Winseer:
Rjan:
…Are we not talking about two seperate cross-purposes here?
FULL time jobs - OLD hand gets cushy contract, new starters get crappy contract.
AGENCY jobs - New hands get cushy contract, old hands - resent it very much - but don’t have the balls to vote with their feet and do exactly the same - leave FT and go agency
…which is why there’s a log jam between “shifts available” and “shifts coverable”.
There wouldn’t even be agency workers there if the full-timers clamped down on it - unions used to fight casualisation and force firms to man their operations properly.
What they have traded is others’ job security for their own - and then complain when the rates soar for agency workers who have no job security.
And their complaints ring hollow, because like you say, most won’t give up the security for the higher rate. Haha, they daren’t even face the market, which they say should determine others’ pay when it happens to be lower than their own!
What we’re seeing in this thread is an exposition in how the right-wing union member thinks. His commitment is not to the working class, or even to his own kids as workers, but to himself. He does not have the solidarity of the fighter. He is willing to make no sacrifice. He is merely one of a number of grafters, a member of the union by convenience whilst he’s filling his own boots, even at the expense of his own co-workers.
Such thinking has governed for a generation, and that is probably why the rich have never been richer whilst the working class of this country are not just substantially poorer but now positively dying in a crisis of reproduction.