I think the broader point that many people have been trying to get at it is "Unions are definitely a net good, but like any other system of rules or regulations or protections, there are unavoidable downsides."
To throw my own anecdote on the pile, a girl in my fiancée department (we work in the same place) is very nice, and also incredibly stupid and grossly incompetent. It became clear after she'd been here a few months that she was just flatly incapable of doing her job. She didn't belong here, she would never be able to do anything approaching a good job, she needed to go.
But first there was the problem of training. She had been informally trained by a couple different people, but it wasn't a formal training process, and she couldn't be let go if she hadn't been formally trained, because that would be unfair. So we had to spend time training her and then give her a couple months to improve.
When she didn't improve (which surprised nobody), she still couldn't be let go until she'd received formal written warning a certain number of times. After all of that, we were allowed to begin the termination process. All told, it took more than six months to let go the person who we could've told to from the outset couldn't do the job. Which never actually happened, because she transferred to a different place before we could get rid of her. In the mean time, the entire office was crippled because she did literally no work, and a combination of state and union rules prevented us from bringing in anyone to help in a temp basis.
Now I think every specific rule in place that led to this clusterfuck is a good one. I don't know if I would change any of them. But if you are trying to convince me this is the system is "working as intended", then you're fucking high. You can tell me I'm just too stupid to understand how hard her job was, or too privileged to sympathize with her situation, or that management is really to blame here and this girl got done dirty, or whatever you want. Or you can just accept that every system - even a very good system - has unintended consequences. Just like it's impossible to create a social safety net that doesn't let some people slip through the cracks, it's also impossible for a union to protect every good worker without also sometimes making it very hard to get rid of the bad ones.
(I could also mention the guy who was suspended for looking at what was pretty clearly - by not provably in a court of law!
- child porn in the office on his work computer, but could not be suspended for more than a certain number of months before he was allowed to transfer to a new department.)
Yes, yes, The Right loves to harp on examples of Unions Gone Wild, and fuck those guys. But this is like arguing against the claim that there's rampant election fraud by asserting that there has never been a fraudulent vote cast in the history of the nation.
Unions are a net good. They do a lot of great things. I, personally, am very happy with my union. But sometimes they make individual cases harder than they otherwise would be. All of these things can be true! It's okay to admit this!
Except that your example is actually an excellent example of poor management. All of these requirements were known to management, and yet management blew them off until they suddenly realized that she was a bad fit, then suddenly they became the union binding their hands.
Gooseshit.
Had management been doing their job, the formal training requirement wouldn't have been an issue because she would have been given that training from day one, in part to make sure that particular box was checked, but also in part to not set her up for failure. The writeups would also have been part of the management process, again to both check those boxes as well as to actually manage this worker. Her dismissal was stretched out and the office was crippled by management not doing their job, yet you're blaming the union for managerial fuckups.
I mean, yeah, the proper thing to do is to write down every fuckup, no matter how small, and document everything in writing just in case. Except nobody wants to do that as a default, because that's a stressful fucking work environment. You want to assume that people will get better, you want to assume that the mistakes are outliers.
I've worked in places where everything you do goes on your permanent record from day one, because they start from the assumption that they want a papertrail so they can fire your ass. They suck.
Management isn't really to blame for one bad worker fucking up the workflow, though, they've been trying to hire additional help, but the state won't approve the funding. The only real place where management dropped the ball was in having a coworker train her instead of the training department. (And the training she received was adequate, she was not Set Up To Fail, it just was from someone who didn't have "training" in their job title.) But yeah, their bad on that one. Everything else was by the book, though, and was the system working as intended. Most of the process being "stretched out" was by design.
And again, the process is generally a good one! Again, I like the process! But sometimes this good process leads to headaches. And this is what I'm talking about, where it's impossible to say "unions are great, but have downsides" without someome jumping in and going "no YOUR FACE is a downside, how dare you speak ill of the UNION."
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The Times found that a host of factors have contributed to the transit authority’s exorbitant capital costs.
For years, The Times found, public officials have stood by as a small group of politically connected labor unions, construction companies and consulting firms have amassed large profits.
Trade unions, which have closely aligned themselves with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and other politicians, have secured deals requiring underground construction work to be staffed by as many as four times more laborers than elsewhere in the world, documents show.
That elsewhere in the world isn't some labour rights hellhole, but specifically France.
But how did this happen?
At the heart of the issue is the obscure way that construction costs are set in New York. Worker wages and labor conditions are determined through negotiations between the unions and the companies, none of whom have any incentive to control costs. The transit authority has made no attempt to intervene to contain the spending.
Government capture by unions AND companies whose goals are completely aligned.
This is the clearest union corruption example I've seen. Thing is, it's the only one I've heard of. It's only happened because the companies have no incentive to push back.
How do you think France mitigates that?
What are they doing better?
For the record, distinct from the thread topic of unions, English-speaking countries seem to have higher public transit infrastructure costs specifically because they don't look to non-English-speaking countries for ideas. When Paris or Hong Kong or Seoul figures out a way to deliver commuter trains at a lower cost per mile, their techniques don't pierce the language & cultural barriers into the Anglosphere.
I'm sure that affects labor costs and specifically unionized labor costs as well.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
The Times found that a host of factors have contributed to the transit authority’s exorbitant capital costs.
For years, The Times found, public officials have stood by as a small group of politically connected labor unions, construction companies and consulting firms have amassed large profits.
Trade unions, which have closely aligned themselves with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and other politicians, have secured deals requiring underground construction work to be staffed by as many as four times more laborers than elsewhere in the world, documents show.
That elsewhere in the world isn't some labour rights hellhole, but specifically France.
But how did this happen?
At the heart of the issue is the obscure way that construction costs are set in New York. Worker wages and labor conditions are determined through negotiations between the unions and the companies, none of whom have any incentive to control costs. The transit authority has made no attempt to intervene to contain the spending.
Government capture by unions AND companies whose goals are completely aligned.
This is the clearest union corruption example I've seen. Thing is, it's the only one I've heard of. It's only happened because the companies have no incentive to push back.
How do you think France mitigates that?
What are they doing better?
It looks like the problem is that there is regulatory capture by a few construction companies and consulting firms. The unions have then made sure that they receive a portion of the excess profits.
I would be fairly confident that there are already laws on the books to prevent what the companies are doing, but no one has bothered to enforce them through investigation and prosecution.
Jeffe you're example would be more relevant if you didn't keep on identifying the real problems, and it not being the union. Like you just admitted the state is fuckin the managerial level by forcing them to have a broken org chart. The problem in the department still isn't being caused by the union, or even the non functional employee, its being caused at levels above them.
The union literally didn't cause that headache the state and management did by not fulfilling their duties.
.
Termination of an employee is one area where I admittedly struggle to connect to the harm caused. People have to work to exist. Firing someone casually can mean they end up homeless. It is something that should absolutely require thought and care. The solution is for management to put as much thought and care into hiring the candidates that can succeed at the job. Unless the union is forcing bad employees be hired then there is a very clear solution that people instinctively ride right past on the way to hating coll drive bargaining rights.
Generally the probation period keeps this from being too much of an issue. Your first six months you can be let go for pretty much whatever reason, and after that you have to basically shit on your boss's desk to be fired. Which I'm generally fine with. It's impossible to know exactly what you're getting when you hire someone, because there's only so much you can get out of chatting with someone for an hour and reading their resume. I was part of the hiring process for a woman I now work with, and she interviewed really well, and had solid references, but she's... pretty useless for what she was hired for. Unfortunately, it's the kind of position where it's going to take at least six months before they're familiar enough with the environment to really be expected to shine, so probation came and went and we still expected she might grow into the role.
