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Exhibit A of why I hate unions (major vent inside)
Some background: My metro area (Detroit) has the highest unemployment rate in the country. It's above 10%. The economy completely sucks here and has for a really long time - years longer than the rest of the country even when the national economy was rocking it out. We used to have a construction boom and all that went the way of the dodo when the housing bubble burst. So now we have have tons of empty new construction homes and there is little to no work in that industry anymore.
So, in that context, a huge new medical facility is being built near me. I think it's going to be an urgent care center with some offices. It's a few stories tall, so it's a big construction job. It's one of a handful of large construction jobs in the area. When it was started I thought "yay! a big job for contractors to work on."
For the past few weeks there have been protesters - like maybe a hundred of them - carrying signs and trying to block the construction entrance, doing all the typical protest stuff. I've been trying to read their signs and this morning I finally figured it out. The electricians went on strike b/c the general contractor isn't paying union wages, instead they're paying the market rate for non-union electrician wages. Thus, the electricians went on strike. So here we are in an area with the highest unemployment, virtually no jobs in this industry and they are striking b/c they're getting a few dollars less per hour than they did when times are good. Apparently it's better to stall the only large project in the area, and stay on unemployment just to make a statement about union wages. Nevermind that plenty of non-union electricians make that wage and are perfectly fine with it. Nevermind that any wage is better than no wage, especially since there aren't jobs here. grrrr
It's all I can do not to pull over and b!tch one of them out. I think I need to find a new commuting route.
Re: Exhibit A of why I hate unions (major vent inside)
sorry! I agree that unions are annoying in some instances and industries. Our college gets slammed with random protesters when we need plumbers because we don't use union plumbers. I didn't know so many groups had unions. i thought it was mostly teachers, performers and car manufacturers, lol.
I feel you...
When the Northwest Airlines mechanics went on strike a few years ago (not sure if this was nation-wide or just in Minneapolis), I had to drive by their "picketing" sight every day. After a month or so, the mechanics were replaced with new mechanics, and the old union mechanics stayed on strike. Still at their picketing place on the side of the freeway. I think they're still technically on strike. I see random folks with signs there every once in a while still.
Unions are one issue where I tend to lean waaaaay right. (I told you I had an issue or two like that... it was only a matter of time before I outed myself with one of them!)
In general, I hate unions for the reason you stated above. You know, sometimes you don't get to have everything you want. Sometimes life sucks. I get why unions were formed back when general working conditions were hazardous on good days and deadly on bad days, but seriously. They've gone overboard.
Ditto. I get unions for the idea of being eligible for health care and for making sure there is a bathroom at your work site and a safe resting place and all, but I think its silly to strike every time you want a freakin raise. Granted, many times they do threaten to strike well before they do, and sometimes I do think businesses need to feel that strain from the strike to appreciate the gravity of the situation,but still, in other cases it just doens't work.
I remember that! DH has a cousin or uncle or someone that worked for NWA and originally went on strike but had to cross the line b/c he has small children and needed the money. Union people slashed his tires in his driveway, egged his house and a few of them picked on the sidewalk in front of their home, which terrified his kids. Thankfully that only happened for about a week b/c a lot of people crossed the line around that time.
Maybe that story should have been my Exhibit A.
I can't tell. It seems like they're at the stage where the work is inside the building so I can't tell if people are there working or not. I googled everything I could think of and couldn't find a single story about it.
?
Move to Cincinnati. ?Little to nothing is unionized there (seriously, I can count the ones I know of on one hand). ?I was in serious shock when I moved to Buffalo and there is a union for everything.
I have to say that you are a bigger person than I am. ?I don't think I would have the self control not to call them idiots to their faces. ??
I feel you. I think unions are still good in some industries, but most of the time they're annoying.
Management at my site is holding their collective breath b/c the union at our sister site (next city over) wanted to add to their contract that any site within 200 sq mi would also belong to their union. When their management refused, they said they were coming any way (open campus, so totally possible) and would force a vote. I hope not, but we'll see.
I am generally pro-union, but stuff like this does not help their cause. My husband is a member of the AFT, and I'm positive it's the only reason we have decent health insurance. His salary is an absolute pittance, so the health insurance is the only saving grace of his program. I was in CWA for a few months when I was an intern at a paper; until the inters were unionized, they barely made above minimum wage, but afterwards, they made close to $10/hour.
Unions are such a complicated issue. Unnecessary strikes, corruption, the slashing tires example - all these things cut against unions. But then again, corporate greed and corruption cut in favor of unions. And some of the things that companies will to do try to keep workers from exercising their legal rights to unionize are pretty appalling. It's kinda like the current economic mess - nobody's hands are clean.
