Unions today

Over my morning coffee at my favorite internet café, an article in the NY Times sparked my interest. An article about something in America that's long overdue change.

Labor unions.

Unions once held a very important role in the development of the American economy. During the depression era many people had two choices, take whatever crappy job was made available to you, or watch your children starve and die. Not much of a choice. Without the efforts, illegal as they may or may not have been, of Jimmy Hoffa, the USA could very well be just another Mexico - handful of extremely wealthy people, and a large populace of impoverished labor - as the big companies continued to soak up all the money, and "generously" gave a day of work to a man so his kids could eat that day.

Fast forward to modern America. Drive down any street in Las Vegas, and you'll see Help Wanted signs in store windows. In America, there are more jobs than there are people to fill them. This is a place with a great many options. My best friend is a junior executive of a medium-sized retail outfit. He can't find enough good people to fill all his positions. He is constantly recruiting, to the point of tring to steal people of quality away from other companies. Need a job, ask him.

Need a job? Simple. Go get one.

However, that's not how it works in the mind of most Americans. This is no longer the land of opportunity. It is the land of entitlement. A population of people that think that because they were born, they are owed. Owed wealth. Owed a beach house in Aruba. Owed a fabulous lifestyle.

And so it is with unions. Raises are not granted for quality of performance of a worker. They are given because of entitlement. Job security is not based on whether or not you show up for work on time and do a good job, it's based on seniority and the union contract. This lack of motivation to do a good job is the reason union based labor is so poor in quality. I eat most of my meals out, and I far prefer a non-union establishment to a union one. It's easy to tell the difference. In a non-union restaurant, the workers are competent and professional. In a union establishment, the workers are doing the customer a favor by serving them (in their minds).

Sadly, a lot of upper scale restaurants in Las Vegas, particularly those in the casinos, have service that is surpassed by people making minimum wage at McDonald's. As far as the casino staffing, it's almost always poor. And virtually all union.

This is not to say that all union employees are bad ones. There are good people who have found that their chosen job requires them to join a union, often whether or not they want to, and yet their work ethic carries them to work to do a good job. This is a rare occurance, however. Most are union, because they feel they are entitled.

The biggest arguement for the pro-union movement is that companies are greedy. Yeah? So? Why be in business if you aren't greedy? And it's a falacious statement of redemption, anyways, because to join a union so you can pocket more money, while calling someone else greedy is hypocritical. If you join a union to make more money, you are even more greedy than the company, because the company had to create the job for you. You didn't create anything for the company. You were just born, and feel you are somehow entitled to someone else's money.

Don't like the greedy company? No problem. This is America. You can start your own non-greedy company! You can evenly pay yourself and all of your employees, charge just enough to the customers so that after expenses you break even, and live on a cot in the back room of your store, because owning a home with profits from your business would be greedy. And you don't want to be greedy, now do you?

In a real-world scenaro, if your boss didn't pay you what you were worth, you would ask for a raise. If you didn't get one, you'd shop the market, and find a company that would recognize your value, and offer you what you wanted to be paid. If you shopped the market, and nobody offered you more, then.....brace for impact....

You Are Making What You Are Worth.

There are ways to improve on this. If you feel you are better at your job than everyone else, you can start your own company and prove it, and charge what you are worth. If you are that good, people will pay it.

The second way is education. If you aren't making enough money because you have reached the pinnacle of your work-value, improve your value. Gain education. Gain skills. Raise your ceiling. If working as a laborer in a warehouse doesn't pay enough to feed your fast-n-furious lifestyle, get a degree in Business Management, and run the warehouse instead of work in it. Still not enough, continue on, and get a masters in Business Administration, and run the company. This is America. Anyone can.

The American middle class likes to blame greedy companies, and greedy politicians for American jobs going overseas. Sorry, but the jobs moving overseas are not cause, they are effect. Man is man. If there are two men, and one will do the job for $20, and the other for $10, and both do an equal job, the man asking for $10 will get the job. This isn't greed. It's capitalism. It's not evil. You do it, no matter who you are. When you buy a house, when you buy a car, when you swipe your frequent-shopper card at the grocery store to save a few bucks over what they charge at the other store.

