OMG this is the most hilarious piece ever. I love the Daily Show!!!

Many years ago when I was a boy my father worked for NCR (this was before they were bought out by AT&T, now at that time they took excellent care of their employees. Families were well protected medically, employees had upwardly mobile and secure jobs that paid very well as long as people continued to work there. They had only one thing missing, a dental plan.

Then the unions came, they used this fairly minor point to lash the workers together into an attempt at unionizing and making a demand for a dental plan. Well the end result was that my father, along with the rest of the workers who refused to unionize and remained loyal to their employer, kept their jobs and were relocated to Texas, while those who went for the union were simply terminated and the office shut down.

New workers were hired to replace them when the company went to Texas. Great job unions. They may have their uses occasionally, but in the end like most organizations, they will exist to benefit themselves rather than their members.

Brilliant. Oh I love the smell of hypocracy being uncovered in the morning.

I gotta say though, I actually disagree with Wal Marts business practices too. Without going into all the objections I have about Wal Mart's business practices... I protest them by choosing not to shop there.(Ironically enough my mom works at Wal Mart, more on that later, but I still won't shop there). However, despite my personal issues with Wal Mart, I am certainly not going to demand a Union for the employees. What's next? Demanding Unions, benefits, and better pay for people who's only goal in life to to get off the cash register and onto the fryer? How labor intensive is it to say, "Would you like to Supersize that?" It's Wal Mart people, not Wall Street. I don't mean to imply that Wal Mart employees are stupid or worthless but lets face it, working at Wal Mart doesn't take a lot of skill. You don't even need a high school diploma to work there.

Anyone who goes to work at Wal Mart demanding to be treated like they are performing dangerous and highly technical labor or think they are really making a difference in the world is delusional. I feel comfortable saying all that because I was in retail myself for years before I got into my current job. Was it hell sometimes? Hell yes. Any job dealing with the general public is gonna suck, that's just the nature of the beast. But I never complained about my pay. For the most part, the job was pretty fuckin easy and I, having common sense, never thought that retail was my one way ticket to job security. Just the opposite in fact. I knew that the only way to keep getting hours was to bust my ass. I worked my way up to manager and as I went up, naturally so did my pay, but I never expected to get rich off of it. No one goes into retail thinking that they are gonna make a lot of money. In retail, hours are often determined based on sales. This isn't really a shock to anyone who has ever worked in retail. And, wanting to make money
(*Gasp* WHAT?! A Business wants to profit?! For SHAME!* /sarcasm) retailers will often favor their best workers and give them more hours because they are the ones who will get the money into the store. I was fortunate to get benefits but when I started out as part time, I wasn't eligible for them. I made sure to get insurance on my own by paying for it. (See what I did there? I threw in a personal responsibilty point.)

The fact is Wal Mart does offer benefits for full time employees and they pay more than minimum wage. Yes, Wal Mart has a list of other issues but they are by no means starving the employees to death. My mother has worked there for about 6 years. She works the health and beauty section. Her job is to track inventory, help customers, and generally try to keep it neat and stocked. I think she also covers registers if it's busy but she isn't a cashier. Every now and then she has to do an overnight for inventory or season change out but her hours have pretty consistantly been 6 am to 3 pm for the last 4 years. She gets benefits and earns about $12 an hour. That's not gonna buy her a yacht but she is able to survive. Do I think mom should earn more? No actually. She isn't building sky scrapers for petes sake. And if she was only part time, I wouldn't think she should be entitled to benefits either. Why should someone who only works less then 20-30 hours a week be entitled to the same benefits as someone who works 40-50? Benefit covereage is paid out of the employees checks. Every pay period, a predertermined amount is taken out of the employees check and put into thier benefits based on the type of coverage the employee chooses, if there was a choice in coverage. The company has to pay the rest. This is common practice in MOST businesses with benefits. What the company has to pay to cover benefits of part time staff doesn't even equate to the hours the part timer is putting in.

The union people in this story really don't have a leg to stand on here.

Loved this piece when it was live... still hilarious. I am still trying to figure out how unions believe they are doing more good than harm. My husband's job is in the aerospace industry. He has to wait hours, days and sometimes weeks because only union people can perform certain tasks - like picking up and moving a certain type of box. There is one program that he needs to use that only union people can touch, but the union doesn't want to train more than one person to be capable of operating the machine. In short, he's bored by the slow progress of a lot of work that needs to be done.

To this day my dad resents being forced to join the Teamsters when he was a young pilot flying Lear jets for hire.

What I want to know is, how is anyone dumb enough to be interviewed by the Daily Show anymore?