Det er egentlig urovekkende å lese hvordan tilstanden har vært i SAS, en tilstand som innbar at selskaper nå var ganske nær konkurs. Heldigvis ser det ut til at de siste dagers forhandlinger har klart å redde selskapet.

For den som har reist med SAS har det sett ut som om selskapet har vært svært godt; god service, hyggelig og dyktig betjening, sjelden forsinkelser, enkle rutiner, etc.

Men som sagt, selskapet var nær konkurs, og her er et lite utvalg av en liste av tiltak som nå gjennomføres for å redde selskapet:

• Pensjonsalderen heves til 65 år både for flygere og kabinansatte
• Flere lønnstrinn fjernes slik at særlig de best betalte flygerne går kraftig ned i lønn
• Antall dager i luften – såkalte produksjonsdager – øker fra 179 til 190
• Flygernes diett reduseres med 27 prosent
• De kabinansattes arbeidstid utvides.

Hvis dette var nødvendig for å redde selskapet så er dette bra, men det som er ille er at selskapet i det hele tatt er kommet i en slik situasjon at slike tiltak er nødvendige.

Dersom et selskap ledes godt vil det hele tiden bli bedre for alle involverte: for eiere, for ansatte, for kunder. (Dette gjelder ikke for firmaer som produserer varer folk slutter å kjøpe: f.eks. firmaer som produserte skrivemaskiner når datamaskiner med tekstbehandling kom, firmaer som produsere hestekjerrer når bilen kom, etc.)

Det er ledelsens ansvar å hele tiden passe på å holde selskapet i en best mulig stand slik at det er i stand til å møte de utfordringer som finnes og som måtte dukke opp. Dersom ledelsen gjør dette vil firmaet bli bedre og bedre for alle som har med det å gjøre.

Når SAS må igjennom slike kraftige endringer som innebærer at ansatte i fremtiden får dårligere betingelser enn de har jatt i det siste – lavere lønn, lenger arbeidstid, høyere pensjonsalder – så er det forståelig at de ansatte er skuffet, men den som har skylden for dette er ledelsen, både den i firmaet og den i fagforeningen.

Det ser ut til at ikke bare ledelsen har sviktet, også ledelsen i fagforeningene, som i bedre tider har presset igjennom lønns- og arbeidsbetingelser som var bedre enn markedet kunne bære, har sviktet.

Men la oss før vi går videre ha sagt at norske fagforeninger er langt mer realistiske enn fagforeninger i mange andre land.

Det har skjedde en del ganger i USA at fagforeninger har presset sine bedrifter til å gi så gode fordeler for de ansatte at bedriften ikke har kunnet bære dem. Vi siterer fra kommentatoren Robert Tracinskis omtale av dette tema med utgangspunkt i et tradisjonsrikt firma som nylig er slått konkurs.

The news about the bankruptcy of Hostess, maker of the Twinkie and other legendary junk foods, touched off some memories … [of] the whole phenomenon of a kamikaze labor union that keeps demanding more for workers—who end up getting nothing when their employer goes belly-up.

That’s pretty much what the unions did, or tried to do, to three of the big employers in our area, and it taught me some early lessons about the real nature of labor unions and of government intervention.

I grew up in an area known as the Quad Cities, a cluster of four towns in Illinois and Iowa, on opposite banks of the Mississippi River. The big local employers at the time were the Rock Island Arsenal, which made howitzers and machine guns for the US Army, the celebrated Rock Island Line, and two big manufacturers of farm equipment, John Deere and International Harvester.

What might strike you about this list is that half of these companies no longer exist. I watched them go down, and that’s why the Hostess story seems so familiar.

Take the Rock Island Line, the popular name for the Chicago, Rock Island, and Pacific Railroad. The line’s Wikipedia entry tells the story pretty much as I remember it, only worse.

By the summer of 1979, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and the United Transportation Union had accepted new agreements. The Brotherhood of Railway and Airline Clerks (BRAC) held firm to their demand that pay increases be back dated to the expiration date of the previous agreement.

The Rock Island offered to open the books to show the precarious financial condition of the road in an effort to get the BRAC in line with the other unions that had already signed agreements. Fred J. Kroll, president of the BRAC, declined the offer to audit the books of the Rock Island. Kroll pulled his BRAC clerks off the job in August, 1979. Picket lines went up at every terminal on the Rock Island’s system and the operating brotherhoods honored the picket lines. The Rock Island ground to a halt.

Here’s where it gets worse. The railroad was bouncing back and showing signs that it might survive the strike—so the government intervened to shut it down and finish it off for good. Why? Because the survival of a railroad was considered less important than the survival of a union.