She didn't, and while she can't do most of her job, she can do just enough that we can't get rid of her. We basically redesigned how our group functions in order to give her work she was capable of (though she still fucks it up half the time), and now we're more or less fine, so whatever. The biggest downside here is that this was the one extra position we were allowed to have, and instead of filling it with someone who can share my workload, it was filled by someone who we had to stick in the corner where she couldn't do much harm.
Point being, not every instance of an employee being a bad fit is just management dropping the ball.
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Shortytouching the meatIntergalactic Cool CourtRegistered Userregular
for my part I just fail to see how "sometimes a system causes bad results" is a useful contribution to this or any conversation.
Idk why as labor Id ever argue that hey sometimes its too hard to fire labor. Like god damn, some class solidarity isnt a huge ask.
We don't all default to viewing everything through a lens of class solidarity, Sammich. Sometimes people just want to do their job.
(And this is a state job, we're all basically the worker class.)
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I think the broader point that many people have been trying to get at it is "Unions are definitely a net good, but like any other system of rules or regulations or protections, there are unavoidable downsides."
To throw my own anecdote on the pile, a girl in my fiancée department (we work in the same place) is very nice, and also incredibly stupid and grossly incompetent. It became clear after she'd been here a few months that she was just flatly incapable of doing her job. She didn't belong here, she would never be able to do anything approaching a good job, she needed to go.
But first there was the problem of training. She had been informally trained by a couple different people, but it wasn't a formal training process, and she couldn't be let go if she hadn't been formally trained, because that would be unfair. So we had to spend time training her and then give her a couple months to improve.
When she didn't improve (which surprised nobody), she still couldn't be let go until she'd received formal written warning a certain number of times. After all of that, we were allowed to begin the termination process. All told, it took more than six months to let go the person who we could've told to from the outset couldn't do the job. Which never actually happened, because she transferred to a different place before we could get rid of her. In the mean time, the entire office was crippled because she did literally no work, and a combination of state and union rules prevented us from bringing in anyone to help in a temp basis.
Now I think every specific rule in place that led to this clusterfuck is a good one. I don't know if I would change any of them. But if you are trying to convince me this is the system is "working as intended", then you're fucking high. You can tell me I'm just too stupid to understand how hard her job was, or too privileged to sympathize with her situation, or that management is really to blame here and this girl got done dirty, or whatever you want. Or you can just accept that every system - even a very good system - has unintended consequences. Just like it's impossible to create a social safety net that doesn't let some people slip through the cracks, it's also impossible for a union to protect every good worker without also sometimes making it very hard to get rid of the bad ones.
(I could also mention the guy who was suspended for looking at what was pretty clearly - by not provably in a court of law!
- child porn in the office on his work computer, but could not be suspended for more than a certain number of months before he was allowed to transfer to a new department.)
Yes, yes, The Right loves to harp on examples of Unions Gone Wild, and fuck those guys. But this is like arguing against the claim that there's rampant election fraud by asserting that there has never been a fraudulent vote cast in the history of the nation.
Unions are a net good. They do a lot of great things. I, personally, am very happy with my union. But sometimes they make individual cases harder than they otherwise would be. All of these things can be true! It's okay to admit this!
Except that your example is actually an excellent example of poor management. All of these requirements were known to management, and yet management blew them off until they suddenly realized that she was a bad fit, then suddenly they became the union binding their hands.
Gooseshit.
Had management been doing their job, the formal training requirement wouldn't have been an issue because she would have been given that training from day one, in part to make sure that particular box was checked, but also in part to not set her up for failure. The writeups would also have been part of the management process, again to both check those boxes as well as to actually manage this worker. Her dismissal was stretched out and the office was crippled by management not doing their job, yet you're blaming the union for managerial fuckups.
I mean, yeah, the proper thing to do is to write down every fuckup, no matter how small, and document everything in writing just in case. Except nobody wants to do that as a default, because that's a stressful fucking work environment. You want to assume that people will get better, you want to assume that the mistakes are outliers.
I've worked in places where everything you do goes on your permanent record from day one, because they start from the assumption that they want a papertrail so they can fire your ass. They suck.
Management isn't really to blame for one bad worker fucking up the workflow, though, they've been trying to hire additional help, but the state won't approve the funding. The only real place where management dropped the ball was in having a coworker train her instead of the training department. (And the training she received was adequate, she was not Set Up To Fail, it just was from someone who didn't have "training" in their job title.) But yeah, their bad on that one. Everything else was by the book, though, and was the system working as intended. Most of the process being "stretched out" was by design.
And again, the process is generally a good one! Again, I like the process! But sometimes this good process leads to headaches. And this is what I'm talking about, where it's impossible to say "unions are great, but have downsides" without someome jumping in and going "no YOUR FACE is a downside, how dare you speak ill of the UNION."
No, the proper thing is to manage your people. Nobody is saying everything should be written down, because as you point out, that leads to incredibly toxic dynamics - but at the same time, putting off difficult conversations of the "you may not be a good fit here" sort serves to just make a bad situation worse. And again, if management has requirements like formal training and doesn't plan for it - that's on management.
But beyond that, as other people pointed out, the downsides are the point. Losing one's employment is devastating for a worker, which is why the union makes dismissal a multiphase affair - by doing this, it pushes management to actually work on improving their workers instead of tossing them aside. Those "headaches" exist to force management to, well, manage.
Idk why as labor Id ever argue that hey sometimes its too hard to fire labor. Like god damn, some class solidarity isnt a huge ask.
As labor, I don't want to work alongside other labor that is uninterested or incapable of doing the job. It's in my nature to accomplish things, and working on a team with a boat anchor is frustrating.
Sometimes you can have a setup where you realize it's good that it's hard for management to fire someone, but also be equally annoyed that a really shitty person is still around, when signs point towards them probably needing to be terminated.
Few things are ever black and white. Most things are shades of gray.
.
Termination of an employee is one area where I admittedly struggle to connect to the harm caused. People have to work to exist. Firing someone casually can mean they end up homeless. It is something that should absolutely require thought and care. The solution is for management to put as much thought and care into hiring the candidates that can succeed at the job. Unless the union is forcing bad employees be hired then there is a very clear solution that people instinctively ride right past on the way to hating coll drive bargaining rights.
Generally the probation period keeps this from being too much of an issue. Your first six months you can be let go for pretty much whatever reason, and after that you have to basically shit on your boss's desk to be fired. Which I'm generally fine with. It's impossible to know exactly what you're getting when you hire someone, because there's only so much you can get out of chatting with someone for an hour and reading their resume. I was part of the hiring process for a woman I now work with, and she interviewed really well, and had solid references, but she's... pretty useless for what she was hired for. Unfortunately, it's the kind of position where it's going to take at least six months before they're familiar enough with the environment to really be expected to shine, so probation came and went and we still expected she might grow into the role.
She didn't, and while she can't do most of her job, she can do just enough that we can't get rid of her. We basically redesigned how our group functions in order to give her work she was capable of (though she still fucks it up half the time), and now we're more or less fine, so whatever. The biggest downside here is that this was the one extra position we were allowed to have, and instead of filling it with someone who can share my workload, it was filled by someone who we had to stick in the corner where she couldn't do much harm.
Point being, not every instance of an employee being a bad fit is just management dropping the ball.
