Not really as it applies to US Airways justification of outsourcing as professed by Callaway Golf.
His position was that US Airways and their unions in effect caused their jobs to be outsourced by working for above market rates. As DCA, Bluto and others have demonstrated through their prolific research that Mr Golf's assertion is not only a knee jerk reaction but is factually wrong.
Further it demonstrates his complete lack of knowledge of outsourcing, union contracts and is only capable of bleating the company line of "Unions Bad, Parker Good".
It's like you always say 700UW, Don't let facts get in the way. You'd think US had learned the lessons of the high cost of cheap with SHARES, Outsourcing Res offshore only to bring it back onshore, (A move that IMO was directly related to the change in bonus comp for the Trailer Park Boys)
You'll have to connect the dots a little more for me to understand how anyone has demonstrated I am factually wrong. Here's a brief summary of my hypothesis:
1) Unions inflate wages above market rates. (Why would they exist if they couldn't provide that fundamental "benefit" to their members?)
2) Unions negatively affect productivity in multiple ways... they advocate for paying people more to do less (Labor Day holiday was a great example, thanks 700 for that softball) ... they enforce unnatural restrictions on employees doing or not doing certain tasks for the benefit of the company and the customer (at non-union shops there are no restrictions on supervisors or managers jumping in and helping to move a long customer queue through or stepping on the production line during busy time) ... by preventing Management from properly disciplining or terminating underperforming employees ... by adding expensive work rules like paid vacation days above what non-union employees are offered ... and by demanding onerous work rules and filing grievances which Management must respond to thus expending money, time and resources that would not be required in a non-union environment. Each of these, and there are many more, reduce productivity and thus weaken a company's financial postion.
3) Because of #1 & #2 above, many jobs and industries which were formally strong in this nation have seen dramatic declines since unions came along to "protect workers". I submit this is the case because companies, in the pursuit of generating the profits and ROI demanded by their shareholders and investors, decided to outsource jobs to contractors and/or to move entire operations to other countries where the total cost of labor is less expensive than doing the same work that can be done by unionized employees in the US.
4) The final and fully expected result of all of this is that unions in America are directly responsible for lost jobs and the outsourcing decisions companies make. US is not altogether different in their approach than any other publicly traded company. When the financial environment warrants a decision to eliminate over-market priced jobs in favor of generating a better ROI though outsourcing, Managers would be foolish not to take it under strong consideration.
Parker's and other executive compensation, especially in the form of stock-options, are irrelevant to the facts at hand. If the executives all agreed to cap their compensation at $100k I would expect and anticipate that they would make the exact same decisions as they do at their current level of compensation. They wouldn't stick around mind you, but as fiduciaries of the company they are fundamentally responsible for making good business decisions independent of their personal compensation - that is what a fiduciary is. Thus, there is simply no correlation between executive compensation and the decision to outsource except that outsourcing is proper for fiscal responsibility (as opposed to unions), and managers are charged with doing just that.
Executive compensation is tied to performance metrics because that is in the best interest of the shareholders/owners. The better the executives perform on achieving shareholder objectives, the better they are compensated. Only in some screwed up liberal philosophy would people be paid not to provide a greater return on investment, oh wait, that's exactly what unions do.