The Ingram management team operated as much of the Rock Island as they could. Trains slowly began to move, with more traffic being hauled every week of the strike. President Jimmy Carter issued a back-to-work order that BRAC dismissed. Still more traffic flowed on the strikebound Rock Island. Seeing the trains rolling despite the strike and fearing a Florida East Coast strikebreaking situation, the unions appealed to the [Federal Railway Administration] and [the Interstate Commerce Commission] for relief. Despite that Rock Island management had been able to move 80% of pre-strike tonnage, at the behest of the Carter administration, the ICC declared a transportation emergency declaring that the RI would not be able to move the 1979 grain harvest to market. The ICC issued a Directed Service Order authorizing the Kansas City Terminal Railway to take over operations….

On January 24, 1980, Judge McGarr elected not to review the Rock Island’s final plan of reorganization. Instead, Judge McGarr initiated the shutdown and liquidation of the Rock Island Railroad. …

I watched them try it again, by the way, with John Deere, where my father worked. He wasn’t directly involved in the strike—he worked in advertising and public relations for their lawnmower division—but I do recall hearing the rumors about the union’s motivation. Deere workers were part of the United Auto Workers, but Deere was a relatively small employer compared to the giant auto makers in Detroit. So the union leadership made a simple calculation: they encouraged the workers at Deere to strike in order to set a precedent that would help them get a better deal in the next round of contract negotiations in Detroit. They were endangering the jobs of tens of thousands of workers at Deere in order to sweeten the pot for hundreds of thousands of workers at GM. It was a sacrifice for the greater good.

I guess they call it “collective” bargaining for a reason: you may lose your job, but the proletarian masses will come out ahead. Or not. We all know how well those deals turned out for GM in the long run.

In all of these cases, of course, there were other contributing factors. These companies suffered from tough competition, bad management decisions, unfavorable trends. Over the long term, Hostess didn’t go bankrupt because of the unions. It went bankrupt because it didn’t keep up—possibly couldn’t keep up—with cultural change. In an era of healthy living and gourmet coffee shops, Twinkies and Ho-Hos are out of place. Their only resort was to try to convince hipsters to eat Twinkies ironically.

But in all of these cases, it was the unions that delivered the final, self-destructive blow. They had negotiated more generous pay, work rules, and pension benefits in an earlier era, when they were demanding resources from a thriving, profitable company. But when that company began to struggle, they refused to adjust.

This is no surprise, because unions are built on a Marxist economic theory. In their view the capitalists—the owners and top management of a company—are just skimming unearned wealth in the form of profits, so the role of the union is to muscle in on the racket by demanding their own share of unearned wealth, ostensibly on behalf of “the little guy.” In practice, some of that wealth ends up going to well-paid union executives instead, but what do you expect? Some animals are more equal than others. As to the fate of the workers, I supposed you could argue that a job with reduced pay and benefits isn’t worth keeping. But in today’s economy—as in the Rust Belt economy of my youth—that doesn’t sound very convincing.

No, the driving force here isn’t any kind of rational economic calculation. Instead, it is the unions’ archaic anti-capitalist, anti-profit dogma. That is what leads them to hate the profits of investors and management more than they love the jobs of their workers. It’s what turns them, not just into parasites, but into the parasite that kill its Hostess.

Vi er absolutt for at arbeidsfolk skal få en god lønn, men dette kan kun skje ved at firmaet de jobber i blir bedre, ved at det blir akkumulert mer kapital i firmaet, ved at kundene er fornøyde, osv. Hvis dette skjer vil forholdene for de ansatte hele tiden bli bedre. Hvis derimot fagforeningene forsøker å presse de ansattes lønninger høyere enn produktiviteten i firmaet tilsier så vil det ende med enten at firmaet går overende, slik Tracinski gir en del eksempler på, eller ved at de ansatte plutselig må redusere sine lønninger kraftig, slik det nå skjer i SAS, eller kanskje miste jobben.

En av grunnene til at SAS-ansatte har hatt det bedre enn de skulle ha hatt det kommer av at det har vært beskyttet, SAS var jo opprinnelig reelt sett et statlig monopol. Og NB vi mener ikke bare at de som har utført de produktive jobbene i SAS har hatt alt for høy lønn, vårt poeng er at i selskaper som SAS så har de hatt for trege internrutiner, de har hatt for mange byråkrater og administratorer, de har muligens har hatt en rutestruktur som selskapet egentlig ikke hadde rygg til å bære og som kanskje var motivert ut i fra prestisje heller enn profitt, osv.

De fleste som flyr med SAS har vært svært fornøyde, og vi håper at selskapet vil overleve og blomstre i fremtiden, noe som vil være et gode både for ansatte og for kunder. Og vi mener ikke dette bare om SAS, vi mener dette om alle firmaer som tilbyr kundene et godt produkt, dvs. også om SAS’ konkurrenter som f.eks. Norwegian.
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http://www.vg.no/nyheter/utenriks/artikkel.php?artid=10071041

http://www.tracinskiletter.com/2012/11/parasite-kills-hostess/