In order to force the employers to pay higher wages/benefits. Of course that means fewer people will be hired (it's not a coincidence MI has the highest unemployment rate and a high unionization rate), but the few don't mind penalizing the many when it benefits them.
In my hometown there's Kroger, Wal-Mart, K-Mart, and an independent grocery store. The independent grocery store doesn't use union workers, and it's the best. They typically employ high school and college students where the large chains employ townies.
That said, they were all better than most of the grocery stores around here.
Another union story just b/c I'm in a mood today.
You probably know my Dh works for an auto manufacturer and he's been assigned to a few different plants over the years, which are unionized by the UAW.
Even though the hourly (unionized) workers and salaried (non-unionized) workers are supposed to be on the same team, if my DH is in a plant he is not allowed to do anything a union worker does. Nothing. It's a "us vs them" mentality and it is a major reason why the foreign auto manufacturers are leaps and bounds more efficient than the unionized American plants.
If a package needs to be delivered from point A to point B at the plant there is a union worker to do that. If that worker happens to not be around and salaried people need that package to make the car it doesn't matter. They have to wait b/c they are not allowed to touch packages. Also, no other union worker is allowed to touch it either. Each worker has his/her own job and no one else is allowed to do it for them. I mentioned delivering packages b/c that actually happened. My Dh was right in the middle of solving a major issue on a car and all they needed were new lightbulbs. So the supplier sent them to the plant and there they sat in the loading area b/c the worker who was designated to bring the bulbs to the working area was "too busy" - for an entire week. The entire project was stalled for a week b/c no other union worker would do it and if my DH did it he would have been written up and penalized.
Another similar thing happened to one of Dh's co-workers. This non-union worker is only allowed to do certain things with the computer software that tests and predicts how parts of a car will react. He was explaining to a union worker that such-and-such a scenario will work and the union worker didn't get it. So the non-union guy explained himself by using the computer software. That non-union worker was written up and penalized b/c he "crossed the line" into union territory. Even though they were working together on the same friggen issue and the guy was just trying to help out the other guy. It's totally insane.
And don't even get me started on what the higher up union workers do all day.
(I might DD this later if I can)
I think we already had a "working on Sunday" perk. I think it was time and a half...
We have lots of 'light-bulb' jokes in the theatre world. Here's the one for the stagehand union (Local 1 in NYC has a reputation for being a little mafia-like):
Q: How many IATSE guys does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Twenty-five and a minimum of four hours, you got a @!%#&@ problem with that?
I absolutely understand your frustatration over this type of situation. I understand how it came about, though - employers would slowly start to use non-union workers to do work that union workers generally did in order to replace them. It really sucks. If the unions and the employers could have a better working relationship, this might be less likely to result. The unions are trying to be vigilant about protecting their jobs. Unfortunately, this often results in these absurd situations.
As for American automakers, I have no doubt that some of the problem is unions. But a huge problem is that a lot of foreign automakers simply make better cars. Toyotas are far more reliable than Chevys. My Toyota actually cost more than a comparable Chevy or Ford would have cost, so I don't think the whole problem can be attributed to labor. I keep seeing these commercials for the Escalade Hybrid - WTF?! In these economic times, when most people are cutting back, why take one of the most obnoxious cars ever manufactured, spend all the money to make it a hybrid, and spend millions of dollars advertising it? Why not use the money to produce lower cost hybrids that could compete with the popular Prius and Civic? I completely get your frustration with unions, but if American automakers want to compete, they need to stop putting out crappy products.
Yeah. I've read too much about the Triangle Factory Fire and stuff that was happening in the early part of the 20th century in factories and such not to be sympathetic, but I think there are better solutions.
A person should not lose his or her rights when walking into work. I think labor laws are beneficial. Employers shouldn't be allowed to lock seamstresses in a building, and they're not, thanks in part to the work of unions. But I don't think many of the other measures unions take are necessary.
The Chevy Malibu is by far the best car in its class, and Chevy trucks don't even compare to the foreign ones so I'm not going to get into the which-is-better contest. American cars would be thousands of dollars cheaper than they are now if the manufacturers weren't paying union workers DOUBLE what the foreign companies pay their non-union equivilent workers (and that's just the ones that work. don't even get me started on the Job Bank!).
