[Cleveland Steam Whistle]

Originally Posted by iggy_oi

People will still need parcels delivered, are they the only game in town? No, but it is always best to have competition in an industry. Think about how much a parcel shipment would cost if there was only one company doing it? There's a reason why in Canada we pay much more for domestic flights than most countries, 2 companies hold a monopoly and use it to gouge consumers. And they typically do not share those extra costs with their employees. People blame this poor economy on things like oil, which is a big factor, but they rarely see how big corporations are continuously reducing the amount of money going to the middle class, who are the true driving force to an economy.

This isn't about the union wanting a strike, unions don't want strikes, they are a last resort, this about a big company wanting to make bigger profits at the expense of their employees who at that the end of the day make their money. I wonder if they ever stop to think about the impact of reducing their employee's earnings and how it actually bites them in the ass when they can't afford to even use their service.

Here's a good example of how short sighted some views are on the impact of reducing costs in the name of making bigger profits.

If you've been in a macdonalds recently you've no doubt seen the new screens they use to take your order. Now those 4 screens in the restaurant eliminate 4 jobs in the store, sure that employee probably only made at best $30k a year, but here's where it creates it's impact, that employee can no longer go spend that $30k which has a ripple effect on every business that relies on that customers business. Most people will say, oh but it's not that much money, well if you consider that there are probably 100 macdonalds locations in the province, 4 $30k/year jobs lost at each locations, that would take around $12M out of our provincial economy. Meanwhile your Big Mac hadn't dropped in price, so those cost savings are just going in rotten ronny's pocket.

Yup, and a bunch of jobs got created to make those machines. The MCDs job is simply no longer relevant, but the make the machine job is. Nothing is gained by keeping jobs that no longer meet needs of society.