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Tell Fox: Union Members ARE Rocket Scientists
Amaya Tune, AFL-CIO Media Outreach specialist, is p’od. She’ll tell you why.
Stuart Varney, a Fox blowhard, had a segment today hitting the AFL-CIO for pushing for a “No” vote on Michael Dell.
The Fox crew jested that we shouldn’t be weighing in because unions don’t create innovative technology and went so far as to say: ”Imagine if unions made an iPhone.”
This made me reach out to my brothers and sisters at the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE), whose membership includes rocket scientists. They gave me a list of really cool things their members innovate and create.
Here’s a list of stuff I plan to tweet at Fox all day under the hashtag #unionsbuild with some of these examples:
* Nuclears subs and carriers;
* Space shuttle;
* Dams and waterways;
* B-52;
* Unmanned aircrafts; and
* 787 fuselages.
If folks want to join my angry tirade, I welcome your tweets or retweet this:
RT @amayatune @Foxnews so what have you invented lately? NASA union scientists had over 30,000 inventions last year. #unionsbuild
Also, if you have your own examples of things that unions build that are critical to society (like our next generation of workers by teaching our kids) then throw ‘em in!
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9 Comments
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Don’t forget safety in the workplace, paid time off, guaranteed pension, health care, A VOICE IN THE WORKPLACE, paid vacation, guaranteed wages, etc etc etc…. O WAIT – this sounds like a CEO’s contract?! That is right – we should ALL work under a “guaranteed contract!!!” Union organizers, negotiators, business agents, and members did create something but you can’t buy – DIGNITY ON THE JOB!!! Thank you to all the great union folks that also created tangible items, too! IFPTE!!!!
Hey FOX, do you have an employment contract? Can you say OOOPPPPSSSS!
Fox will trust unions to build the entire nuclear arsenal but won’t trust us to build a phone. Oh please.
Isn’t this really a more an issue that various unions don’t organize engineers, programmers and artists in the tech universe?
The people actually building the iPhone in China are unionized. They work at Foxconn and there was an effort to organize, and I guess the communist party got involved or something. So union members are building the iPhone – they’re just not American union members.
The ARM chip in there was designed by engineers in England. A lot of the other tech is US (like the multitouch surface). The software is largely US-made. A lot of the EDGE and WiMax tech is US.
Really though, the iPhone represents the end product of a lot of research and engineering. Most of any product is based on old technology and R&D.
Our real weakness is that we’ve disinvested in R&D since the 1970s. We’ve been coasting on the hard work and massive investment in science of the 1960s (the internet is a good example of 60s tech). My brother’s a physicist, and he’s been out lobbying to Congress about this problem.
The entire infrastructure of R&D is broken, starting with public education and the lack of affordable universities. Then there’s the issue of science majors going into finance careers to pay off their huge student loans. That’s how the children of the working class make money – getting in the door with smarts. But many the smart ones that would have been designing the future were working for Wall Street.
We need to get our priorities in order.
Visit http://www.unionlabel.org to follow the twitter conversation or to learn more about union products and services! Hey Fox — want to know what unions build — visit the Union Label website!
Don’t forget AFT, UAW, & other unions representing university research faculty, scientists, engineers, graduate student research assistants, & post-docs!
With the sale of my division by Boeing, I no longer have any direct hands on dealings with exotic military programs, but for years I worked on B-52, B1-B, F-4 and numerous classified unmanned aircraft programs. If FOX wants to say that it takes more skill to build a cell phone than it does to get a 55 year old half million pound airplane to deliver weapons to a spot on a map anywhere in the world within roughly a 1 foot by 1 foot target, then so be it. I know my compadres who are still working military projects at Boeing are doing far more advanced projects than I worked on back then. At Spirit, Union employees create a fuselage section for the 787 made entirely of composite material that perfectly matches the boeing designs and snaps together in Washington state. The non union shops that built other sections had to be purchased by Boeing to get their quality up to the point where it could begin to match ours.
What did unions build? They built America!!! Where do we begin: how about the Brooklyn Bridge, the Golden Gate Bridge and the US Naval Fleet. How about the Empire State Building and major portions of the Interstate Highway System and most of the country’s airports. How about some of the greatest musical performances in human history, brought to you by the unionized musicians of America’s best symphonies and orchestras. Seriously!!! Tell Stuart Varney to call me on his Made-in-China iPhone and I’ll give hime a more complete list.
The next time there is a labor problem at lox I mean fox, who do you think will help them? Thats right, a UNION!!!! Horrors! Or as Dr. House would say, “Oh, Snap”!!
My late husband was a union lineman for 34 years. IBEW 1289. Turn on a light switch and thank a union lineman, enjoy your warm comfort on a cold winter night and thank a union lineman. I suggest when Fox has lights in their tv studios, they should thank a union employee. In fact, many jobs within Fox headquarters are union held positions. Stuart Varney should pack his bags and head back to whatever foreign country he came from. He is a fool who fits in well with Fox.