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- Path: sparky!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!mips!darwin.sura.net!jvnc.net!yale.edu!yale!mintaka.lcs.mit.edu!hersh
- From: hersh@expo.lcs.mit.edu (Jay Hersh)
- Newsgroups: comp.graphics
- Subject: Re: SigGraph, Chicago, and Unions
- Message-ID: <hersh.714074256@xenon.lcs.mit.edu>
- Date: 17 Aug 92 17:57:36 GMT
- References: <1992Aug14.015500.25529@cmcl2.nyu.edu>
- Sender: news@mintaka.lcs.mit.edu
- Organization: X Consortium, MIT Laboratory for Computer Science
- Lines: 66
-
- galanter@nyu.edu (Philip Galanter) writes:
-
-
- >Both at SigGraph and now here I have heard/read a number of anti-union
- >slams. Yes, Chicago is a union town...it is also a town where working
- >class people have a chance to earn a decent living and maybe, if they are
- >careful and frugal, buy a home for their family someday.
-
- >Its time to stop laying the blame for a poor US economy at the feet of the
- >people who have the least power to influence the direction their given
- >industry takes, and are the first to suffer when things go bad. After 12
- >years of Reagan/Bush/"right-to-work" union busting the economy is in worse
- >shape than ever, save for the few at the very top who enjoy the largest
- >gap between the executive and working class in the West.
-
- >Yes, unions are _sometimes_ corrupt, wasteful, and/or counter-productive.
- >So are the government, banks, Fortune 500 companies, and computer industry
- >standards committees. Please allow working class people the only leverage
- >over their economic future that they have. At the end of the day they are
- >just like you, tired and a little bit older...
-
-
- Ahem.... Soapbox on
-
- I know a few people who helped organize this year's SIGGRAPH.
- According to them the reason that course attendees got box lunches instead
- of the sit down lunch customary in past years was due to the costs
- involved in having a sit down lunch, which they indicated was mostly
- labor.
-
- Also the course breaks were rigidly scheduled with no flexibility
- in time to accomodate the speakers. Again people involved with this
- portion of the conference indicated this was due to Union work rules.
-
- I don't know about other portions of the conference (though I've heard horror
- stories of $700 slide projector rental costs since an Electrician was
- required to plug it in, and an operator to run it), but it is clear from
- these 2 examples alone that Union wages in Chicago are higher for comparable
- services in other not-necessarily union towns as Boston or Las Vegas,
- and that the work rules were substantially less flexible.
-
- I would expect things will have to change substantially before SIGGRAPH
- goes back to Chicago as my hearsay understanding of the impression of those
- involved was that people were generally unhappy with certain portions of the
- conference (such as I mentioned above), and that much of this was a factor
- of inflexible work rules and union costs.
-
- Soapbox off.
-
-
- My personal opinion is Chicago is a nice town, but in several instances
- completely separate from SIGGRAPH I found the service dissapointing.
- This could have been my bad luck, or it could be a deeper additudinal
- thing among labor there.
-
-
- JaH
-
-
-
-
-
-
- --
- Hopfen und Malz, Gott erhalts
- There is nothing open about OpenGL
-