Unions: I need an intellegent discussion on their validity
 

:rtfm: OK, here's where I turn to the cellar for advice, since my dad's taken his final dirt nap. There has been a push to start a union for the P&S "Professional and Scientific Staff" portion of the U of I's workforce. http://www.seiu199.org/join/p_s.cfm Yesterday, I actually had 2 people come to my HOUSE (40 miles form work) to get me to sign the 'card' for an election. (I did not!!) Before their visit, I did not care to be part of a union, and now after I DEFINATELY don't want to be part of one, despite their best bullshitting. There were several things that they said that just seemed fishy to me, and frankly I have to think that by coming to my home on a Sunday, they are hurting for the support they said they had.

What I would really appreciate fellow Cellarites, is anyone's $0.02 on unions. As a P&S staff, my salary comes from 'soft' money. My boss, Dr. Mike Dailey, writes grants, gets them, and I am paid from them. I am not paid by nor technically work for the university itself. He loses his funding, I lose my job. I do shitty research or slack off I get fired because we lose our funding. I am cool with that. The university ALREADY has an operations manual that outlines grievance procedures, payscales, and all the other things that a union contract would do. So why the hell would I want to pay dues (at least 1.9% of my monthly gross income!), and risk the current leval of security I have? Because some dumbass works for a boss who abuses him and he's not a) smart enough to switch to another lab b) willing to stand up for himself and go to the HR rep and file a grievance using the current ops manual? The people who visited said that the Union would provide networking for employment oppportunities (already have that at hawkeyerecruiter.com), someone to back them up during grievance procedures, (already have that too, in our depts HR rep), and get us more $$ since funding is going down. Uh, talk to the A-hole in the Whitehouse about that. :bonk: When I asked about striking, thay said public employees are not allowed to strike. So how the hell does a union have any 'power'? They said that if an agreement could not be made, then an arbitrator would be brought in to pick a side. So, now Iv'e paid 1.9% of my salary in freaking dues to get nothing in return if the arbitrator says so? Bullshit.

Please, tell me your experiences, good and bad with a union if you've got 'em. Thanks!

There are good unions and there are bad unions, like any organisation they've often become entities that look after themselves before their members. I have friends in AU whose parents have been though hell and back because of small numbers of powerful figures in the unions (which are practically mandatory) using them to get their way. However we live in a capitalist state, companies have an obligation to shareholders to pump every last bit out of you they can for as little as is possible before dumping your empty husk so banding together isn't such a bad idea really. Pity they've been kneecapped totally in the US so you're probably better of without. R&D academia isn't quite assembly line either.

It pisses me off to no end every time I have to write a check to the AMF union to work. Not only do they take an anual dues check from me, they also take a percentage of "work dues" from every gig I land. What do I get in return? A monthly magazine that's more of a political action rag than anything beneficial (vote for this candidate, not this candidate, all of which I disagree with).

Back when bosses were beating employees to death, filling coal mines with children, and forcing people to work 90 hour work weeks, I can see how unions had a legit purpose. These days, they seem geared toward accumulating their own politicla power and protecting the incompetent employees from any sort of responsibility.

-ml

Labrat - you are in IA city so you know the Quad Cities. that is where i am from. My dad spent his entire life working for IH then became Case IH. this is also the hometown of John Deere, so pretty much everyone i knew was STRONG union. (UAW for the most part) i remember the days of people getting beat down with baseball bats for attempting to cross strike lines, and getting death threats for driving toyotas to work. during college i worked in that plant and another one that were both strong union.

Unions are positive in a lot of different ways. i'm sure you've seen the bumper sticker about thanking your union rep if you enjoy weekends and all that jazz. having a union rep for the grievance system is really powerful in this type of setting.

unfortunately, i don't think there are too many people in the union leadership (outside of the local) who have the best interests of the people in mind. the most frequent reason to see a union rep from outside of your local is when they come through to remind you that if you don't vote for the Democrat in the upcoming election you are betraying all that the union stands for and maybe you should find a new line of work. republicans are the devil (which is true) democrats are the kind hearted souls looking out for blue collar union workers (not true).

living in IA and especially working for the University system the way you do, you get the benefits of the Union without being required to join. giving up better than 1% of your pay with no tangible benefit seems pretty foolish to me. federal guidelines mandate compliance with much of what the unions were originally established to negotiate for.

You know, when Mrs. Dallas lived in the NYC burbs of NJ, she got lots of gigs through the local chapter. It was definitely worth it. She hasn't gotten a single gig from the local here in 15 years. I think she oughta drop it, but she doesn't want to.

The salesforce in our dealership went union shortly before the current regime took over ( yes, i think the last GM got the boot for allowing this to happen).