If the man charging $10 in the above example happens to live in America, he gets squeezed out of his ability to do his job by organized crime a.k.a. labor unions. But labor unions do not control the workforce in India. Or China. Or any other nation where people will put in a harder day's work for less money. Paying the worker that works harder for less money is not greedy.

It's common sense.

Nobody pays the lazy contractor more money to not finish fixing the roof before the big storm. Why should a company pay a lazy worker more money to do a lesser job? Only one reason.

Labor Unions.

Now, my own views may be tainted a bit. I've never worked for a union organization. When I have had jobs and not made enough money, I've done what I needed to earn more, without organizing a strike. I've either improved myself, or gone to somewhere else that the money was better. There's always another option in life.

And I remember when I was a teen, the Teamsters went on strike. Drivers. Bus drivers and truck drivers and meat cutters at grocery stores. The teamsters started shooting at Greyhound buses to scare customers into not riding. A bus in Arizona was hit, and a rider was shot in the neck. All because someone that thinks they are entitled to more than they are worth wanted to prove his worth by crippling the company with a strike, and when that failed because people that were willing to work stepped up and took his job he had to shoot at customers.

And here in Vegas, The Frontier Hotel had the record for the longest labor strike in US history. If memory serves, it lasted seven years. My choice of sides in that conflict came from the strikers themselves. I hadn't gone in to the hotel during the strike, but was passing across the hotel's parking lot having come from the hotel next door, and passing by. Strikers thinking I was coming out of, or going into, the hotel started yelling at me for being a scab. The best way to answer profanity is with profanity, and that's what I did. And complimented my comments with a nice friendly gesture. And then I did go into the hotel.

Wow! Food specials!!! $3.95 for a 12 oz prime rib dinner with salad, baked potato and dinner roll! GOOD prime rib! I couldn't pass up that!!! And when I was enjoying the delicious dinner, I found out something else. The service was better than any other hotel in Vegas. All because the union workers were out on the sidewalk, while people that actually cared about doing a good job and wanting to actually earn their money were in feeding customers.

I haven't eaten at the Frontier since the hotel was finally sold to pro-union owners and the strike ended.


Here endeth the rant.


Back to the original subject. A newspaper in Santa Barbara had it's employees vote to join the teamsters, and the owner rejected the organization. An article on it appeared in today's NY Times. And the entire city has assaulted her for her decision. So has the media around the country (including the NY Times).

But why? It's her company. If she wants to run a non-union company, that should be her choice. This is America, right? Aren't people allowed to do what they want in their own homes? Isn't that all the rhetoric? Freedom of choice. My business is my business, and if you want to come work in my business, you do so under my terms.

Don't want to work for me under my rules, or my standards? That's fine. This is still America. You can go somewhere else! You can go work for a union company.

A company is not subject to the will of the masses. It is not a political body. It wasn't elected. It wasn't created for the benefit of the people that were fortunate to get a job there. It was created by the owner, for the owner. The owner's motivation may be greed, or it may be for providing better quality goods or services to customers. But it certainly wasn't so they could be strong armed by spoiled children.

The Santa Barbara News-Press is not the only newspaper on Earth. If reporters wanted more pay, they could go get other jobs with other newspapers. Or magazines. Or TV news agencies, etc etc etc. Obviously, since they didn't, they couldn't. Probably because they were not worthy of a job someplace like the NY Times, and so they were stuck. Stuck with the one company willing to accept them and pay them what they are worth. If they were worth more, they'd be earning it.

Amid all the furor over owner Wendy P. McCaw's decision to not go union, and to strongly hold her ground on that decision, I applaud Ms. McCaw. I believe she has every right to run her company the way she wants to. To the people of Santa Barbara that are mad at her for running her business the way she wants, start your own newspapers and compete. Competition is allowed in America. And if the people working there do not like it, stop crying about your full diaper, and do something about getting it changed.

