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Union or non-union it always seems like the best workers are always having to pick up the slack for the deadwood employees and management. The SAME BS from experience occurred both in union and non-union shops. If I had to choose I would union as the employees at least have some bargaining positions from exploitive businesses today.
I'm not in a union, never have been, and never will be. I have job security... my employer is always trying to bring on good people and retain those they have. So are our competitors and others in noncompetitive verticals. I get raises and promotions... at my last employer, when the annual reviews didn't result in enough of a bump, my response was to leave and give myself a 10% in base comp. I get time off... twenty days per year, plus holidays, plus a two-week shutdown around the holidays, and if I call in sick or with an emergency nobody carps. I don't have a pension, but I do have my 401(k), IRA, taxable savings, etc. and will never be looking for the taxpayer to come bail me out because I happened to be around at the wrong part of the Ponzi cycle.
Unions are a cancer. They exist to exploit working people and direct their hard-earned money to distasteful political causes. They do not protect the hard-working and productive... they penalize those folks by holding them down to the lowest common denominator and making it difficult or impossible to get rid of the deadwood, which increases the workload on those with a work ethic.
Quite frankly, when someone starts going on about unions, I have serious questions about how much of a contributor they could possibly be... it's the do-nothings who are largely eager for special protections from being fired. Those who produce and contribute have little to fear, but an awful lot of people believe just showing up every day is "contributing", and they're the ones who are always carping about "Businesses hate good people and want to fire me to hire some incompetent nephew." BS.
You do realize that the only reason you get most of the things you mention in the first paragraph is because of the unions in the mid 20th century? It's easy to portray all unions as "cancers" because some of them were exactly that - associated with organized crime for example. That's a very slanted view that is not borne out in reality.
I will agree with you that the return of the union isn't going to fix the problems we see now - the ever widening divide between the 1% and the underclass. Automation is the ultimate goal of corporations these days. You don't have to worry about unions when you don't need employees.
Union or non-union it always seems like the best workers are always having to pick up the slack for the deadwood employees and management. The SAME BS from experience occurred both in union and non-union shops. If I had to choose I would union as the employees at least have some bargaining positions from exploitive businesses today.
I spent time in both union & non union shops and yeah, it's the same either way. I've been a union steward for the UAW, sat on the other side of the table as the HR Manager (lol) and now sit at the table as the operations manager. It's pretty funny actually.
When I ran for steward I was idealistic and thought that I would be fighting for people who had been treated unfairly by management. I've always rooted for the underdog so I thought that this would be perfect for me. I did get some cases where management had indeed been very unfair to good employees and had wins for these employees. Unfortunately the majority of the grievances I handled were complaints from employees who were slackers and upset because someone told them to do their job. Quite a few of them I told point blank, "I'm not gonna push a grievance because the supervisor told you to do your job and you didn't like it."
While in management I had decent relations with the union which took a while to establish because the plant manager was a psycho who would deliberately antagonize the union whenever he could. I ended up finally telling the union steward to just come to me and not bother with the plant manager because I was tired of being threatened with arbitration every time the steward came out of the plant manager's office ticked off.
Probably odd to have someone in management agree with you on this but yes, there are exploitative employers out there and a lot of the practices are not geared towards the employees. I knew that it was time to get out of HR when they changed my title in my last HR job from 'Human Resources Manager' to 'Human Capital Manager'. People as 'capital'?
I have not seen a lot of union activity but they are still somewhat common in my industry (manufacturing). It's not a big deal to me either way if there's a union or not in the workforce that I oversee.
Trump admitted the unemployment numbers were bogus on the campaign trail.
“Don’t believe those phony numbers when you hear 4.9% unemployment. The number’s as high as 35%. In fact, I even heard recently 42%."
Because he was looking at the participation rate at the time, which is still below historical highs.
Let's use our brains for this:
1. You said campaign trail. So how would someone outside of the government know the inside scoop?
2. The calculation for the job number has been the same for decades and the calculation method is posted publicly. We're the numbers take in 1989? 2001? 2007?
3. Do you really believe our country can stand true unemployment of 35%? That's not even possible. America runs on consumption. Losing a full third of all consumers would be a catastrophe.
4. Participation rates are affected by many factors including aging, people choosing to claim disability, the opioid crisis, and failure to launch.
Maybe it's your particular surroundings but everyone I know is employed and doing okay. Rents in my area are stable of increasing. So people are working.
People seem to forget that full employment does not mean that everyone has a job.
I spent time in both union & non union shops and yeah, it's the same either way. I've been a union steward for the UAW, sat on the other side of the table as the HR Manager (lol) and now sit at the table as the operations manager. It's pretty funny actually.
When I ran for steward I was idealistic and thought that I would be fighting for people who had been treated unfairly by management. I've always rooted for the underdog so I thought that this would be perfect for me. I did get some cases where management had indeed been very unfair to good employees and had wins for these employees. Unfortunately the majority of the grievances I handled were complaints from employees who were slackers and upset because someone told them to do their job. Quite a few of them I told point blank, "I'm not gonna push a grievance because the supervisor told you to do your job and you didn't like it."
While in management I had decent relations with the union which took a while to establish because the plant manager was a psycho who would deliberately antagonize the union whenever he could. I ended up finally telling the union steward to just come to me and not bother with the plant manager because I was tired of being threatened with arbitration every time the steward came out of the plant manager's office ticked off.
Probably odd to have someone in management agree with you on this but yes, there are exploitative employers out there and a lot of the practices are not geared towards the employees. I knew that it was time to get out of HR when they changed my title in my last HR job from 'Human Resources Manager' to 'Human Capital Manager'. People as 'capital'?
I have not seen a lot of union activity but they are still somewhat common in my industry (manufacturing). It's not a big deal to me either way if there's a union or not in the workforce that I oversee.
You and I have had similar experiences. As a union steward I defended someone from a frivolous charge, regretfully he took it as his queue to act up even more. For every screw up there are a hundred workers willing to put in a good day. When I look at the sacrifice that union founders went through it's painful to see the union movement losing ground in the workplace battlefield and in the courts.
I would rather see people do their jobs with reasonable time off and low stress rather than work themselves to death on the wrong end of a whip.
even accounting for it, we are doing fine, assuming you have a 21st century education.
I got my education when universities taught people how to think, not follow stupidly like sheep.
By the way salaries that can be normalized according to what they could buy were at their highest in the seventies.
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