I'ts unusual for a car dealership to be union, but there it is. My perception is that the salesmen get better benefits than i do....and they get them for free. they have a kickass payplan, too. on the otherside, they too are subject to the terms of their agreement. this means they get written up regularly for being below average, late or whatever else they do wrong. It all goes into their file, and they can be terminated for it after 3 warnings. They get held closely to the rules so that their leverage is limited. they have to attend quarterly union meetings, blah blah blah, and i'm sure they pay dues, but overall, i think they definitely benefit from the arangement.

It does lay the foundation of an adversarial relationship between the salesmen and management, though. Not that that isn't true in a non union shop.

a union of salesmen.
*shudders*

in the end, i think it is easily summarized. Unions are very useful and can have a great impact on the lives of those they represent, but in your specific situation, i don't know that it would really benefit you. IIRC, in IA, if there is a union established, even if you don't choose to belong you will received most of the benefits they provide but will not be subject to any of the downside. (dues, seniority slotting for new positions, etc.)

Bad: A previous employer of mine had both union and non-union positions available. When I took an oh-hell-I-got-my-degree-NOW-what job doing data entry there, it was a union position, so I got to start paying dues to the United Electrical Workers. What my job had to do with electrical work beyond my using an electric-powered dumb terminal, I'll never know, but that was a requirement for employment.

During my stay in that job, we went on strike once, losing three days' pay and gaining a moderate hourly raise. (Short version: the company had been sold, the union wanted massive payback for cuts the old owner had made, the new owner said "you want WHAT?", and the union VP came down and said "You people are nuts, I'd settle.") That raise and my crew-chief position were lost when the night shift was dissolved; moving to day shift left me at a net loss after losing shift differential and crew-chief pay, with not a finger lifted by the union to even talk to us about it. Never even got a membership card.

I moved to a non-union position with the same company. A month later, I started getting the union newspaper in the mail, unasked-for, which I'd never gotten while I was an actual member. It kept coming for years.

Good: Wal-Mart considers unions to be horrific, satanic and awful, so there must be something good about them.

In general, I agree that most unions in this day and age are unnecessary bureaucracy.

However, my industry DESPERATELY needs to unionize, to stop the abusive practices by employers. It is quite standard in the videogame industry to work 80-hour weeks for months on end. Royalties don't happen anymore--some companies have bonus programs tied to the sales performance of a game, but that means you must still be working for that company at least a year or more after the game is released.

Not only is turnover between companies stupidly high (it's a joke, people will leave for another company, and then be back six months later, and then over to a third company shortly after) but general industry turnover is also excessive. A study was done by an industry website, and something like 70% of employees said they definitely planned to leave the industry within 5 years. Within 10 years, almost 100%.

Unionizing is actually pretty unlikely. But what is starting to happen is employees are more commonly accepting work on a contract basis. This means hourly pay with time-and-a-half for anything over 40 hours a week, no insurance benefits, and the understood loss of your job at the end of your contract, anywhere from one month to 18 months. But the studio managers don't expect--or allow--you to live at the office when they have to pay time-and-a-half for it.

I have had a manager order me to go home at 5:00PM, while in the same breath telling the standard employees that there would be a meeting at 3:00AM. I don't know if a union would be better, but contract work is certainly an improvement.

And the employers don't seem, as far as I can tell, to think this causes any problems--just unplug one computer-drone-component and plug another one in.

This is also IMO tied in to the whole age discrimination thing. It's easier to work people in their young 20s like this.

Definitely. For every person who leaves the industry as a jaded and bitter 28-year-old, there are a dozen 19-year-olds who would give anything to work on videogames.

Unions can also make an unnecessary tangle out of things that could resolve themselves quickly. For example, my dad was giving a presentation at some conference and accidentally kicked the plug of the overhead projector out of the socket (pre-powerpoint days, of course). He went to plug it back in and was nearly dogpiled. Turns out a union man had to do the replugging.

Wouldn't have been so bad, except the guy whose job it was to plug things in at convention centers had already left. I'll spare you the longwinded tale, but it was about 3 hours later before the guy showed up, during which time the room was useless but for the chairs and beverages in back.


Saddens me to hear that videogame makers are so shat upon. That used to be a wet dream job of mine, before I realized the actual work that goes into making games...far less fun than the playing, it turns out.

Ah yes, the madness that was the Pennsylvania Convention Center. Your dad may not have been in PA, but I guess these issues could occur at other convention centers. What really has to happen is that the companies and the unions need to understand that if the company goes under, everybody starves. In cases where the company is a Convention Center that nobody believes the state would have the balls to shut down, this is hard to impress.

