Your members are constantly striking at times when the country faces massive lay-offs and job losses, when everyone else would be happy just to sure of a job to go to next Monday. You constantly complain about poor pay. You constantly make demands that those of us who studied longer and worked harder in order to achieve more would never dream of making. It was your choice, whether good or bad, to do the job you do.
Union jobs, unlike ours, are a lot safer. More of your jobs -- especially those of GDL members -- are safe from outsourcing than are ours. You may not make as much money as you'd like but that was your choice. You have job security in driving that bus and fighting the fire. My job could be moved to the Philippines in May. Nobody's waiting for the fire truck to arrive from Bangalore.
The money you want isn't there, and it's not there because of you. The constant threat of strikes and the increasing pay demands all drive the cost of the rest of us so high that companies turn to outsourcing wherever they can. The result is that we -- the people who pay for your services -- aren't earning enough to, in fact, pay for those services. There's less money, you idiots, not more. And every time you pull this bullshit there's that much less again. Who is going to open a branch office in a country that costs four times as much money and in which they can't even be certain their extremely expensive employees can even get to the damned office?
Some years ago I was in the damned DGB office when you were striking for more money and fewer hours. Remember the picture of a smiling sun with a "38" logo? You were striking for more money and only 38-hour work weeks and the union had already printed the newer version of that poster demanding only 35 hours. Meanwhile I work at least 41.3 hours a week and have to think about some mook in Romania taking over my job queue in a couple months as I walk two kilometers to get to the goddamned office because you whose jobs aren't going anywhere refuse to work.
You're the ones who are, at the heart of it all, responsible for all the job losses by driving up prices and causing instability. Between you and the Betriebs-rats which destroy competitiveness by removing such "anti-social" ideas like merit pay, this country is doomed. There's labour and materials for 1/4 of our price just to our east as well as massive unemployment there which makes it very easy to find staff. They're getting EU subsidies which we're paying in order to compete with us and take even more of our industry away. This despite the fact that almost 20 years later we still haven't been able to take care of our own after the Reunification. Every time you strike you make Eastern Europe look that much more attractive.
Fuck you. Get your asses back to work and be glad your job can't be done for lower net costs by someone in Malaysia.
woof.
P.S. When you strike, things get even more unfair: I get to work from home. For full pay. Until I lose my job to outsourcing because of your greed.