I would argue that in part it is. I will happily concede that management could have done everything they thought was necessary, and really did a good job overall. Mistakes can happen where no one is truly at fault because a novel situation arose. I am not trying to say you, or anyone didn't put in the effort necessary. It does sound to me like you ended up blind sided by a situation you didn't know you needed to prepare for which still falls in managements domain even if no one knew it ahead of time.
I would also put forth that the problems you put off onto the "state" are also problems with management. It is just a higher level of management than what you can control. There is certainly a huge problem that exists if a person cannot be fired if they cannot adequately perform the functions of the job they were hired for. I have to wonder why such a deal was signed since it is ludicrous on its face. My experience with the state (Louisiana) is that the job descriptions don't always match what the office needs to be done to be functional. The union is not the one that caps staffing levels, or available jobs. Management does at the state level and everyone downstream suffers for it.
Idk why as labor Id ever argue that hey sometimes its too hard to fire labor. Like god damn, some class solidarity isnt a huge ask.
As labor, I don't want to work alongside other labor that is uninterested or incapable of doing the job. It's in my nature to accomplish things, and working on a team with a boat anchor is frustrating.
there is no way to throw bad labor under the bus without also putting yourself in a worse position
I think the broader point that many people have been trying to get at it is "Unions are definitely a net good, but like any other system of rules or regulations or protections, there are unavoidable downsides."
To throw my own anecdote on the pile, a girl in my fiancée department (we work in the same place) is very nice, and also incredibly stupid and grossly incompetent. It became clear after she'd been here a few months that she was just flatly incapable of doing her job. She didn't belong here, she would never be able to do anything approaching a good job, she needed to go.
But first there was the problem of training. She had been informally trained by a couple different people, but it wasn't a formal training process, and she couldn't be let go if she hadn't been formally trained, because that would be unfair. So we had to spend time training her and then give her a couple months to improve.
When she didn't improve (which surprised nobody), she still couldn't be let go until she'd received formal written warning a certain number of times. After all of that, we were allowed to begin the termination process. All told, it took more than six months to let go the person who we could've told to from the outset couldn't do the job. Which never actually happened, because she transferred to a different place before we could get rid of her. In the mean time, the entire office was crippled because she did literally no work, and a combination of state and union rules prevented us from bringing in anyone to help in a temp basis.
Now I think every specific rule in place that led to this clusterfuck is a good one. I don't know if I would change any of them. But if you are trying to convince me this is the system is "working as intended", then you're fucking high. You can tell me I'm just too stupid to understand how hard her job was, or too privileged to sympathize with her situation, or that management is really to blame here and this girl got done dirty, or whatever you want. Or you can just accept that every system - even a very good system - has unintended consequences. Just like it's impossible to create a social safety net that doesn't let some people slip through the cracks, it's also impossible for a union to protect every good worker without also sometimes making it very hard to get rid of the bad ones.
(I could also mention the guy who was suspended for looking at what was pretty clearly - by not provably in a court of law!
- child porn in the office on his work computer, but could not be suspended for more than a certain number of months before he was allowed to transfer to a new department.)
Yes, yes, The Right loves to harp on examples of Unions Gone Wild, and fuck those guys. But this is like arguing against the claim that there's rampant election fraud by asserting that there has never been a fraudulent vote cast in the history of the nation.
Unions are a net good. They do a lot of great things. I, personally, am very happy with my union. But sometimes they make individual cases harder than they otherwise would be. All of these things can be true! It's okay to admit this!
Except that your example is actually an excellent example of poor management. All of these requirements were known to management, and yet management blew them off until they suddenly realized that she was a bad fit, then suddenly they became the union binding their hands.
Gooseshit.
Had management been doing their job, the formal training requirement wouldn't have been an issue because she would have been given that training from day one, in part to make sure that particular box was checked, but also in part to not set her up for failure. The writeups would also have been part of the management process, again to both check those boxes as well as to actually manage this worker. Her dismissal was stretched out and the office was crippled by management not doing their job, yet you're blaming the union for managerial fuckups.
I mean, yeah, the proper thing to do is to write down every fuckup, no matter how small, and document everything in writing just in case. Except nobody wants to do that as a default, because that's a stressful fucking work environment. You want to assume that people will get better, you want to assume that the mistakes are outliers.
I've worked in places where everything you do goes on your permanent record from day one, because they start from the assumption that they want a papertrail so they can fire your ass. They suck.
Management isn't really to blame for one bad worker fucking up the workflow, though, they've been trying to hire additional help, but the state won't approve the funding. The only real place where management dropped the ball was in having a coworker train her instead of the training department. (And the training she received was adequate, she was not Set Up To Fail, it just was from someone who didn't have "training" in their job title.) But yeah, their bad on that one. Everything else was by the book, though, and was the system working as intended. Most of the process being "stretched out" was by design.
And again, the process is generally a good one! Again, I like the process! But sometimes this good process leads to headaches. And this is what I'm talking about, where it's impossible to say "unions are great, but have downsides" without someome jumping in and going "no YOUR FACE is a downside, how dare you speak ill of the UNION."
No, the proper thing is to manage your people. Nobody is saying everything should be written down, because as you point out, that leads to incredibly toxic dynamics - but at the same time, putting off difficult conversations of the "you may not be a good fit here" sort serves to just make a bad situation worse. And again, if management has requirements like formal training and doesn't plan for it - that's on management.
But beyond that, as other people pointed out, the downsides are the point. Losing one's employment is devastating for a worker, which is why the union makes dismissal a multiphase affair - by doing this, it pushes management to actually work on improving their workers instead of tossing them aside. Those "headaches" exist to force management to, well, manage.
I'm actually pretty sure that if a manager told an employee they might not be a good fit prior to documenting their failings, they would run afoul of union rules. It would be considered a hostile work environment. Managers are very limited in when and how they can address their employees, per union rules. Which is generally a good thing. It just sometimes means you have to tiptoe around the occasional elephant in the room.
There ARE such things as bad employees who are beyond help. It is good that a lot of time is spent giving even those employees every chance to improve. And hey, maybe you've been fortunate enough to never run into someone who just clearly can't do the job they were hired to do. Maybe you legit don't believe such a person exists. If so, I'm jealous. Or maybe you just don't believe it's ever possible to determine that someone is unqualified in any less than six months, I dunno.
I guess the best argument I can see for your position is "if a manager makes a mistake in hiring someone, or forgets to dot an i somewhere, the proper punishment is that they are saddled with a clearly bad employee for several months." Which, okay, fair. Kinda like if you catch a guy in the act of stabbing someone to death in front of twelve witnesses, but you forget to read him his rights when you arrest him, the proper punishment for the cop is that the murderer goes free on procedural grounds. But you defend that as "it is good that there are repercussions when the police fuck up their job, even though occasionally it results in something terrible" not generally as "it is awesome that the murderer goes free and the victims are denied justice."
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I always admire the double think where most people here understand how things like voter ID and other long or convoluted application or qualification processes can be used to prevent people from doing things without out right prohibiting them.
but something like this:
is obviously just a case of: WeLL WhY DIdn'T MaNAgeMenT FolLoW tHe ProCess?
Look, I don't know how every single job and union works, but in most jobs aren't bad employees supposed to be filtered out by both the hiring process and some kind of probationary training period?
It takes years to become a teacher with tenure, it shouldn't be a surprise its takes as long to get rid of one.
