[xoxoxoBruce]

@ lupin..the..3rd, I agree NASCAR is too boring for me to watch anymore, since they have gotten so fast they can't race each other, and the main strategy is attrition. However, I do appreciate the engineering it takes to put those cars on the track at those speeds, and the huge balls of the drivers.

You say all these laws to protect workers eliminate the need for unions, but those laws are violated, or misinterpreted every day. Without a union rep to handle it, you have to hire a lawyer to tell you if your complaint is valid, then send letters to the companies HR dept, then go to court, at your expense. Multiply this by millions of suspected violations, and the courts are jammed. As often as not, the employee is wrong, and his/her shop steward will tell them so, putting a stop to it then and there.

I've seen cases where the first or second line management, are trying to circumvent the wishes of the owner/director of the company, and cases where the employee is trying to pull a fast one. Having the union on the spot to settle it quickly, acting like a traffic cop, is to everyone's advantage. 99% of the time the need for union representation is not about money, it's about safety and fairness.

The UAW and the big three, are a whole other world, not representative of most unions. The companies were making vast sums of money and anything they offered the union, the competition was going to agree to anyway so it didn't matter. The nature of the automobile business is uneven which meant frequent layoffs, so the union would accept anything offered to smooth the cycle, but those solutions became ridiculous in practice because the company's low level management didn't know how to implement them.
The foreign manufacturers have implemented better plans, that involve the workers rather than dictating to them. But there are still cases where workers are getting screwed because of personal grievances, with no recourse.