All I Can Say Is…
Heh.
One of my first jobs was in the shipping department at a factory that paid well and was a great place to work. They were one of the area’s “big employers” and getting a job there was relatively… not prestigious, but sought after and respectable anyway.
The industry became increasingly competetive, more of the work was done in the south where costs were lower and equipment was newer. It became harder and harder to maintain plants in Massachusetts, long and storied history or not.
There was always muttering about unionization, ranging from jocular disgruntlement that was not at all serious to genuine efforts, and repeated rejections by the workforce, by union organizers.
Eventually they succeeded. At a company that was already treating people fairly well, struggling to stay open as much to keep people in jobs as because it made the slightest business sense, they then proceeded to fail to ever negotiate a contract in the months before the place shut down. Whatever work they were still doing in Massachusetts moved to another state. The end would have come anyway, but I thought the employees were unmentionably stupid for hastening it, and they weren’t too happy with the union negotiators stonewalling the company and never actually getting them a contract.
The Wal-Mart link via Kate at Outside the Beltway.
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