I always admire the double think where most people here understand how things like voter ID and other long or convoluted application or qualification processes can be used to prevent people from doing things without out right prohibiting them.
but something like this:
is obviously just a case of: WeLL WhY DIdn'T MaNAgeMenT FolLoW tHe ProCess?
Whats the source on this low rez grainy infographic
I always admire the double think where most people here understand how things like voter ID and other long or convoluted application or qualification processes can be used to prevent people from doing things without out right prohibiting them.
but something like this:
is obviously just a case of: WeLL WhY DIdn'T MaNAgeMenT FolLoW tHe ProCess?
So a principal decides to fire a tenured teacher, has to provide them 1 year to prove whether they are a good teacher or not, after which they are suspended without pay while the firing process is completed? Oh the horror!
I always admire the double think where most people here understand how things like voter ID and other long or convoluted application or qualification processes can be used to prevent people from doing things without out right prohibiting them.
but something like this:
is obviously just a case of: WeLL WhY DIdn'T MaNAgeMenT FolLoW tHe ProCess?
(assuming that thing is actually for real)
well why didn't they
why did they sign an agreement with the union that included a process that they don't intend to follow
or can they welch on a legal agreement because it's just too onerous and they don't wanna
teaching is a special case anyway because there are very few objective measures of their quality as an employee
like if they're showing up to work drunk every day then they'd be gone pretty quick
but you can't just like, look at their student's grades and determine if they're a good teacher or not
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
Yeah, an important difference is that any firing process in a union contract was negotiated between theoretically equal parties. This is vastly different from legislators writing laws to ensure their reelection or oppress minorities who they have prevented from having any say in the process.
I always admire the double think where most people here understand how things like voter ID and other long or convoluted application or qualification processes can be used to prevent people from doing things without out right prohibiting them.
but something like this:
is obviously just a case of: WeLL WhY DIdn'T MaNAgeMenT FolLoW tHe ProCess?
My dude what in the hell, the fuck does Voter ID have to do with following procedures meant to protect workers from unjustly getting fired, especially all the shit we already know about the foundations of Voter ID laws being shaken as hell regarding the non-problem they “mean” to “solve”?
I think the broader point that many people have been trying to get at it is "Unions are definitely a net good, but like any other system of rules or regulations or protections, there are unavoidable downsides."
To throw my own anecdote on the pile, a girl in my fiancée department (we work in the same place) is very nice, and also incredibly stupid and grossly incompetent. It became clear after she'd been here a few months that she was just flatly incapable of doing her job. She didn't belong here, she would never be able to do anything approaching a good job, she needed to go.
But first there was the problem of training. She had been informally trained by a couple different people, but it wasn't a formal training process, and she couldn't be let go if she hadn't been formally trained, because that would be unfair. So we had to spend time training her and then give her a couple months to improve.
When she didn't improve (which surprised nobody), she still couldn't be let go until she'd received formal written warning a certain number of times. After all of that, we were allowed to begin the termination process. All told, it took more than six months to let go the person who we could've told to from the outset couldn't do the job. Which never actually happened, because she transferred to a different place before we could get rid of her. In the mean time, the entire office was crippled because she did literally no work, and a combination of state and union rules prevented us from bringing in anyone to help in a temp basis.
Now I think every specific rule in place that led to this clusterfuck is a good one. I don't know if I would change any of them. But if you are trying to convince me this is the system is "working as intended", then you're fucking high. You can tell me I'm just too stupid to understand how hard her job was, or too privileged to sympathize with her situation, or that management is really to blame here and this girl got done dirty, or whatever you want. Or you can just accept that every system - even a very good system - has unintended consequences. Just like it's impossible to create a social safety net that doesn't let some people slip through the cracks, it's also impossible for a union to protect every good worker without also sometimes making it very hard to get rid of the bad ones.
(I could also mention the guy who was suspended for looking at what was pretty clearly - by not provably in a court of law!
- child porn in the office on his work computer, but could not be suspended for more than a certain number of months before he was allowed to transfer to a new department.)
Yes, yes, The Right loves to harp on examples of Unions Gone Wild, and fuck those guys. But this is like arguing against the claim that there's rampant election fraud by asserting that there has never been a fraudulent vote cast in the history of the nation.
Unions are a net good. They do a lot of great things. I, personally, am very happy with my union. But sometimes they make individual cases harder than they otherwise would be. All of these things can be true! It's okay to admit this!
Except that your example is actually an excellent example of poor management. All of these requirements were known to management, and yet management blew them off until they suddenly realized that she was a bad fit, then suddenly they became the union binding their hands.
Gooseshit.
Had management been doing their job, the formal training requirement wouldn't have been an issue because she would have been given that training from day one, in part to make sure that particular box was checked, but also in part to not set her up for failure. The writeups would also have been part of the management process, again to both check those boxes as well as to actually manage this worker. Her dismissal was stretched out and the office was crippled by management not doing their job, yet you're blaming the union for managerial fuckups.
I mean, yeah, the proper thing to do is to write down every fuckup, no matter how small, and document everything in writing just in case. Except nobody wants to do that as a default, because that's a stressful fucking work environment. You want to assume that people will get better, you want to assume that the mistakes are outliers.
I've worked in places where everything you do goes on your permanent record from day one, because they start from the assumption that they want a papertrail so they can fire your ass. They suck.
Management isn't really to blame for one bad worker fucking up the workflow, though, they've been trying to hire additional help, but the state won't approve the funding. The only real place where management dropped the ball was in having a coworker train her instead of the training department. (And the training she received was adequate, she was not Set Up To Fail, it just was from someone who didn't have "training" in their job title.) But yeah, their bad on that one. Everything else was by the book, though, and was the system working as intended. Most of the process being "stretched out" was by design.
And again, the process is generally a good one! Again, I like the process! But sometimes this good process leads to headaches. And this is what I'm talking about, where it's impossible to say "unions are great, but have downsides" without someome jumping in and going "no YOUR FACE is a downside, how dare you speak ill of the UNION."
No, the proper thing is to manage your people. Nobody is saying everything should be written down, because as you point out, that leads to incredibly toxic dynamics - but at the same time, putting off difficult conversations of the "you may not be a good fit here" sort serves to just make a bad situation worse. And again, if management has requirements like formal training and doesn't plan for it - that's on management.
But beyond that, as other people pointed out, the downsides are the point. Losing one's employment is devastating for a worker, which is why the union makes dismissal a multiphase affair - by doing this, it pushes management to actually work on improving their workers instead of tossing them aside. Those "headaches" exist to force management to, well, manage.
I'm actually pretty sure that if a manager told an employee they might not be a good fit prior to documenting their failings, they would run afoul of union rules. It would be considered a hostile work environment. Managers are very limited in when and how they can address their employees, per union rules. Which is generally a good thing. It just sometimes means you have to tiptoe around the occasional elephant in the room.
There ARE such things as bad employees who are beyond help. It is good that a lot of time is spent giving even those employees every chance to improve. And hey, maybe you've been fortunate enough to never run into someone who just clearly can't do the job they were hired to do. Maybe you legit don't believe such a person exists. If so, I'm jealous. Or maybe you just don't believe it's ever possible to determine that someone is unqualified in any less than six months, I dunno.
I guess the best argument I can see for your position is "if a manager makes a mistake in hiring someone, or forgets to dot an i somewhere, the proper punishment is that they are saddled with a clearly bad employee for several months." Which, okay, fair. Kinda like if you catch a guy in the act of stabbing someone to death in front of twelve witnesses, but you forget to read him his rights when you arrest him, the proper punishment for the cop is that the murderer goes free on procedural grounds. But you defend that as "it is good that there are repercussions when the police fuck up their job, even though occasionally it results in something terrible" not generally as "it is awesome that the murderer goes free and the victims are denied justice."
