If the UAW is killing GM and not the fact they produced crap for years and are only now almost on par in quality with the rest of the world, still have tupperware interiors and features in their cars that consumers dreamed about 10 years ago. I am pretty sure Ford would be in the same boat... yet somehow they are not... go figure.

BTW my father who has been down the docs for 46 years makes about 28 an hour thank you very much. Of course anything before 8am and after 5pm is time and a half and anything on the weekends is time and a half. There are also meal hours which are double. It's not a ridiculous amount of money, but you can make a lot by doing overtime. Considering that as long as a ship is in port it is loosing money, you work a ship for x number of days to get to unloaded and loaded. So if it is there for 3 day, you work 3 days straight with the appropriately paid amount of time break based on the equipment you are driving and the team you are working with. So there goes your 80 an hour BS.

Ok all those IT folks who went to college and took "anat & phys, microbiology, pathophysiology" raise your hands. ... Yeah so like I said, 4-5 years.

So I knew that the union comment would take a beating. I always get the sense that those against unions are just like the higher ups. They know the cost of everything but the value of nothing. Since you all went after the low hanging same old same old fruit that hold no merit. As to unions giving a sense of entitlement, you are damn straight. If you put in 5 or 50 years of work at a company you should have a sense of entitlement. You have helped this company become what it is and you should be entitled to be proud of your job and your work. As to getting rid of unions because they protect the lazy workers which are a small minority. Or, unions are bad because I once heard a story about a union that voted against taking a pay cut and the company shut down. Using this logic, we should abolish freedom of speech because there are is a small minority of crazies out there that will say just about anything and just about anything because they can. We should also get rid of the right to bear arms because there are a small amount of nut jobs out there that will get all the guns they can and shoot people. The Police should be disbanded because there is a small minority out there that abuse their power. Face it, it's a piss poor argument because all human constructs are flawed. If you go looking for a problem, you will find several in everything, but they doesn't mean we should eliminate it because of those problems. The good out weights the bad when it comes to unions. As to the statement that unions are no longer needed because the government has laws that protect the worker today. Yeah keep telling yourself that. You simply cannot live on minimum wage in this country without working some crazy hours like an 80 hour week, that is a fact. Almost all the minimum wage jobs you can get will only allow you to work part time so that they don't have to pay for health insurance which means you need several part time jobs at minimum wage to get the ridiculous amount of hours you need to just barely scrape by. Oh and forget health insurance because you can't afford it and of course all those hours you spend working are contributing to your good heath. The government nor a company isn't going to pay attention to one individual, but a union it will. Unfortunately in this country thanks to years and untold amount of money lobbying and discrediting unions, corporations have been able to enact many laws against unions in this country that have marginalized unions. The result of this is that we have the current work and health care abuses and a lot of other things that are completely out of balance in this country. Here is a kicker... I just read in the paper here on Sunday that corporations are lobbying harder than ever to allow more foreign works into this country to do tech jobs because there are simply not enough qualified candidates. UM BULLSHIT! I would send this into both my congressmen and my senators, but all this winds up doing is getting me on their junk mail list. On the other hand if I had a union that had a much larger pocket, voice, and pull I could have a chance to fight it. Oh and the GM stockholders got the shaft because people that knew the cost of everything but the value of nothing keep making shit cars with Tupperwear interiors and features that were state of the art 10 years ago. Despite what you may have heard, the union workers at GM don't make much if anything more than non union shops. But I can guarantee you that without the union, all automotive companies would be paying minimum wage part time only on the assembly line. If you need any more evidence that the GM higher ups are morons the fact that they are killing off Pontiac rather than spinning it off as a separate company if a perfect example.

I used to work on the docks in NJ as a longshoreman during the summer and winter breaks from school in the early to mid 1990s. If I had stayed down there I would have close to 20 years in already, be getting paid close to the same amount I get now considering the hours that I put in plus the extended periods of no work each and every time the economy takes a down turn. I would have 6 weeks paid vacation every year, great medical, stable work, and no politics or being treated like an overpaid janitor. Unions are very good things people and sooner or later this country is going to figure out. The books are now closed and probably won't be open again for 5 years so even though I still have a union card, I can't get a job down there till federal government determines that it needs more workers thanks to the NYSA, not the union. I am trying to get a job as a US Customs Agent now. Sure I ain't going to be making a lot of money, but the benefits, 40 hour work week, and stable steady work means that it actually comes out to about the same as I make now.

Here is the problem... you are trying to assign arbitrary numbers to something that cannot be measured. These are numbers for accountants, they want one number to be able to show them where to cut cost. Problem is that there is no way to quantify how much money an IT department saves a company. Metrics have gotten out of control in this country. We are always measuring the cost and never measuring the value. How do you assign a number to a person who is not a number? How do you quantify the guy who spent all weekend fixing the server? How do you quantify the accrued knowledge of a human being? It impossible to do. The accountants never ask questions like, "How would my quality of life be affected if I couldn't get effective tech support?", "How much money would the company loose if these computers and programs didn't exist?". You need to measure the man and his work as a whole, person to person.

I have dealt with this before. My lawyer told me that only one or 2 of these cases have ever made it to the court. Judges throw these cases out as soon as they see them. Your previous employer cannot tell you where you can and cannot work. It is taking away your ability to earn a living. I had worked for a company for 2 years, went to their direct competitor for more money for a year, then came back to the first company. Both times I got a very official and long letter from the former company's law firm chastising me about the non-compete and asked me to respond within a certain time limit to some questions in the hope that I would write something that was actionable. Both times I ignored the letters, the time limit came and went, and nothing further happened. I have a friend who was in a similar situation and his former company decided to press the issue. It never made it to court, judge just threw it right out. I believe that the only way that a non-compete can be enforced is if the company can show significant monetary damage has occurred. Working for whomever you want is still perfectly legal in the USA!