Date: Sun, 17 Jun 2001 15:50:34 -0700 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: "Brad Knowles" <brad.knowles@skynet.be>, "Rahul Siddharthan" <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in> Cc: <chat@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: RE: Mundie, Perens, GPL, BSD etc again Message-ID: <000601c0f77f$eb28c9c0$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> In-Reply-To: <p05100318b7525d0f1bde@[194.78.241.123]>
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>-----Original Message----- >From: Brad Knowles [mailto:brad.knowles@skynet.be] > > Now you just try to tell me that Unions have this kind of >power in the US. > Actually they do but they exercise it differently. We don't have fools running out onto the highways because there's way too many rednecks here running around with shotguns. If a Farmer tried blocking a major public highway with a tractor, the good old boys in their '73 mud-covered Chevy truck with a winch as big as an elephant would come down and "explain" it to him, after dragging the tractor off the road. Someone told me about one of these "explanations" during the recent visit by the Dali Lama. It seems that when the Dali was speaking that some jackass in the back in the anti-Lama crowd kept yelling and disrupting the speech - so about 5 minutes into it, 3 guys held up a sheet between the Lama and TV cameras and demonstrator while 4 others pounded on him until he shut up. Pretty funny considering the topic of the speech was non-violence. :-) Instead, the Unions are basically in bed with the corporations, and most of the strike posturing you see on the evening news is fake - it's staged so that the union members all think that their contract votes actually make a difference. Every once in a great, great while you see a real strike, like the Air Traffic Controllers strike that was broken up about 15 years ago, but mostly the strikes you see here are set up. What happens is that the Union goes on strike for 2 months - thus none of the members get paid for that period - and then hammers out a contract with the company for a 5% wage increase over the next 2 years. Of course, the additional money gained by the increase is equally offset by the loss of wages over the previous 2 months, so the union membership ends up getting absolutely nothing more than on the old contract, but they are dumb enough that they actually think they gained something. Meanwhile the company has gained cash to improve their short term cash flow, which if the Union hadn't struck they would have had to furlough all of them for 2 months anyway. The corporations want the unions in because that way they have control over their employees. If there was no union, if a particular employee on a production line got mad he would just stop working which could stuff up the assembly line. With the Union, the shop steward can come over and punch the union member in the nose to get him working again, if necessary. Ted Mittelstaedt tedm@toybox.placo.com Author of: The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide Book website: http://www.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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