I think the analogy you used shows where the break down is. You seem to be framing the problem in a very different light. If I am wrong on any of this please tell me, but if my impressions are right I see what is happening. You are equating a person staying at the job as a bad, and firing them as the proper result. It struck me with your earlier example where you mentioned the person finding a new job before they were fired as well. There seems to be a justice angle for you here that I don't think others are sharing.
For me, if an employee sees the writing on the wall and leaves before termination then that is the best outcome hands down. We live in a society that forces us to work for our continued existence, and makes no effort to ensure proper employment is available. The cost of having an office running poorly for months does not strike me as nearly as bad as putting a person out on the street. This basic reality is why unions need to exist as the power imbalance is far too high otherwise.
Using your analogy, my defense is would be that it is better to require the trial rather than letting police just arrest whomever they think is guilty with no further oversight. If the police failed to collect the evidence then I am super pissed at them for phoning in their jobs with so much on the line. I am still happy the process exists to protect from severe abuse though since we know how likely it is to happen based on everything.
I always admire the double think where most people here understand how things like voter ID and other long or convoluted application or qualification processes can be used to prevent people from doing things without out right prohibiting them.
but something like this:
is obviously just a case of: WeLL WhY DIdn'T MaNAgeMenT FolLoW tHe ProCess?
So a principal decides to fire a tenured teacher, has to provide them 1 year to prove whether they are a good teacher or not, after which they are suspended without pay while the firing process is completed? Oh the horror!
Yeah, I mean it's only a year of education for their students. There are no longer term consequences for them right?
Also, again we all understand-and will admit to- the idea of these elaborate processes are created to inhibit removal of bad workers WITH UNIONS, as long as it is a police union we are discussing at the time.
I always admire the double think where most people here understand how things like voter ID and other long or convoluted application or qualification processes can be used to prevent people from doing things without out right prohibiting them.
but something like this:
is obviously just a case of: WeLL WhY DIdn'T MaNAgeMenT FolLoW tHe ProCess?
Oh, hey - it's that gooseshit diagram that literally complains that requiring principals to do their actual job as management (that is, the first line on the diagram) is enabling "bad teachers" (which, let us note, is a very nebulous term.)
I always admire the double think where most people here understand how things like voter ID and other long or convoluted application or qualification processes can be used to prevent people from doing things without out right prohibiting them.
but something like this:
is obviously just a case of: WeLL WhY DIdn'T MaNAgeMenT FolLoW tHe ProCess?
So a principal decides to fire a tenured teacher, has to provide them 1 year to prove whether they are a good teacher or not, after which they are suspended without pay while the firing process is completed? Oh the horror!
Yeah, I mean it's only a year of education for their students. There are no longer term consequences for them right?
Also, again we all understand-and will admit to- the idea of these elaborate processes are created to inhibit removal of bad workers WITH UNIONS, as long as it is a police union we are discussing at the time.
I agree, we should move all police funding to schooling.
Also "bad" teachers don't tend to also extrajudicially murder people and keep their jobs.
Shortytouching the meatIntergalactic Cool CourtRegistered Userregular
it is my position that whining about how difficult it is to fire teachers is performative nonsense and will remain so for as long as teachers are as underpaid as they are. it indicates that you are an axe-grinder and an unserious person.
I always admire the double think where most people here understand how things like voter ID and other long or convoluted application or qualification processes can be used to prevent people from doing things without out right prohibiting them.
but something like this:
is obviously just a case of: WeLL WhY DIdn'T MaNAgeMenT FolLoW tHe ProCess?
So a principal decides to fire a tenured teacher, has to provide them 1 year to prove whether they are a good teacher or not, after which they are suspended without pay while the firing process is completed? Oh the horror!
Yeah, I mean it's only a year of education for their students. There are no longer term consequences for them right?
Also, again we all understand-and will admit to- the idea of these elaborate processes are created to inhibit removal of bad workers WITH UNIONS, as long as it is a police union we are discussing at the time.
You realize that the power dynamics of police and the public make their unions not the same as, like, the teamsters right?
Or I guess we can make Tin’s worries more moot: no more private ownership of business. socialize every workplace that every one is directly owned by their employees.
Seems like that’ll help deal with these problems. Let the employees decide policy directly instead of having to have a union that negotiates on their behalf with the managerial class
Or is the problem you just want at will employment?
I always admire the double think where most people here understand how things like voter ID and other long or convoluted application or qualification processes can be used to prevent people from doing things without out right prohibiting them.
but something like this:
is obviously just a case of: WeLL WhY DIdn'T MaNAgeMenT FolLoW tHe ProCess?
So a principal decides to fire a tenured teacher, has to provide them 1 year to prove whether they are a good teacher or not, after which they are suspended without pay while the firing process is completed? Oh the horror!
Yeah, I mean it's only a year of education for their students. There are no longer term consequences for them right?
Also, again we all understand-and will admit to- the idea of these elaborate processes are created to inhibit removal of bad workers WITH UNIONS, as long as it is a police union we are discussing at the time.
I will gladly argue that everyone deserves some form of collective bargaining rights. Yes, I even include police in that group. That is because I will put forth that unions are not the ultimate cause of the abuses that police are involved with. Jurisdictions without unions will often be just as horrible as those with them. The problem lays in the fact that politicians refuse to stand firm on negotiations over collective bargaining rights as it would harm their re-election chances. Management does not want to engage in the process because it might cause them problems and so the rest of society suffers.
There is a lot more going on there as well which falls outside of the scope of the thread. I almost certainly won't engage in the broader discussion of finer points because it feels very crass. Trying to have an academic discussion with people in a lot of real, and continuing pain about their pain is not something I am inclined to do.
Gnizmo on
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Shortytouching the meatIntergalactic Cool CourtRegistered Userregular
I always admire the double think where most people here understand how things like voter ID and other long or convoluted application or qualification processes can be used to prevent people from doing things without out right prohibiting them.
but something like this:
is obviously just a case of: WeLL WhY DIdn'T MaNAgeMenT FolLoW tHe ProCess?
So a principal decides to fire a tenured teacher, has to provide them 1 year to prove whether they are a good teacher or not, after which they are suspended without pay while the firing process is completed? Oh the horror!
Yeah, I mean it's only a year of education for their students. There are no longer term consequences for them right?
Also, again we all understand-and will admit to- the idea of these elaborate processes are created to inhibit removal of bad workers WITH UNIONS, as long as it is a police union we are discussing at the time.
I will gladly argue that everyone deserves some form of collective bargaining rights. Yes, I even include police in that group. That is because I will put forth that unions are not the ultimate cause of the abuses that police are involved with. Jurisdictions without unions will often be just as horrible as those with them. The problem lays in the fact that politicians refuse to stand firm on negotiations over collective bargaining rights as it would harm their re-election chances. Management does not want to engage in the process because it might cause them problems and so the rest of society suffers.
There is a lot more going on there as well which falls outside of the scope of the thread. I almost certainly won't engage in the broader discussion of finer points because it feels very crass. Trying to have an academic discussion with people in a lot of real, and continuing pain about their pain is not something I am inclined to do.
well that's a whole thing. there's good reason to believe, now, that the people who are alleged to have power over police departments actually do not, and they're actually self-governing. that's another thread though.