In the end, though, at least as far as the PA Convention Center, an agreement was reached that would allow mere mortals to plug things in.

IMO, the value of a company should be the jobs it creates in the community as well as its value to shareholders and customers. Unfortunately, too much of the money given to companies ends up with top management and shareholders. The purpose of unions is to force the company to deal with it's employees, which I think is beneficial to all parties.

In each industry:

If employees have a long lists of corporations competing for their work, no union is needed.

If corporations have a long list of employees competing to get work, a union is needed.

A union is one way for employees to make a contract on equal footing with their employer - sometimes the only way.

I have never, ever, gotten a gig through the AMF. The only reason I don't drop my membership is because it's impossible to do anything in this town that touches TV or film without being a member. All of the industry gigs are closed shop.

-sm

My present gig is a non-union position on a university campus as well. If we were unionized, we probably would not exist and a buch of kids with autism wouldn't get the services they need. It is very expensive to keep the staff to student ratio we need. That would not be doable in a union shop. We have some very good people who could be getting fat in the public schools, but find this much more rewarding. That said, we have a lot of turnover based on burn out and financial issues. I'd say if you feel like you're making what your financial backers can afford and your boss isn't a complete SOB, I wouldn't bother.


edit: There is also the point that folks who can't or won't do the job tend to leave. In a union environment, they might just stay on the teat...

There are limitations on organizing at work. By signing the card you are saying you would like to put it to a vote of employees, not joining a union. The need X number of cards to force a vote. Once they have that, then they start campaigning for votes. If they win the vote, then they start campaigning for members. Not all union "shops" are closed "shops". There are a myriad of laws, state and federal laws that govern what the company/union contract can entail, depending on the type of relationship between the company and the public/government.

Traditionally unions were a blue collar thing but in recent years more and more white collar groups have been organizing. It's easy to see why when you look at the stats for people in white collar jobs regarding the rise in hours worked, unpaid hours, unused vacation and sick time, decreasing benifits and pressure, pressure, pressure.

Unless they are connected....bosse's wife's nephew... then they stay and you get the boot just before your pension is vested. :(

A lot of companies are getting smart and slacking off the adversarial attitude. They have come to realize the people that know how to make the place more efficient is the people that do the job. They are looking for easier, faster ways to do it constantly and it's to the companies advantage to spread this knowledge around to all the employees. They are using Employee Involvement programs to do it, and they've been wildly sucessful. The auto companies found the bosses were giving orders that were actually detrimental to efficiency. The troops knew it but had no say. Now they do, the bosses listen and production/quality/efficiency goes up.

Adversarial unions are created by adversarial management. Too often, when management is blaming the union, they forget to notice why the problems originally exist.

In some places, the union does perform well for their people. For example, in GM where plants are innovative, I have seen unions workers intentionally violate union rules only because they want to help out fellow employeess - unionized and otherwise. In some union plants where the work required worker independence, the union negotiated special conditions for those plants that provided workers with more freedom to decide what did and did not need be done. However where GM was making crappy products, top management was always then quick to blame the unions.

One of the many AT&T long distance blackouts in NYC was created by management who did not understand what that red light meant. When batteries died at 2 PM (cutting off the AT&T long distance service to NYC and even shutting down all airports), then Robert Allen was quickly blaming unions for *again* creating problems. But the union guys were all out on a training program. Robert Allen just knew it must have been the unions. Just another reason why AT&T was a dying company for so many decades.

One union guy just happened to stop by about the same time Robert Allen was preaching before the press. He found managers running about in chaos without any idea why the switching station had shut down. He corrected the open switch that management never bothered to comprehend in many union warning memos.

Unions have attempted to unionize Honda on multiple occassions. But Honda does not go about blaming their employees since 85% of all problems are directly traceable to top management. Employees rejected the union because they don't have adversarial (and therefore anti-innovation) management.

You must decide whether the management is there to blame the employees for problems, or to deal with problems at the source - management. Therein lies a criteria for unions. Unions are a symptom of and therefore created by bad (and self serving) management.

Is your management bad? One ball park criteria is their salaries and bonuses. Generally the worst management also tends to be the best paid. Go figure. But that has historically been the trend with but a few very obvious exceptions.

Sometimes. I ran into a problem in a local school system while attempting to do some Sp Ed research. The research I was doing happened to coincide with a major blow up between the union and administration. In this case the union is resisting Federal Law. Teachers unions are notorious for being run by old teachers who know everything about education. These tend to be the same folks who don't want non-typical students in their classrooms.

Which union you join is a biggy as well, in education the choices are not good.

I didn't sign, but I took a card to read it. First sentance sounds like I'm telling who I want to represent me, not just saying 'sure have an election, s'ok by me!! Fishy Fishy.

