Showdown in St Louis: Best Buy vs. IBEW
 

The Electricians's Union (International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers) has been protesting in front of our local Best Buy for the past few weekends. They have huge signs up outside the parking lots and are handing out anti-BB flyers at traffic intersections.

They say that a new Best Buy being built in Wentzville, MO is using workers paid less than "the area standards wage and benefits rates earned by our members". Best Buy counters that the electricians are hired by the construction company and not by Best Buy: "Best Buy does not control and is not managing that construction".

So when I went to buy a DVD today, I had to go through two union workers handing out flyers. Weird.

Who cares. Maybe they should get educations then instead of bitching that they can't take 10 months to finish a job which these 'lower paid' workers will do in 2-3 months. Lazy.

Oh...

Sigh. My post was clearly sarcastic. Notice how I put 'lazy' at the end of it. You should watch that episode of South Park where they classify a certain race as 'lazy'.

And for the record, most illegals actually DO my job. I live in California, I am the minority. It would be great to go back to college, but registration is already filled due to all the illegals getting in for no other reason then they can't discriminate against them, but can against me. Oh well. This is better suited for the Political forum I suppose.

Hmmm...yeah, Best Buy doesn't hire those electricians. Maybe they should be picketing the construction site instead.

= J

But then nobody would see them.

Reminds me of a few years back when workers at a regional donut maker went on strike. They picketed in front of independently owned stores that sold the donuts because that was where people would see them. They had no beef at all with the stores.

To make a long story short, in the end everybody who went on strike was fired and the temporary employees hired to make the donuts were made permanent.

Kinda like the grocery strikes here in California a few years back. Alot of scabs became permanent employees.

Seems fair to me. Nothing is risk free - using a contractor that doesn't hire union, means you've got the risk of being picketed or even having some employees go on strike and hurting your business. Going on strike means you have the risk of permanently losing your job.

No pain, no gain.

In the CA grocery strikes, they set up a two-tiered system where all the old employees got their jobs back and the new employees/scabs got jobs with lower wages. This is the bone of contention between the union and the stores now, which might result in another grocery strike.

So no, not really like the donut one, where the old workers lost their jobs.