Two pieces

Today, I was going to write about pettiness. Easy to do in Las Vegas. Vegas is one giant breeding ground for it. But one case caught my eye in particular. At a laundromat.

The sign really exemplified the petty attitude in this city. Change for customers only. You can make a case for restrooms being for customers only, because sinks and toilets use water, which costs money. And soap and paper towels and toilet paper cost money.

But we're talking about change. One dollar becomes one dollar. Five dollars becomes five dollars. There's no expensive involved. And if someone needs change to use the payphone, so what? It's going to cripple your business if you break even on a change transaction? You don't even have to go through the labor intensive and costly proccess of opening the cash register and counting four quarters. The machine handles it for you.

And the real beauty of this, is the "smile you're on camera" assertation. Yeah? And....? What does this guy envision? He's going to call the police if you make change? "Yes, officer, I want to press charges. I caught him making an unauthorized change transaction. I have the evidence on video."

If you happen to be in Vegas, and find yourself near the Venetian or TI, why not head straight down Twain ave, to Paradise Road. Stop in and buy $20 in change. Start a trend of running this neanderthal out of change, so he has to keep running to the bank for more money. Something a few casual change makers would never do. But a big run of people could.

But, as I was saying,...that's not what I am going to write about today.

Today, I'm going to take another stab at the stupidity of the general populace here in Vegas.

I used to use the library nearest the strip for the Wi-Fi access, but since I started making Lovell Canyon my regular haunt, I'm out west, and started using the library in that area. It's a beautiful facility complete with a really nice museum facility. It's clean. It's too far outside of town to be a hang-out for the homeless, so it's always got plenty of seating.

These people don't deserve it.

And then again, maybe they do.

There's a sign by the check-out desk. Whoever wrote it misspelled "problems". It sat for weeks. I kept waiting for them to change it. They never did. So finally I told them. Now they know. They still haven't changed it. So much for librarians promoting literacy.

Then today, the fire alarm went off. It was set off by someone in the museum. A false alarm. We know this, because someone from the museum came running over to the library to announce it was a false alarm. But they still made us clear out. The entire library.

And then we all sat outside for 25 minutes while they put out the false alarm. Even made everyone stand back a safe distance, in case the false alarm should spread to the concrete building.

This Thanksgiving, I know what I'm thankful for.

I won't be in Vegas during Thanksgiving.

Regaining the itch

It's unseasonably warm for November. It was in the mid 70's during the day. In November. Gorgeous day. Should be a great night for camping. Driving out to my camping spot, I find some evil bastards camping in my spot!

INFIDELS!

Parked in their mini van in my regular camping spot. I knew I should have put up a No Trespassing sign. The nerve of these people, thinking they can just camp in my spot at their leisure.

Sadly, I was forced to find a new place. Somewhere less comfortable to my soul. Less familiar. Less....mine. I should have stayed in the city at a hotel. If I have to share my space with strangers, at least it should be somewhere luxurious.

So, begrudgingly, I drive further into the canyon, in search of a suitable turnoff. This is no small order. I'm not driving a jeep. I'm driving a low profile BMW. Certainly not designed for off-road activity. So I have to find a turn-off that's in fairly decent shape. This is not a highly maintained area, so these dirt roads are not all without their storm damage.

I finally find one, about a mile deeper into the canyon area, and higher in altitude. I don't really like the spot, because it's too visible from the road. Not something I want when the morning traffic starts drifting through, but it will do.

It's a wonderfully warm night. The last time I had come out, there had been fog in the canyon, and it was quite cool. Tonight, warm and dry. And I got out a little earlier, so I wasn't exhausted. In no rush to get camp set up, I decided to go for a little walk to familiarize myself with this new area. Not too far down the side road, there's another little area to park. A dell, surrounded by pines, obscured from view of the road. Much, much, better.

