Factory Jobs Disappear; Workers Lack Options [NYTimes]

On Monday, September 15, 2003, at 11:31 AM, orionaut wrote:

> --- In spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com, Al Globus wrote:
>
>> Unions, like insurance, are a necessary evil. Industries where
> the
>> bosses haven't rapaciously exploited the workers are, generally,
> not
>> unionized. However, when management literally kills workers for
>> profit, works must (and have) organized to protect themselves. I
> once
>> saw a bumper sticker: "Do you like weekends -- thank the unions".
> 12
>> hour days, 6 days a week were once standard -- even for 10 yr old
>> children. These conditions -- and worse -- are still common in
> some
>> parts of the world, but in Europe and the US unions changed that.
>
> I argue only with your tense.
>
> Unions did indeed once serve a legitimate purpose, but that time has
> long passed...at least here in the First World. Today,

About a year ago several workers in a chicken fire were burned to death
in a southern state (I can't remember which one) when a fire broke out
in a chick processing factory. It turned out that management had
LOCKED several of the fire exits and some workers had died trying to
break the lock. Furthermore, the same company had done the same thing,
with the same results, a few years earlier. It was not a union shop.

> they do
> nothing but arbitrarily confiscate money from folks who receive NO
> useful benefit therefrom (starting to sound like our old friend, the
> State, neh?). And, not at all incidentally, eviscerate American
> manufacturing's ability to compete in a larger world far less
> complacent than America's has been -- everso shortsightedly! -- for
> the last 40 years or so.
>
> spike
>

The dinosaurs were destroyed by an asteroid because they weren't
space-faring. It's almost as if Gaia then thought "Well, dinosaurs
worked pretty well, but space-faring is necessary. Maybe I'll should
try mammals this time." Humanity is now developing systems to detect
and deflect asteroids, and could build orbital space colonies to spread
beyond Earth to insure life would survive a planetary catastrophe.

Al Globus
CSC at NASA Ames Research Center
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/~globus/home.html

Views expressed in this email are only my opinions and are not the
position of any organization I'm familiar with.