"I hereby designate Service Employees Internatiuonal Union ("SEIU") local 199 as my collective barganing representative. I understand that this card will be used by the Union to request that an election be conducted by the Public Employment Relations Board."

Date_______ Signature__________________________

And, here there are no limitations about what we talk about on our breaks, including unionizing --or not. Since I work with 95% men, I occasionally wish there WERE... :eyebrow:

you guys forgot this: :2cents:

I guess I just don't see the NEED. We have boatloads of vacation and sick leave...from the first day I started here, I earned 12hrs of sick and 16hrs of vacation per pay period (month). By the time I had my daughter, my accumulated time gave me a 100% paid maternity leave, AND i was even adding to my time while away, so when I came back, i still had a couple days to spare! Pay is what Pay is. We aren't exactly doing research for profit, and anyway, I'm not at this to get rich. My boss gives me what he can, I see the budget, and he gives me extra flexability instead of extra $$. To me, knowing my boss understands and supports that I'm a mom first, and a scientist second is worth millions.

The Operations Manual covers everything from hours to work, to grievance procudures, to raises to you name it. AND ITS FREE! I don't have to pay a monthly due to be covered by it.

Unions
 

I've got no experience of how unions work in the States but 'Ive been working in various jobs for around 32 years(God is it really that long) and I have been a member of a few unions even getting into being a union Rep.
Ive never found it to be other than a positive thing..
Over here there are usually other benefits to being a member (IE) death benefit insurance,eductational stuff, legal help plus the protection that membership brings that management just cant fire your arse on a whim.
The UK may have better employment rights than the states I don't know but union subs are usually not that expensive,give it a try if not for you.you can always come out again.

To sum up my views I would say there are two sides to the coin.

Good
Unions are designed to protect those with trade skills, more specifically, trade skills that don't transfer over to other lines of work very well. If you have an occupation that is very specialized (examples: pipefitter or electrical lineman) it may be in your interest to be represented by a legal entity that can fight back when managment tries to push you under the carpet. For the most part I would say unions spring up in situations where workers feel that management does not care for them. This can be seen in large work environments with many people doing similar, highly specialized jobs. No one enjoys being seen simply as a cog in a machine by their boss so unions fight back for them.

Bad
Unions are notorious bullies. Why does it cost so much to make a movie? Unions have managed to get a strangle hold on all jobs related to movie production. You want to produce a movie you have no choice but to hire union help. As a producer you may feel its unwarranted to pay set extras $1300 a day but you don't have much choice when your whole studio is union. Related to union dues, I have seen many unions set up for the purpose of profit making (a few top managers making money off workers). If you can get 1000 workers to give you $10 a month then your making a good profit. Not all unions are scams but many are pretty closed lips about where union dues go.


Related to your job LabRat it sounds like you have no real need for a union. Your pay resembles that of a contracted employee. If there is work you get paid, if there is no work your out. The understanding between you and your employer is what brings up the question of wheater a union is needed or not. But for the record, I seriously think some people set up unions for the purpose of self profit and an excuse to bully more money out of their employers.

Union rules is a misnomer. It sounds like unions make the rules when in fact the rules are spelled out in the contract which the union and company come up with jointly.
Of primary importance to a union is the safety and welfare of there members. That's why things like electricity, chemicals, dangerous equipment, etc, should only be handled by people that are trained to handle it safely. You don't want someone that doesn't have a clue, operating a crane over your head. :headshake
"Hey, something spilled, I'll wipe it up. says the helpful employee. What if it's acid? What if it's flammable? What if it's a live 440 volt line laying in the spill?
Way too many people die at work in this country. In non-union shops everyone is at risk when the foreman, under pressure to produce, take shortcuts. No safety switches, no belt guards, no warning signs, no fire bottles.
One thing that will always underlie any agreement is "Managements right to manage". They run the show and it's the unions only job to make sure the management doesn't violate the contract. If something isn't covered by the contract the union can request the company sit down and work out an arrangement to cover the situation. But, the union can't force anything unless the company violates the contract or the law.

you are absolutely right in all of that Bruce. In a manufacturing or trades environment i think unions are close to a necessity.

in Labrat's situation i don't see any positive for her.

Thanks for the input all. I'll keep you posted on the progress.

Last night, at 7:00pm two more representatives stopped by my home to get me to sign a card. I told them that I thought that it was confidential who signed or not. The last 2 who were at my house told me XXX (a well known RA on campus) signed a card, there was no way I'd sign one. How am I supposed to trust anything I was told? After that, they said g'night. Hopefully that'll be the end of it. :lame:

I agree in that her situation is unique. :)