So I move the car to the new location, and set up camp.

When morning comes, I feel completely recharged and energetic. I do some light working-out with the dumbell I keep in the trunk, some stretching, some Tai Chi. But it's just not enough. I look to the trail continuing on into the hills, and I just have to follow it. It's a little chilly, so I put on the wonderful jacket my brother-in-law gave me, strap on the backpack even though I'm just going a short way to see what's around and start hoofin'.

I have picked a spot up the hills, just to the foot of a small mountain that looks like an inviting climb. I've been eyeballing this mountain ever since the first night I came out here. It's flat on top, but there doesn't look like any good way up, unless there's one on the backside. I want to walk to the base, and get a closer look. From the distance, these things always look easier or harder than they really are. If I can get to the base, I might find a suitable route for a future trip.

The entire trip is uphill. And it's great. It's not overly difficult, but it's enough for a light sweat. Wonderful exercise. And it's beautiful scenery. It's a strange mixture up here. It's still low enough to be desert, with cacti and the reddish rocks, but also high enough to have pine trees growing. The air is wonderful. Crisp and clean. The smell of the oxygen-rich air from all the plant life.

Unfortunately, there's signs of man. A discarded car door. Lots of bullet casings and shotgun shells. More trash. Not as bad as the areas around Mount Charleston, and the more commonly travelled spots, but still enough to be discouraging. I didn't bring a bag with me, or I'd pack out some of this garbage. Little-by-little, I'm becoming an active environmentalist. I like it. It's a good change.

When I get to the top of the trail, I stand in awe of the sight below. I never imagined that the it would be anything more than more of what I'd already walked through, flattening out and continuing on into the desert. I was shocked to find that it dropped into a huge valley. It is perhaps the most breathtaking view I've ever seen. Ok, maybe it didn't rival the Grand Canyon, necessarily. It might be more that it caught me by surpise the way it did. I knew the Grand Canyon was coming. I was not ready for this.

It would be the perfect camping area. A flat plateau overlooking valleys on both sides, surrounded by views of mountains. Absolutely amazing. The problem with a spot like this is the exposure. Sitting up on the plateau as it does, it's going to get windy. Windy and cold. It's a shame. This would be a great place to wake up in the morning, having these views when you first crawl out of the tent in the morning. For a good half hour, I just stand and enjoy the view, taking in huge gulps of the wonderful air before heading back. I expected to start work at 9am, and it's 10 minutes till. Considering it takes me 40 minutes to drive back into the city, I'm expecting to run a bit late.

But it was well worth it.

Becoming addicted

I've camped out three straight nights, now. Same spot in Lovell Canyon. I am starting to think I'm not such an etched-in-stone city mouse as I thought. I love it there. So far away from any thing. Up on Mount Potosi, you can still see city lights off in the far distance. Hear airplane traffic. Out in Lovell Canyon, there's nothing. You're so far away from everything, there's absolutely nothing but you and nature.

This morning, it was actually warm. Almost hot. Beautiful. I started taking stock of the surrounding scenery, mapping out potential routes for climbs and hikes and other explorations. I think I am going to have to get to know all of this area very soon.

Roughing it - Yuppie style

This is my first article every written on location, directly to my computer. I often blog in the wild, but that effort includes pen and paper. This one goes straight to my laptop.

That's the first indication that there is nothing remoted related to 'roughing it' involved in this camping trip.

I got out of Vegas on the night that would be Halloween. All the parties and celebrating took place on a Saturday, since Halloween fell during the week, and the best way to make the best profit was to move the day to one that fell on a weekend.

I took Mark's advice, and went to a place called Lovell Canyon. Mark recommended it based on my own needs. I wanted a place where I could camp and not be molested. Plenty of raw desert around Vegas that's open land, however, I do not have Mark's truck. And a sporty little BMW was not designed to tackle rocky trails. So, I needed someplace close to Vegas, but isolated from humanity, but with a well paved road so I could get there. I needed someplace where I could park a few feet off the road, pitch my tent and enjoy the great outdoors, without having to be out of smiling range of my beloved automobile.

