www.CostaRicaTicas.com

And why the hell is this in the Hotel section?

I am a member of IBT (International Brotherhood of Teamsters). I am very pro-union. In the transportation business they are absolutely necessary.Transportation company execs. for years have been trying to lower or eliminate hours of service and safety requirements. Basically their dream is to put a truck or bus on the road with balding tires and a driver who has been going for 20 hours straight. All the statistics show that to be a deadly combination. But it looks great on paper so they push it. Who cares if a family of four is plowed over? Who cares if a bus rolls over killing or injuring all 53 potential passengers? Certainly not the bosses in the office. It takes unions to force some common sense into the office jockeys and protect the general public. The roads you dive on are much safer thanks to organized labor. Their is nothing wrong with workers making a fair wage and benefits. Unions protect the middle class.

Not speaking for Brother ID here but this Thread may be a "hide in plane site" job. I will have my little joke.

The other Brothers (MrLasVegas and Srilm) covered most of the bases, especially enforcement of safety and health issues, but it's also true that unions carry management's water sometimes, 2 ways: one is as a safety valve--explaining to a worker that they might have a legit gripe but not an actionable grievance under Postal Regs or the Collective Bargaining Agreement (the contract); also, there are times both workers and front-line management (sometimes even mid-level management) want to either make or stop a change--there's pressure from execs against which junior management is helpless--working together with our muscle and their knowledge, quite a few ill-considered follies have been stopped/ progressive actions /policies have been started.
Now in something of a veer toward the political from an economic standpoint: Wages for workers in the US have stagnated or even regressed since 1979, when anti-union activities/ union-busting ramped up rapidly (the Right to Starve laws [they call them Right to Work, but, c'mon, really...], the explosive growth of union-busting management advisory and law firms, especially in Memphis), and a general anti-worker feeling in the US (that labor is demeaning). There's a "crabs in the bucket" mentality working here--instead of seeking to bring up workers in general up to the level of unionized workers (wages, fringes, working conditions--the whole spectrum of working life), we get buckets and buckets of verbiage about leveling the playing field--DOWN to the level of the least of us--under the bogus guise of competitive conditions. Now we're at the point where workers have the same levels of anxiety as management has always had. "Defining deviancy down", "lowest common denominator prevails"--call it what you will. Funny thing is that, going forward, these wage tendencies will bite our economy in the ass--more money in a workers pocket along with a trend to stay employed long-term gets spent; more money in upper management's pocket gets invested, usually in the US; money in the Big Dog Wall Street/Silicon Valley mahoffs gets invested or spent elsewhere[/
Oh and before someone else utters the phrase "class warfare" as condemnation about efforts towards economic democratization--class warfare has been waged against workers since time immemorial--don't trouble yourself to go there unless you truly enjoy being catcalled and laughed at.

_________________
"A man accustomed to hear only the echo of his own sentiments, soon bars all the common avenues of delight, and has no part in the general gratification of mankind"--Dr. Johnson
"Amen, brother"-ED