Unions and the Pope

so I suppose most of the world know that Sydney hosted Catholics big event, World Youth Day this past week. Not sure how many people heard about the threat of strike by NSW public transport union though. They had been in negotiation with the state government over payrise for some time, and shortly before start of WYD 2008, threatened to go on strike for Thursday 17th July, the busiest day for traffic...busier than even during the Olympics apparently (Sydney had an estimated extra 250,000 visitors for this one week and that particular Thursday 700,000 Sydneysiders and visitors would have been affected if the strike went ahead - source SBS News!!)

So in the midst of all that the Union who supposedly claim they aim for collective good of the people tries to blackmail the state government in their pay negotiation. And people wonder why I dont care for workers union?

Many Australians felt Howard's government introduction of the Australian Workplace Agreement was in favour of employers and allowed individual employees to be exploited. I dont know how they came to that logic, cos I dont believe that one person's performance and associated reward should be evaluated based on the average of how an entire group performs. The only thing that would lead to is unproductivity - the underperformers have no motivation to improve as they are over-rewarded, while the over performers will get to the point where they are discouraged to continue at their level while being under-rewarded. So they will lower their performance knowing they will still get rewarded at the average rate. In the medium to long term every one reduce their performance, and oops! overall performance (of the company/the country) has dropped how many ever notches.