Without any hesitation, Mark knew the spot.

Lovell Canyon road was once the only road to one of the many middle-of-nowhere towns in Nevada. The closest city to Vegas. Pahrump. This was the old highway, and being so, was a well graded, paved road. But now there's a bigger and better highway, so Lovell Canyon road has been forgotten by travellers. A well paved highway that runs through the middle of nowhere.

Mark said it was so far out of the way that nobody ever went there. I checked out a website online that concurred. The site stated that if you really wanted to rough it, Lovell Canyon was the place.

Perfect.

I was just not ready for the biting cold of the desert. I'm totally out of practice. So, instead of being dropped off in the middle of the desert, and hiking miles to make camp, far out of reach of all communication and life-lines,..

I slept in my BMW.

I brought gear. I just wasn't ready. And it was really late at night when I got here. I could hardly see, even with the hi-beams on, driving to where I'd make camp, in a place I'd never set eyes on before. And when I got to where I would sleep that night, it was bitter cold, and the thought of fighting up my tent, in the moonless dark of night, in the cold, totally exhausted was too much. So, the car became my tent. I rolled out my sleeping back, and curled up in the back seat and crashed. It took a bit to finally get to sleep, because there were more signs of gun nuts. Shells from pistols, rifles and shotguns scattered around where I had parked, and footprints in very very loose soft dirt that couldn't have been more than a day or two old were indicators that this was not quite as remote and untravelled as Mark and the website had indicated.

But once I did fall asleep, it was the best. The silence except for the crackling of the random sounds of the nocturnal wildlife moving about. The stars. Wow, the stars! Out of the city lights, and on a moonless night! I've never seen the stars so clearly before. And so many of them. The few constellations that I recognize now are littered with new dots to connect that I'd never seen. I really needed a Starmap for this trip. It's a shame I'm without one. This would have been a great place to learn.

It's a great experience waking up in the wilds. Even if you have to step out of your car to enjoy the morning air. 360 degrees of mountains, mesquite and Joshua trees. You almost don't see the paved path back to civilization. My only regret is not having a nice camp stove to cook up some sausage and eggs, and brew some coffee. If there is ever going to be a repeat trip, this is going to be a must-have.

Yes, people. Water *is* wet.

Ok. I've often written aabout what unpleasant, mean, angry people Las Vegans are. Today, I'm going to touch on another side of the general populace of this desert city.

Stupidity.

I did bite into the subject of the low education standards in a previous article, but what I'd like to illustrate this time around goes beyond education. Lack of raw intellect.

For a very few minutes of a very few days of each year, a rare meteorological phenomenon occurs in Vegas. It rains. A fair percentage of the time when it does rain, the roads become exposed to water.

For those of you that are unaware...

Water is wet.

To many, many Las Vegans, this comes as a shock. Las Vegans are very aggressive and recless drivers, and wet roads do nothing to hamper their nascar-to-the-store style of driving. This behavior is even more hazardous in Vegas than most places, specifically because of the very limited annual rainfall. Cars leak oil. In most places, this il is purged from the road surface by the periodic precipitation. The rarity of rain in Vegas allows this otherwise normal oil leakage to build up so that when a typical Vegas-style rainy day [10 minutes] occurs, suddenly the roadways become a network of paths with the traction of your average ice rink.

Give it 15 minutes after a sprinkle, and you will start hearing sirens around the valley as the accidents begin to pile up.

This idea for this very article was sparked by an accident. I wrote this article from the 4th floor of the parking garage shared by the Ballys and Paris hotels. It had rained. The roads were wet.

I was waiting.

