The reason my company provides these benefits has nothing to do with
unions and everything to do with competition for good employees. Now
if you want to credit the unions for what we provide our employees
then God bless you. You have that right. But I can tell you flat out
unions don't enter into the calculation. Not for us anyway.

I find it interesting that you credit unions with being competitive.
Do you think United Airlines pilot unions were thinking about being
competitive when they forced UAL into the 1999/2000 contract that made
them the highest paid in the entire industry? That's not competition
it's extortion and it backfired big time. 3 years in bankruptcy.
Pensions that are now worthless and massive pay cuts. The flying
public doesn't quite support what United was trying to implement.

In ten years or so none of this will matter. Companies (Including GM)
are moving slowly away from being the health care provider or their
employees. Over time this will put so much pressure on the federal
government that the USA will finally fall to socialized medicine.
Although I think this will be great for those who are denied health
care in this country it will also mean we start waiting in line like
Canadians for low tech health care. My neighbor is a surgeon from
Toronto and he says we have more MRI machines in our small pocket
outside Denver than the whole of Ontario. Americans with health care
don't wait for high tech procedures. We're spoiled in that regard.
However, I do think having 45 million uninsured is unacceptable. I
hope the USA will combine what's right with the Canadian system and
what's right with our current system and create something of a mix.
Otherwise we won't like it. Side note: we provide health care
insurance for our Canadian employees (even though Canada provides
health care) just to bring them up to USA equivalents. i.e. drugs,
dental, optical, etc.

Well, it seems like everyone else is commenting on this, so I guess I
will put in my two cents also.

While unions did raise awareness for workers' needs many many years
ago, now it seems that they are just an easy way for greedy factory
workers to avoid hard work. In most companies, you can achieve higher
pay and better benefits through a corporate miracle referred to as a
"promotion." If these workers were a little more competitive and simply
worked harder to be given one of these promotions, the costs of those
products would remain affordable while their quality increased.

Secondly, unions do harm a company's wellbeing. It seems as if some
people believe that all of the white-collar higher-ups of America are
simply greedy, no-good people looking to rip off the blue-collars. That
is simply not the case, I believe. They just want adequate compensation
for their work. Consequently, the bosses will pay the blue-collars as
much as the company can afford to. Therefore, when a union comes along
and demands and forces a company to pay more, pay more, pay more, to
the blue-collars, the company is paying them with money that it simply
doesn't have. This causes the company to go down the tubes as the
workers rely on the union and quality of work lags. This is exactly why
GM is in the mess they are in now. They paid the blue-collars
adequately for the work they did and the education they possessed...but
that wasn't good enough. So they complained to the unions, which got
them higher pay, so they realized they didn't have to work as
hard...they could still get raises and benefit hikes without results.
This is what brought down the American automotive industry. This is
what is bringing down the American manufacturing industry. And, as we
are still largely an industrial society, this is what has caused the
current national depression, or plateau, at the least.

At least that's my opinion.