John Deere strike imminent?
- Thread starter ISUCyclones2015
- Start date
Looks like a pretty good deal for the workers to me. They even get a “strike bonus” lol.
Agreed, but with the pay increases, I wonder if Deere thinks that labor is going to increase by more than what they currently agreed to in the future.
Guns and Budweiser will be flying off the shelves once that bonus hits the bank accts.
Looks to me like the union made out pretty well on this deal. Gonna be happy people coming out of that for the most part, I'd guess.This is a left-wing perspective but the easiest to find, clear summary I found of the outcome.
What UAW members gained with five-week strike
The contract ratified on November 17 improves greatly on John Deere's first offer to United Auto Workers members.www.bleedingheartland.com
The third-to-last bullet is interesting. I think you see more and more that companies and labor negotiate to push off a worse deal on future employees (who do not get a seat at the table when the deal is being struck). For example in the NFL the NFLPA got more concessions when they agreed to the rookie contract scale that dramatically lowered rookie salaries, knowing that no future rookies were current NFLPA members anyway. It looks like Deere tried that approach - ending pensions for future hires, which wouldn't affect current union members - but here the workers pushed back and beat it.
Basically made 10k for the 5 weeks of strike, plus they got donations of basic staples. Hopefully they remember that and we see good donations to food banks and shelters to reciprocate the good will.
Shares are up about $7 so far today so I don't think Wall Street seems to care at all. Then again it's up about 8% since the strike started even though product out the door was way down.
Last edited:
So, not much has changed in the 35 years since I last worked in a union facility. Some workers would bust tail and work through 8 hours of work (per set rate) in less than 3 hours and then literally sit and do nothing for 5 hours. Nothing we could do about it.
For rote work this makes sense to me. If I am expected to make X widgets in a shift and there is no upside to me to do more then I will either do it as quickly as possible and chill after, or I will take my sweet time with them.
When businesses expect workers to bust their ass and get treated the same as their colleagues who don’t, without meaningful bonuses or promotion potential, then they’re just being foolish.
It's how unions or any group pay, hurt the stronger or more ambitious employees.
When I managed a factory, I had one employee who always told me that if we paid them more, they would work harder. We needed to adjust our pay to put ourselves more in line with a large company that was raising theirs quite rapidly all of a sudden, so we raised the pay pretty well. I kept work sheets on projects so I could see how I needed to bid stuff in the future. After the raise, productivity actually decreased about 7%. Next time that worker brought that up, I mentioned what happened and realized he was a good one to put on the cardboard bailer.
The hard part about that though is that just because I can beat my rate by a lot doesn't mean down the line somebody else isn't going to hold things up. We kept getting sent home early because down the line they didn't have enough bodies to keep up with us. I was supposed to do about 10 units a day with my job in an 8 hour shift, I hit my target rate on day 3 and was doing 13 or 14 units after about 3 days into it just because of some parts issues somewhere else so even at a 30% or 40% increase in what I was expected to do I didn't have any issues. I know that there are hard jobs in those factories but every single person I talked to during this was hitting the same rate as the UAW workers by day 4, a lot of us might have been sympathetic to them towards the beginning of this but I don't know of anybody who was after the first week of being on the shop floor.
That's the nature of most jobs though. Even in an office setting I could get my tasks for the day completed in the first few hours of the day and screw around the rest of the day.
Don't quote me but I believe they pay a very reasonable premium for family but do not have any coinsurance or deductible.
Exactly what I was gonna say. That problem isn't a 'union' problem, it's a 'volume of work available' problem. And doing excess work doesn't always create value.
It will be interesting to see how aggressively Deere looks at more automation of the manufacturing area. Also, what will be the impact will on relocating/selecting new manufacturing sites and additional outsourcing of components/subassemblies.
You act like they haven’t been doing that since reagan broke unions and stopped punishing companies for moving out of the country
That's kind of the double edged sword of unions and standardized pay scale (I've worked both union and non-union construction projects in multiple states) you insure that everyone gets paid the same for the same work, but if someone is better you can't reward them.
On one hand, the union mostly protects the workers from unfair treatment by ****** employers and should be giving the employer an employee who meets a known criteria. Theoretically if I call the hall and ask for a journeyman carpenter I should be getting an actual carpenter not someone who is a "carpenter" because he just bought all the carpenter tools from Home Depot.
The downside is that often good employees are aren't given an opportunity to excel or be compensated for just being better than their coworkers. Or if they do work harder they get sabotaged for being better (I've seen it). You also get a lot of the "It's not about the outcome, it's about the income" mindset at some point.
Boy, not any office job I've had. I need to look for one of those jobs!