I always admire the double think where most people here understand how things like voter ID and other long or convoluted application or qualification processes can be used to prevent people from doing things without out right prohibiting them.
but something like this:
is obviously just a case of: WeLL WhY DIdn'T MaNAgeMenT FolLoW tHe ProCess?
So a principal decides to fire a tenured teacher, has to provide them 1 year to prove whether they are a good teacher or not, after which they are suspended without pay while the firing process is completed? Oh the horror!
Yeah, I mean it's only a year of education for their students. There are no longer term consequences for them right?
Also, again we all understand-and will admit to- the idea of these elaborate processes are created to inhibit removal of bad workers WITH UNIONS, as long as it is a police union we are discussing at the time.
Cops arent labor
+14
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FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
I always admire the double think where most people here understand how things like voter ID and other long or convoluted application or qualification processes can be used to prevent people from doing things without out right prohibiting them.
but something like this:
is obviously just a case of: WeLL WhY DIdn'T MaNAgeMenT FolLoW tHe ProCess?
So a principal decides to fire a tenured teacher, has to provide them 1 year to prove whether they are a good teacher or not, after which they are suspended without pay while the firing process is completed? Oh the horror!
Yeah, I mean it's only a year of education for their students. There are no longer term consequences for them right?
Also, again we all understand-and will admit to- the idea of these elaborate processes are created to inhibit removal of bad workers WITH UNIONS, as long as it is a police union we are discussing at the time.
You realize that the power dynamics of police and the public make their unions not the same as, like, the teamsters right?
You obviously don't realize, I'm not talking about the unions.
I'm talking about you(all).
Who clearly can and do understand how people (legislators, bureaucrats, police unions) can construct neutral seeming processes ( just show an ID to vote, just fill out these forms to apply for foodstamps, this is the process for terminating a police officer) with the end goal of making the nominal outcome of that process if not unachievable very unlikely to happen.
But somehow when that same approach is taken to for example the termination process of a teacher(or ElJeffe's coworker); its just "Ohh no this is just the neutral and naturally arising process required to do this thing, a [non-police] union certainly wouldn't try to (ab)use its power in that way, It is management's fault for not following "the process" correctly".
Some of us literally can't operate to standard expectations. I've got a mental defect that gets me fired pretty regularly because expectations are a garbage thing to hire employees on. Workers should be hired with a hope for a certain output, but an expectation that they will likely fall short of that hope at the very least initially if not forever. They should be hired with the expectation that management will find their strengths and leverage them as best they can accepting that they might not ever be the best or capable of everything management originally wanted. Cause some of us literally can't ever be your expectations.
Like I work in a field without unions and with basically no job protections. I've just gotten used to having a full stress breakdown every two to three weeks because I have a disability no one will ever care about that keeps me from being the standard expectation in a really toxic field and I just have to always wonder, "when are they going to fire me about it?" And stress my life away when my disability hinders my work (which is basically every day).
I'll totally say that unions keeping less than stellar employees employed is a desired outcome of unions. Cause again some of us will never meet your's or managment's shitty expectations, and we still need to eat and aren't actually gutter trash you can keep throwing away simply because we can't work like you do.
Edit: this of course not referring to blatant and continual safety violation but just expected work volume.
I always admire the double think where most people here understand how things like voter ID and other long or convoluted application or qualification processes can be used to prevent people from doing things without out right prohibiting them.
but something like this:
is obviously just a case of: WeLL WhY DIdn'T MaNAgeMenT FolLoW tHe ProCess?
So a principal decides to fire a tenured teacher, has to provide them 1 year to prove whether they are a good teacher or not, after which they are suspended without pay while the firing process is completed? Oh the horror!
Yeah, I mean it's only a year of education for their students. There are no longer term consequences for them right?
Also, again we all understand-and will admit to- the idea of these elaborate processes are created to inhibit removal of bad workers WITH UNIONS, as long as it is a police union we are discussing at the time.
You realize that the power dynamics of police and the public make their unions not the same as, like, the teamsters right?
You obviously don't realize, I'm not talking about the unions.
I'm talking about you(all).
Who clearly can and do understand how people (legislators, bureaucrats, police unions) can construct neutral seeming processes ( just show an ID to vote, just fill out these forms to apply for foodstamps, this is the process for terminating a police officer) with the end goal of making the nominal outcome of that process if not unachievable very unlikely to happen.
But somehow when that same approach is taken to for example the termination process of a teacher(or ElJeffe's coworker); its just "Ohh no this is just the neutral and naturally arising process required to do this thing, a [non-police] union certainly wouldn't try to (ab)use its power in that way, It is management's fault for not following "the process" correctly".
What you are arguing is not reality though. The unions do not dream up some arbitrarily difficult process designed to prevent termination and then implement it unilaterally. They negotiate with management what the process of termination looks like. When management and the union have agreed to a process that protects both of their interests then the contract is signed. Management is every bit as responsible for the process as the union is. The union just makes management stick to it.
I always admire the double think where most people here understand how things like voter ID and other long or convoluted application or qualification processes can be used to prevent people from doing things without out right prohibiting them.
but something like this:
is obviously just a case of: WeLL WhY DIdn'T MaNAgeMenT FolLoW tHe ProCess?
So a principal decides to fire a tenured teacher, has to provide them 1 year to prove whether they are a good teacher or not, after which they are suspended without pay while the firing process is completed? Oh the horror!
Yeah, I mean it's only a year of education for their students. There are no longer term consequences for them right?
Also, again we all understand-and will admit to- the idea of these elaborate processes are created to inhibit removal of bad workers WITH UNIONS, as long as it is a police union we are discussing at the time.
You realize that the power dynamics of police and the public make their unions not the same as, like, the teamsters right?
You obviously don't realize, I'm not talking about the unions.
I'm talking about you(all).
Who clearly can and do understand how people (legislators, bureaucrats, police unions) can construct neutral seeming processes ( just show an ID to vote, just fill out these forms to apply for foodstamps, this is the process for terminating a police officer) with the end goal of making the nominal outcome of that process if not unachievable very unlikely to happen.
But somehow when that same approach is taken to for example the termination process of a teacher(or ElJeffe's coworker); its just "Ohh no this is just the neutral and naturally arising process required to do this thing, a [non-police] union certainly wouldn't try to (ab)use its power in that way, It is management's fault for not following "the process" correctly".
What you are arguing is not reality though. The unions do not dream up some arbitrarily difficult process designed to prevent termination and then implement it unilaterally. They negotiate with management what the process of termination looks like. When management and the union have agreed to a process that protects both of their interests then the contract is signed. Management is every bit as responsible for the process as the union is. The union just makes management stick to it.
again, except for police unions because *waves hands*
+1
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HacksawJ. Duggan Esq.Wrestler at LawRegistered Userregular
Bad workers are a pain to deal with, but I'll take bad workers over bad management any day. Bad workers can be offset by good workers picking up the slack or compensating for their colleagues' pitfalls, generally speaking. Bad management cannot, I've found, be adequately offset by good management due to the hierarchical nature of people managing; if you have a bad manager at the top, everyone below them in the chain of command is going to likely end up regurgitating their crap all the way down the org chart.
---Posted from my union worksite on my union-mandated hour long meal break.
I always admire the double think where most people here understand how things like voter ID and other long or convoluted application or qualification processes can be used to prevent people from doing things without out right prohibiting them.
but something like this:
is obviously just a case of: WeLL WhY DIdn'T MaNAgeMenT FolLoW tHe ProCess?
