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I'd start by doing away with seniority in the unions. No longer would simply being around long enough cut it. In order to win work, you'll have to do it better, faster and cheaper. (Even two out of three would be a step in the right direction.)

I'm a UAW member (Caterpillar) and I disagree with this point. Seniority is beneficial to both parties as an older worker trains younger ones. Age does limit ones ability to do "faster and cheaper" work but knowledge is the benchmark of quality.

While young pups can work faster and accept cheaper wages, if these pups are retained in any layoffs over senior members, quality suffers.

Corporate investment in practices such as 6 Sigma, Lean Team and the Pacific Institute (Lou Tice) compounds the degradation of the quality factor as you have kids straight out of college attempting to improve production rates by charts, graphs and studies to workers who have made this or any other trade thier life's work in expectation of the best and fair compensation.

I'm ten years from retirement from CATINC and if you are familiar with the hiring practices in place now due to the last contract you would understand that CAT's ideology will turn it's machinery products into sub-standard, higher cost units.

They are hiring kids off the street in which if they maintain a "proper attitude" they will be retained, no matter what their skills or learning abilities are.

Said like a good union member and I know that you truly believe it. However, I am reminded of a comment by Mark Twain, to paraphrase, "It is not so much what we don't know that gets us in trouble, as it is what we do know that is not true." What you know is not true.

Unions have been a steady detriment to this country since their beginning and finally reached the point of destroying the industries which provided them with employment. They are still at it, and still succeeding.

For a company, labor is a commodity just like raw materials and machinery. Management is always trying to find the cheapest materials and machinery which meets their needs. Why not labor? If a material or machinery supplier forms a monopoly, sets the price artificially high to reflect their monopoly, sets the conditions of when and how they will deliver, and generally delivers an inferior product, the government steps in and breaks that up. Why do they allow labor to continue to do the same?

Since the thirties our country has been silently infiltrated by the left until they have become so successful they no longer see a need to be silent. The unions have been part of that. The unions give money to, the workers money, and actively support the left. The left is anti-free enterprise, as reflected in what I said above, and anti-America. (That doesn't mean all the members are but they don't have a voice. They are forced to fund their enemies.) The left has burdened us with unnecessary and counter productive environmental and safety rules, high taxes which incentivize the wrong things, and have killed our biggest asset, entrepreneurial innovation and risk taking with their enforcers, the trial lawyers.

Unions and lawyers are the biggest contributors to the left and they form an incestuous ring of back scratching, all to the detriment of free enterprise and success. Without that incestuous ring we could kick China's and India's butts til the cows came home.