No salaried worker at an auto plant is going to go to a plant and "take over" the job of transporting packages from point A to point B or any other union job. Salaried workers have jobs to do already and they're not anything like a plant worker's (if that was even a possibility then that union worker shouldn't have that job b/c it's pointless and a waste of money). Non-union workers in the plants are engineers, not the non-union equivalent of a union worker. There is no such thing as a non-union hourly worker (line workers, skilled trade, etc) at the American auto plants. But it's more than that. The UAW prohibits union hourly workers from helping out union hourly workers. So it goes far beyond "protecting jobs" from an engineer who doesn't even work there except on short-term assignments. Do you think they're worried about a line worker "taking over" another line worker's job? What's the worst that could happen - increased productivity? The horror!
The best thing that could happen to the Big 3 would be to abolish the union (that and their massive retirees' pensions). It's sad b/c the UAW could have protected workers and their jobs at the same time. Instead they're sabotoging their own jobs and challenging everyone to rethink the necessity of unions b/c of their ridiculousness.
I completely agree with this. And I agree with you that the restrictions have reached the level of absurdity. I was just pointing out that they started by trying to protect encroachment of union jobs by non-union. Bottom line: unions often suck, but so does management. This leads me right back to my feelings about humanity in general: people suck.
LOL agreed. People suck.
I totally agree they served a useful purpose back in the day before labor conditions were standardized. And I don't even think they're totally pointless today, in theory. It's just that I have yet to find an example of a well-functioning one that doesn't harm the business more than it supposedly helps the worker. So I guess I'm back with the p.p. that said they're great in theory and fail in reality.
I agree, I'm so torn on unions.
It seems most the time, they end up actually hurting their members, which obviously isn't the point. UAW is case in point - how many auto workers have lost their jobs because the Big 3 can't compete because of UAW? It's affects the whole - American cars not only cost more than they should, but they can't be as efficiently produced, and somewhere down the line that cuts a great feature or reliability standard that foreign automakers may be able to achieve.
My mom is a member of the nursing assistant's union, which she hates because they cost a lot, are generally useless, and often just end up in fighting matches with the nurse's union, which usually wins.
On the other hand, I can see the slippery slope in a case like caden's first example - like WalMart, sure any wage is better than no wage, but will we end up in a race to the bottom?
Most our grocery stores here are unionized, and I can tell the difference between the moms who can support their children on union wages and have been at my local Safeway since I was a kid, and the Target checkers who I don't trust to fill my own reusable bags if I were to bring them in. However, I obviously vote with my dollar for those Target checkers every time I shop there.
We did have a grocery strike in Southern California when I went to college just over the "border". I drove around for an hour and a half to find a can of split pea soup w/o crossing a picket line.
No b/c 1 job doesn't exist in a vacuum. Each employer has to compete with other employers to get the best employees it can. There's a wage point in which an employer won't be able to find quality employees b/c the wage rate is too low and substandard (just like there's a price point at which it won't be able to sell any goods b/c customers can get it cheaper elsewhere). Why would anyone work at a place with rock bottom wages when they could go somewhere else and get a better wage? The only reason they wouldn't do that is if there were no other jobs, which gets back to my point that a job is better than no job.
Besides, unions don't exist to provide a wage that is slightly more than the rock bottom of the barrel. It exists to provide a wage that beats the market rate. There is no reason why certain people should be paid more to do the same job other people do for less. Well, no good reason, I should say.
Well, I'm always one to drop kick a union in the teeth, I have another lovely example. I have a friend who worked for PG&E (pacific gas and electric) at Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant. He needed to move his computer (desktop) from his cube to a conference room for a week long project. He was late to the start because he could not move it himself and had to wait for a union guy to move it and was late. Nice and efficient.
Like Pescalita I also got to embrace the UFCW strike a few years back, it didn't bother me much becaue my market was a local non-union chain but the strike was about the employees having to start paying a percentage of their health benefits because it was getting too expensive for the markets to pay 100%. They would still have benefits just have to pay like 10%. They went on strike, I do not remember what the resolution was but shortly after the end, the UFCW dropped medical benefits for their administrative workers because they cost too much - if that isn't a glowing becon of hipocracy I don't know what is.
BigT- my Dh isn't allowed to move his computer either! I thought that was just a UAW thing. Glad to know the absurdity is widespread. He's not allowed to lift anything over a certain weight (5lbs or something like that.) I wonder if that's how it is for your friend.
Oh and the UAW went insane over paying copays too. I remember they went on strike at the plants and parked a few vehicles at the entrances so the strikers could kept stuff near them. The vehicles, owned by the union workers, were the most expensive vehicles the company made - WAY more expensive than my DH and his non-union coworkers could ever afford. We drove by the plant in our compact to check out the strike and were like WTF you want us to feel sorry for you b/c you don't want to pay a $20 copay and you drive THAT? Meanwhile we pay hundreds of dollars each month for our premium, much less our copays.
I really need to stop!