Do you work for the union? do you like it?

touche

 

I've been in management for many years working on union and non-union gigs. My opinion is that unions are a response to bad management and unions can be every bit as bad as bad management. Being a manager I try to not be that "bad" manager. However, sometimes decisions are not popular and the union guys want to get all up in your face. On one union construction job the union data cabling guys were doing a completely unacceptable job. On any other site I would have made them tear it out and do the job right. On this site the union guys threatened to go out on strike. Being that this job was just outside Chicago and 100% union that would have shut the whole job down. In the end I let them do whatever kind crappy job they wanted to do. After the union guys were gone I flew my own non-union guys in to rip out their work and do it right. It cost a lot more to rip out the bad work, put in in correctly, and fly teams of people around the country but in the scheme of things you do what you have to do.

My current gig is union but my state is a right to work so you don't have to join if you don't want to. I couldn't tell you is union or not because frankly I don't care. I do make a point of being friendly with the union leadership. If I work with them, they will work with me and we will get a lot more done than if we butt heads.

I will confess to a little bit of schadenfreude observing one of the union leaders and his coworker. This coworker was without a doubt the worst employee of all time, a lazy, lying, thieving, complainer. As there are only two guys in the trade, the union guy had to do two peoples worth of work. Of course management was working to fire the lazy guy and the union was representing him. So on one hand the union guy was working twice as hard and at the same time representing lazy guy.

 

I hear ya. He certainly wasnt subtle about his feelings.

 

At least this is how Philly works

 

I believe there was a grievance filed. My job there was not to deal with the unions, but to make sure the finished product was what the company wanted. (I might have expressed my disdain for the work being done in some "colorful" language OK OK it involved several words beginning with F and I probably was out of line.) The team we brought in to fix the mess were employees as apposed to the contractors who refused to do the job right in the first place. I'm not sure why anyone in their right mind would bring back the people who refused to do the job correctly in the first place.

To your second point I'm not sure what a pinpoint job is. In re-reading the post I made it sound like the union guy, Fred, was representing the lazy coworker. That was not the case, the steward was representing the lazy guy, attending his disciplinary meetings, etc. Fred as a member of the union leadership was aware of the representation and the fact that lazy guy was really a piece of work. Being laid off is an entirely different thing from being fired. If I lay someone off I cannot immediately rehire the position. And firing someone takes a lot of work. Anyplace I've ever worked the process requires massive paper work and months of effort.

Lastly, I've never been to Philly, but I hear you have a pretty good sandwich

 

To Beavis and Oz "you can't fix stupid"..

 

apparently reading comprehension is not your strong suit

 

As a general rule, IT people do suck. It's a side effect of our huge salaries and rich lifestyles. Some people hate us, but we understand that the world needs toilet cleaners too.

 

I went to a fight, and a Tacoma blog broke out.

 

Yeah it was a fun discussion, for the most part.

The sad thing is that a few bad unions became known for crooked dealings and created a union PR problem to the point that a lot of people who could seriously benefit from a union want no part of it. This is something people in most of the rest of the world look at us and scratch their head about: IG Metall, the German union that is working with the UAW to organize the VW plant in Tennessee, wins incredible benefits for their members while helping to ensure that the workers are highly trained and the products are top quality. That's why people around the world are willing to pay top dollar for a BMW, and they want it made in Germany, too, even though the labor costs in Germany are higher.

THAT'S how you protect your standard of living and make sure your kids have a decent economy to grow up into. You don't just say "go work somewhere else if you're not happy." That's been the motto here for a while now, to the point that our standard of living is sliding down, and it will continue to do so until we add value to the jobs done here. Unions are one way (but not the only way) to do that.

 

Well it's actually not dropping like a rock - it's dropped because so many of the union covered jobs have gone overseas, thanks to the philosophy which says that the only way to "compete" is to either ship the good jobs elsewhere or try to get people here to do them for nothing. The loss of good union jobs has hurt everyone and lowered our standard of living, there's no reason to rejoice other than out of stereotypes and personal vendettas based not on facts but emotion.

 

And, just because the people are saying something doesn't make what they're saying accurate. Look at the people they vote into office. The people are cutting their own throats because they've been tricked into voting against their own best interests.

 

No. I am saying that people can collectively make bad choices. History is full of examples. Nazi Germany. Slavery. Communism. All have been politically popular at certain times.

But I have laid out concrete arguments for why unions can be beneficial, how they are helping people's standards of living, and you don't really respond to any of this other than with a statement that you're glad they're declining. We're not going anywhere here.

 

This is nonsense and you have already said so yourself. With only a small percentage of jobs in this country covered by unions (a fact you're happy about) how are unions now suddenly the main cause for job loss?

 

Union membership has been 13 or 14 percent of the workforce for quite a while, they're not really declining.

 

I think some of the numbers for unions are artificially low becuase of right to work states where a union can represent workers in a group that are not members. In my job everyone gets union representation even if you are not a member. Same with my partners job. I wiuld be interested in seeing the number of people with union representation rather than union membership.

 

That might be true; I have just seen those figures in that range for quite a few years.

I think also there's an issue of what constitutes a union; for example some white-collar employee groups call their union a professional association. To me if they bargain for pay and benefits they're a union; otherwise they're an association.

 

Thats also a good point. I belong to other guilds and associations that i duobt get counted in the membership numbers as well... of course that may be because some don't consider art a job..... damn kansas.

 

Haha yeah I am in Indiana which went right-to-work a few years back. And you know what's happened since then? The average wage has slid down and the jobs we attract are call centers and others at low-wages. Welcome to the future.

 

What Reagan did with the air traffic controllers should be done with all essential public services.
You want a union, that's fine and dandy, but prohibit strikes and lockouts where the public suffers.