I love my BMW. It's a beautiful car. It's a few years old, now, and if some Gilligan that doesn't understand that wet roads are slippery slides into me and totals the car, the insurance will give me book value for it, and it won't come even close to the money needed to replace such a car that's in showroom condition. So, I do not drive in Vegas when the streets are wet, if I can help it. It's not as big of an issue as it might sound. It almost never rains. When it does, it's not for more than a few minutes, and then the desert air dries out everything shortly after. It almost requires a concerted effort to drive on wet roads, here.

So, I decided to simply stand 8 stories or so above the earth, enjoying the crisp evening air and the view of the valley and skyline that is one of the few things in Vegas I actually enjoy. And while I waited for the streets to dry I was greeted by the delicious crunch of two vehicles colliding on the employees-only road behind the hotel. Two cars going around a corner. On wet roads. Too fast. Too typical.

A week before, it had rained. A light drizzle, just enough to get the roads moist. My best friend's daughter called him while to come get her. She had wrecked her car in a one-car accident on the highway. Driving too fast. Lost control. Slammed into the cement guardrail. And while Mark waited with her for the tow truck to arrive, another car had the exact same accident. Then, still waiting on the tow truck, a two car collision.

Am I surprised? Not in the least bit. This is a very unique state. It's the only place in the world where the highest ranking court of law upheld a law making it illegal to use your brain. Card counting (blackjack) is nothing more than using your memory. The New Jersey state supreme court found this so in a case concerning counting cards in Atlantic City. How can it be illegal to use your brain? Nevada had no problem outlawing the use of the brain.

Why didn't this cause massive outrage among the citizens?

Probably because most of them don't use their brains in the first place.

True Democrats

I'm a republican.

That's embarrasing to say, these days. I'd be less ashamed to say I'm a drunk, or a drug addict, or a kleptomaniac.

The rampant corruption is always right-leaning. The congressmen that are ousted in shame for corruption crime and now with the Foley incident, being sexual predators are mainly from the right.

"Pro-life" is the religious right. And one of the great hypocrisies of the right. These people aren't pro-life, they are pro-birth. Once the babies are born guns, war, the death penalty...killing is ok. Just not until after it's been sanctioned by the pro-lifers.

I'm a true believer in pro-life. I'm against anything that takes the life of people. I think killing is sick. And people that kill are sick. I'm not against hunting or eating meat. But sport hunting I have a hard time understanding. What kind of genetic malfunction do you need to feel the urge to go out and murder for fun? And what would these people be doing if there were no animals to kill?

Obvious, from my last article, the right-wing fringe and their religious agenda isn't my cup of tea, either. So, then, why am I a republican?

The simple answer: money

My family has it. I want to keep it. The republican party is one of generations-old wealthy persons, and big corporations and other entities that are rich and greedy and don't want to share their income.

In terms of keeping/making the country a good/better place, the left does that.

But the left does not mean the democrats. Not today.

I was stricken with revelation driving home the other day. The biggest, loudest candidate for Mayor in the small town of Petaluma, California is Pam Torliatt. Pam is fresh off a defeat for the state assembly, now trying her hand in the mayoral race. She's littered Petaluma with her giant, loud red signage. The same red signs she used for state assembly, but re-printed for 'mayor'.

Two elections in the same year. And all this trash. Trash and TV commercials and mass-mailings. All costing millions of dollars. In a realistic world, a democrat would never win an election, because you'd never know their name. A real democrat wouldn't spend all that money on elections. Instead of raising funds for advertising, they'd be raising funds to repair leaky roofs in poor neighborhoods before the rains. Raising funds to feed children. Then, in their spare time, they would rally together with other like-minded folks, and march to see their congressman and lean on him to do the right thing.

Pam Torliatt is too busy raising money for her own cause, to be bothered with the causes of those that are really in need. The people. The folks the democrats pretend to be working for.

There might not be any real democrats living in the US. The real democrats are probably all working for the peace corps, fighting diseases in crappy third world countries without making the money they deserve, and without recognition for their efforts. People totally unlike myself. The real heros.