[ExI] solargate: was RE: A Nobel laureate and climate change

[Adrian Tymes]

On Sun, Sep 18, 2011 at 1:51 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
> No sane investor would have put money into Solyndra because their factory
> was in a non-right-to-work state.  We already had a local solar panel
> manufacturer, First Solar in Santa Clara, but it wisely located its factory
> in neighboring Arizona, which is a right-to-work state where labor prices
> are within reason.  In California, factory workers are forced to join the
> union.  Unions drive up wages and costs.  Consequently, no sane investor
> should ever put a dime into any company which has a production facility or
> any labor-intensive operation in any non-right-to-work state.  In a
> narrow-margin manufacturing enterprise, unions cause companies to fail
> eventually.  They can do engineering in non-RTW states, but generally not
> manufacturing.  They will lose money on every sale while trying to make it
> up by increasing the number of sales.

One thing I don't get: even if the state doesn't forbid union-card companies
(and, honestly, what's the point of a union if a company can simply hire
non-union workers at will), why does that mandate that any given company
must agree to unionization?  If its workers vote to unionize, simply dismiss
those who are not happy working non-union.  If a lot of workers want to
unionize, then you're probably doing something wrong in terms of worker
treatment, and would get more productive workers by remedying the problem
instead of agreeing to unionization.

Of course, my perspective may be skewed by working in an industry
(software, especially for small startups) where unionization efforts have been
repeatedly rejected by the workers.