what her ph. wage was and when she told me I was stunned, she was after all that time making less the $7.50 ph.

It took me 22 years to hit $15.00 ph and with allot of overtime I just reached $30,000 a year.  This was for 6 day a week working.  The company benefits were non taxable and out of the ordinary.

If that poster says his or her mother was making $40.00 ph in the 1970---she was making more then a Family Practitioner.

Darn making 77 k a year in the 1970 put you in the super paid category.

[AllosaursRus]

Lets see I came up from Tenn. in 1988, minimun wage was $4.11 ph.

This state it was perhaps $5.10 ph   After 3-4 years I was making  close to $6.00 ph--with a lot of over time not too bad.

I asked a worker who had been there for 15 years what her ph. wage was and when she told me I was stunned, she was after all that time making less the $7.50 ph.

It took me 22 years to hit $15.00 ph and with allot of overtime I just reached $30,000 a year.  This was for 6 day a week working.  The company benefits were non taxable and out of the ordinary.

If that poster says his or her mother was making $40.00 ph in the 1970---she was making more then a Family Practitioner.

Darn making 77 k a year in the 1970 put you in the super paid category.

Uh Vesta, it was 20/hr. But even then, it is a stretch in the way of LA to NY with a rubber band!

[Chris_]

TN minimum wage in 1988 was $3.80.

[Boudicca]

In 1970, you could easily hire all the degreed engineers you wanted for $6/hour. The only way anyone could make $20/hour in a grocery store was by shoplifting. The guy who owned the store wouldn't clear $20/hour in 1970.

Shoplifting, or banging the boss.

[Chris_]

Adjusted for inflation, $20/hour (full-time, 40 hours a week) is worth more than $200,000.  Must have been one hell of a grocery store.  Were they selling cocaine and *****?

[AllosaursRus]

Adjusted for inflation, $20/hour (full-time, 40 hours a week) is worth more than $200,000.  Must have been one hell of a grocery store.  Were they selling cocaine and *****?

Now that's some ***** I'd like to see! Ta hell with the cocaine!