Slowpoke Toon: Right to Be A Jerk States

[n2doc]

[daleanime]

1. Need posters!

[Gothmog]

2. Great cartoon

[another_liberal]

3. Thanks for posting this cartoon . . .

You can't blame people for being ignorant if no one ever tells them the facts.

[rhett o rick]

4. k&r. Thanks for posting. nm

[midnight]

5. Outstanding!

[Enthusiast]

6. Kicked and recommended!

[betsuni]

7. The jerk store called ...

[Brigid]

8. Daleanime is right -- Need posters!

[cstanleytech]

9. My older brother has exactly the same mentality as the guy at the end and it bit him on the ass

hard because his employer (Bi-Lo) ended up firing him and a number of other older experienced full timers in order to hire part timers at minimum wage.

[Brigid]

10. Happens all the time.

That is why workers have no loyalty -- no reason why they should when they get none back.

[ibewlu606]

11. Kicked!

I see this all the time with non-union electricians here in Florida. They really CAN'T do the math. You ought to see the look on their faces when I break it down for them on paper. The smart ones will go union, but many just can't get over the union animus that's ingrained into the psyche of southern workers.

[randr]

12. Right to work laws go further

We have them here in Colorado and if you think you have been discriminated against or in anyway mistreated at work forget about filing any grievance. You can be fired for bringing up the subject. Senior workers are especially singled out for "rotation", a new management style is directed at keeping workers on edge and suspicious of each other, and at the same time staffs are told to report "issues" in order to maintain "transparency".
My wife works at a hospital where these objectives are clearly spelled out in curriculum for upper management advance courses. There is also an system that favors advancement of less qualified people putting the "peter principle" firmly in place.
As with all "laws" proposed by the folk at ALEC, the "Right to Work" means the opposite.

[Jim Lane]

13. Actually, the assumption is that workers CAN do math.

A so-called "right to work" law is really a "right to be a free rider" law.

The correct calculation for the guy in the last panel would be: "If I join the union, they bargain on my behalf and I get better wages, minus a small deduction for union dues. If I don't join the union, they bargain on my behalf anyway and I get better wages, without the small deduction for union dues. I come out ahead by not joining, right?"

The problem is that, in the short term, he does come out ahead by not joining. Thus, under a "right to work" situation, any one individual worker has an incentive to take a free ride on the union dues payments of the workers who do join.

If enough people reason that way, then the union can't bargain effectively and everyone is worse off.

It's a classic free-rider situation, to which the classic solution is compulsion. Workers can choose not to join the union but must still pay an "agency fee" to the union to support its work on their behalf. That's the arrangement that a "right to work" law prohibits.