[thelist] Re: the Third World devel thread

>Several eons ago a US political initiative was begun to require a 
>test prior to handing someone a high school diploma.  The test would 
>have been simple enough a 6th grader should have passed it.  They 
>just wanted to be sure people could read, write and do simple math.  
>I believe it was the NAACP that killed that bill, suggesting that 
>fewer blacks would pass it and therefore wouldn't get diplomas and 
>therefore wouldn't get jobs and therefore it would be a form of 
>racial discrimination.


Riiight, care to provide some evidence?  I've heard this enough times 
from various people who can never provide actual hard evidence enough to 
qualify it in my mind as an urban myth.  I suppose next you'll be telling 
us about this feminist with AIDS who's sleeping with as many men as 
possible as revenge against men (another urban myth).

>The company I worked for was union, though my team was outside their 
>specs.  Working in that environment and seeing what being union 
>actually did to the work, to the people, was literally nauseating.  
>How to bring in communism and kill human spirit. Every day without 
>fail some truly amazing, asinine, expensive, ridiculous, nonsensical 
>thing would become apparent or come about due to the stupid 
>circumstances that being union put on the people in it and those 
>working with it.  I mean even my boss, who actually WAS union and 
>supported it (feeling he made more money thanks to it), admitted 
>constantly that it was the most poisonous thing to happen to good 
>business practice, made no sense, supported the worst habits and 
>killed the spirits of the best people.


Do you seriously expect anyone who's spent more than a year in the real 
world to actually believe this?  Come on!  This sounds like a John Birch 
Society pamphlet!  Never in twenty years of jobs have I *ever* 
encountered this and I've worked in places both with unions and without 
unions doing things from assembly line work to mainframe programming.  
For every example that you can provide about the awfulness of union shops 
and how they "kill the human spirit" I could provide the exact same 
situation in non-union shops.  Do you ever consider it might be the 
people or the relationship between the company and the way it treats it's 
workers (both union and non-union) that might be causing this?  More than 
likely you saw what you wanted to see and ignored anything else that 
might have contradicted your belief that unions are pure evil.

Scott Johnson