So a principal decides to fire a tenured teacher, has to provide them 1 year to prove whether they are a good teacher or not, after which they are suspended without pay while the firing process is completed? Oh the horror!
Yeah, I mean it's only a year of education for their students. There are no longer term consequences for them right?
Also, again we all understand-and will admit to- the idea of these elaborate processes are created to inhibit removal of bad workers WITH UNIONS, as long as it is a police union we are discussing at the time.
You realize that the power dynamics of police and the public make their unions not the same as, like, the teamsters right?
You obviously don't realize, I'm not talking about the unions.
I'm talking about you(all).
Who clearly can and do understand how people (legislators, bureaucrats, police unions) can construct neutral seeming processes ( just show an ID to vote, just fill out these forms to apply for foodstamps, this is the process for terminating a police officer) with the end goal of making the nominal outcome of that process if not unachievable very unlikely to happen.
But somehow when that same approach is taken to for example the termination process of a teacher(or ElJeffe's coworker); its just "Ohh no this is just the neutral and naturally arising process required to do this thing, a [non-police] union certainly wouldn't try to (ab)use its power in that way, It is management's fault for not following "the process" correctly".
What you are arguing is not reality though. The unions do not dream up some arbitrarily difficult process designed to prevent termination and then implement it unilaterally. They negotiate with management what the process of termination looks like. When management and the union have agreed to a process that protects both of their interests then the contract is signed. Management is every bit as responsible for the process as the union is. The union just makes management stick to it.
again, except for police unions because *waves hands*
No? I made a post earlier that addressed just this. I unequivocally stated that management was a problem there as well.
I always admire the double think where most people here understand how things like voter ID and other long or convoluted application or qualification processes can be used to prevent people from doing things without out right prohibiting them.
but something like this:
is obviously just a case of: WeLL WhY DIdn'T MaNAgeMenT FolLoW tHe ProCess?
So a principal decides to fire a tenured teacher, has to provide them 1 year to prove whether they are a good teacher or not, after which they are suspended without pay while the firing process is completed? Oh the horror!
Yeah, I mean it's only a year of education for their students. There are no longer term consequences for them right?
Also, again we all understand-and will admit to- the idea of these elaborate processes are created to inhibit removal of bad workers WITH UNIONS, as long as it is a police union we are discussing at the time.
You realize that the power dynamics of police and the public make their unions not the same as, like, the teamsters right?
You obviously don't realize, I'm not talking about the unions.
I'm talking about you(all).
Who clearly can and do understand how people (legislators, bureaucrats, police unions) can construct neutral seeming processes ( just show an ID to vote, just fill out these forms to apply for foodstamps, this is the process for terminating a police officer) with the end goal of making the nominal outcome of that process if not unachievable very unlikely to happen.
But somehow when that same approach is taken to for example the termination process of a teacher(or ElJeffe's coworker); its just "Ohh no this is just the neutral and naturally arising process required to do this thing, a [non-police] union certainly wouldn't try to (ab)use its power in that way, It is management's fault for not following "the process" correctly".
What you are arguing is not reality though. The unions do not dream up some arbitrarily difficult process designed to prevent termination and then implement it unilaterally. They negotiate with management what the process of termination looks like. When management and the union have agreed to a process that protects both of their interests then the contract is signed. Management is every bit as responsible for the process as the union is. The union just makes management stick to it.
again, except for police unions because *waves hands*they are the executors of state sponsored violence and are not part of the labor class
Posts
I mean, yeah, the proper thing to do is to write down every fuckup, no matter how small, and document everything in writing just in case. Except nobody wants to do that as a default, because that's a stressful fucking work environment. You want to assume that people will get better, you want to assume that the mistakes are outliers.
I've worked in places where everything you do goes on your permanent record from day one, because they start from the assumption that they want a papertrail so they can fire your ass. They suck.
Management isn't really to blame for one bad worker fucking up the workflow, though, they've been trying to hire additional help, but the state won't approve the funding. The only real place where management dropped the ball was in having a coworker train her instead of the training department. (And the training she received was adequate, she was not Set Up To Fail, it just was from someone who didn't have "training" in their job title.) But yeah, their bad on that one. Everything else was by the book, though, and was the system working as intended. Most of the process being "stretched out" was by design.
And again, the process is generally a good one! Again, I like the process! But sometimes this good process leads to headaches. And this is what I'm talking about, where it's impossible to say "unions are great, but have downsides" without someome jumping in and going "no YOUR FACE is a downside, how dare you speak ill of the UNION."
For the record, distinct from the thread topic of unions, English-speaking countries seem to have higher public transit infrastructure costs specifically because they don't look to non-English-speaking countries for ideas. When Paris or Hong Kong or Seoul figures out a way to deliver commuter trains at a lower cost per mile, their techniques don't pierce the language & cultural barriers into the Anglosphere.
I'm sure that affects labor costs and specifically unionized labor costs as well.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
It looks like the problem is that there is regulatory capture by a few construction companies and consulting firms. The unions have then made sure that they receive a portion of the excess profits.
I would be fairly confident that there are already laws on the books to prevent what the companies are doing, but no one has bothered to enforce them through investigation and prosecution.
MWO: Adamski
The union literally didn't cause that headache the state and management did by not fulfilling their duties.
Generally the probation period keeps this from being too much of an issue. Your first six months you can be let go for pretty much whatever reason, and after that you have to basically shit on your boss's desk to be fired. Which I'm generally fine with. It's impossible to know exactly what you're getting when you hire someone, because there's only so much you can get out of chatting with someone for an hour and reading their resume. I was part of the hiring process for a woman I now work with, and she interviewed really well, and had solid references, but she's... pretty useless for what she was hired for. Unfortunately, it's the kind of position where it's going to take at least six months before they're familiar enough with the environment to really be expected to shine, so probation came and went and we still expected she might grow into the role.
She didn't, and while she can't do most of her job, she can do just enough that we can't get rid of her. We basically redesigned how our group functions in order to give her work she was capable of (though she still fucks it up half the time), and now we're more or less fine, so whatever. The biggest downside here is that this was the one extra position we were allowed to have, and instead of filling it with someone who can share my workload, it was filled by someone who we had to stick in the corner where she couldn't do much harm.
Point being, not every instance of an employee being a bad fit is just management dropping the ball.
We don't all default to viewing everything through a lens of class solidarity, Sammich. Sometimes people just want to do their job.
(And this is a state job, we're all basically the worker class.)
No, the proper thing is to manage your people. Nobody is saying everything should be written down, because as you point out, that leads to incredibly toxic dynamics - but at the same time, putting off difficult conversations of the "you may not be a good fit here" sort serves to just make a bad situation worse. And again, if management has requirements like formal training and doesn't plan for it - that's on management.
But beyond that, as other people pointed out, the downsides are the point. Losing one's employment is devastating for a worker, which is why the union makes dismissal a multiphase affair - by doing this, it pushes management to actually work on improving their workers instead of tossing them aside. Those "headaches" exist to force management to, well, manage.
As labor, I don't want to work alongside other labor that is uninterested or incapable of doing the job. It's in my nature to accomplish things, and working on a team with a boat anchor is frustrating.
Few things are ever black and white. Most things are shades of gray.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
I would argue that in part it is. I will happily concede that management could have done everything they thought was necessary, and really did a good job overall. Mistakes can happen where no one is truly at fault because a novel situation arose. I am not trying to say you, or anyone didn't put in the effort necessary. It does sound to me like you ended up blind sided by a situation you didn't know you needed to prepare for which still falls in managements domain even if no one knew it ahead of time.
I would also put forth that the problems you put off onto the "state" are also problems with management. It is just a higher level of management than what you can control. There is certainly a huge problem that exists if a person cannot be fired if they cannot adequately perform the functions of the job they were hired for. I have to wonder why such a deal was signed since it is ludicrous on its face. My experience with the state (Louisiana) is that the job descriptions don't always match what the office needs to be done to be functional. The union is not the one that caps staffing levels, or available jobs. Management does at the state level and everyone downstream suffers for it.
there is no way to throw bad labor under the bus without also putting yourself in a worse position
hitting hot metal with hammers
I'm actually pretty sure that if a manager told an employee they might not be a good fit prior to documenting their failings, they would run afoul of union rules. It would be considered a hostile work environment. Managers are very limited in when and how they can address their employees, per union rules. Which is generally a good thing. It just sometimes means you have to tiptoe around the occasional elephant in the room.
There ARE such things as bad employees who are beyond help. It is good that a lot of time is spent giving even those employees every chance to improve. And hey, maybe you've been fortunate enough to never run into someone who just clearly can't do the job they were hired to do. Maybe you legit don't believe such a person exists. If so, I'm jealous. Or maybe you just don't believe it's ever possible to determine that someone is unqualified in any less than six months, I dunno.
I guess the best argument I can see for your position is "if a manager makes a mistake in hiring someone, or forgets to dot an i somewhere, the proper punishment is that they are saddled with a clearly bad employee for several months." Which, okay, fair. Kinda like if you catch a guy in the act of stabbing someone to death in front of twelve witnesses, but you forget to read him his rights when you arrest him, the proper punishment for the cop is that the murderer goes free on procedural grounds. But you defend that as "it is good that there are repercussions when the police fuck up their job, even though occasionally it results in something terrible" not generally as "it is awesome that the murderer goes free and the victims are denied justice."
but something like this:
is obviously just a case of: WeLL WhY DIdn'T MaNAgeMenT FolLoW tHe ProCess?
It takes years to become a teacher with tenure, it shouldn't be a surprise its takes as long to get rid of one.
Whats the source on this low rez grainy infographic
So a principal decides to fire a tenured teacher, has to provide them 1 year to prove whether they are a good teacher or not, after which they are suspended without pay while the firing process is completed? Oh the horror!
MWO: Adamski
(assuming that thing is actually for real)
well why didn't they
why did they sign an agreement with the union that included a process that they don't intend to follow
or can they welch on a legal agreement because it's just too onerous and they don't wanna
hitting hot metal with hammers
like if they're showing up to work drunk every day then they'd be gone pretty quick
but you can't just like, look at their student's grades and determine if they're a good teacher or not
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
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PSN: AbEntropy
My dude what in the hell, the fuck does Voter ID have to do with following procedures meant to protect workers from unjustly getting fired, especially all the shit we already know about the foundations of Voter ID laws being shaken as hell regarding the non-problem they “mean” to “solve”?
I think the analogy you used shows where the break down is. You seem to be framing the problem in a very different light. If I am wrong on any of this please tell me, but if my impressions are right I see what is happening. You are equating a person staying at the job as a bad, and firing them as the proper result. It struck me with your earlier example where you mentioned the person finding a new job before they were fired as well. There seems to be a justice angle for you here that I don't think others are sharing.
For me, if an employee sees the writing on the wall and leaves before termination then that is the best outcome hands down. We live in a society that forces us to work for our continued existence, and makes no effort to ensure proper employment is available. The cost of having an office running poorly for months does not strike me as nearly as bad as putting a person out on the street. This basic reality is why unions need to exist as the power imbalance is far too high otherwise.
Using your analogy, my defense is would be that it is better to require the trial rather than letting police just arrest whomever they think is guilty with no further oversight. If the police failed to collect the evidence then I am super pissed at them for phoning in their jobs with so much on the line. I am still happy the process exists to protect from severe abuse though since we know how likely it is to happen based on everything.
Yeah, I mean it's only a year of education for their students. There are no longer term consequences for them right?
Also, again we all understand-and will admit to- the idea of these elaborate processes are created to inhibit removal of bad workers WITH UNIONS, as long as it is a police union we are discussing at the time.
Oh, hey - it's that gooseshit diagram that literally complains that requiring principals to do their actual job as management (that is, the first line on the diagram) is enabling "bad teachers" (which, let us note, is a very nebulous term.)
I agree, we should move all police funding to schooling.
Also "bad" teachers don't tend to also extrajudicially murder people and keep their jobs.
What are you even trying to get at here?
You realize that the power dynamics of police and the public make their unions not the same as, like, the teamsters right?
Seems like that’ll help deal with these problems. Let the employees decide policy directly instead of having to have a union that negotiates on their behalf with the managerial class
Or is the problem you just want at will employment?
I will gladly argue that everyone deserves some form of collective bargaining rights. Yes, I even include police in that group. That is because I will put forth that unions are not the ultimate cause of the abuses that police are involved with. Jurisdictions without unions will often be just as horrible as those with them. The problem lays in the fact that politicians refuse to stand firm on negotiations over collective bargaining rights as it would harm their re-election chances. Management does not want to engage in the process because it might cause them problems and so the rest of society suffers.
There is a lot more going on there as well which falls outside of the scope of the thread. I almost certainly won't engage in the broader discussion of finer points because it feels very crass. Trying to have an academic discussion with people in a lot of real, and continuing pain about their pain is not something I am inclined to do.
well that's a whole thing. there's good reason to believe, now, that the people who are alleged to have power over police departments actually do not, and they're actually self-governing. that's another thread though.
Cops arent labor
You obviously don't realize, I'm not talking about the unions.
I'm talking about you(all).
Who clearly can and do understand how people (legislators, bureaucrats, police unions) can construct neutral seeming processes ( just show an ID to vote, just fill out these forms to apply for foodstamps, this is the process for terminating a police officer) with the end goal of making the nominal outcome of that process if not unachievable very unlikely to happen.
But somehow when that same approach is taken to for example the termination process of a teacher(or ElJeffe's coworker); its just "Ohh no this is just the neutral and naturally arising process required to do this thing, a [non-police] union certainly wouldn't try to (ab)use its power in that way, It is management's fault for not following "the process" correctly".
Like I work in a field without unions and with basically no job protections. I've just gotten used to having a full stress breakdown every two to three weeks because I have a disability no one will ever care about that keeps me from being the standard expectation in a really toxic field and I just have to always wonder, "when are they going to fire me about it?" And stress my life away when my disability hinders my work (which is basically every day).
I'll totally say that unions keeping less than stellar employees employed is a desired outcome of unions. Cause again some of us will never meet your's or managment's shitty expectations, and we still need to eat and aren't actually gutter trash you can keep throwing away simply because we can't work like you do.
Edit: this of course not referring to blatant and continual safety violation but just expected work volume.
What you are arguing is not reality though. The unions do not dream up some arbitrarily difficult process designed to prevent termination and then implement it unilaterally. They negotiate with management what the process of termination looks like. When management and the union have agreed to a process that protects both of their interests then the contract is signed. Management is every bit as responsible for the process as the union is. The union just makes management stick to it.
again, except for police unions because *waves hands*
---Posted from my union worksite on my union-mandated hour long meal break.
No? I made a post earlier that addressed just this. I unequivocally stated that management was a problem there as well.