People are ascribing a lot of malice afore thought, to something with a much simpler explanation. No one likes being constrained by rules and most people view themselves as fundamentally good and fair people.
A union isn't some group of meddling kids ruining their dastardly scheme for capitalist riches, its the TSA. Oh do you want to go over there, first wait in this line, take off your shoes and belt, go through this scanner, ohh was there a crumbled receipt in a pocket, time to get pat down. And now the water I already had for a dollar, I have to rebuy for $5.50? What did I gain for this hassle?
I mean I've paid money for the convenience of skipping the TSA lines. That someone would spend money to keep their business from being bound to a bunch of rules and processes they don't want seems an entirely practical decision, even separate from financial incentives or disincentives of dealing with a union.
Also most people-managers included - are over worked. Even if you argue it gives "better" results, if it adds additional steps and time required they don't want it. A one page notice of termination form, or a multi step documentation/grievance/arbitration process is a no brainer. The outcome of the process is moot, that is hours of time. There is a reason 30 Minute Instapot Meals outsells The Complete Guide to French Cuisine.
So, I've mentioned that I work in healhcare IT - have been for all my professional career. And as such I have to deal on a daily basis with HIPAA, which governs how I handle personal health information (PHI) and has serious ramifications for not doing so. It can be a pain to have to deal with those requirements, and some days I bang my head on it repeatedly.
But here's the thing - at the same time, I will defend HIPAA. Does it give me extra work and hassle? Sure. But it does so because the information I work with is sensitive and could cause harm if it gets released, even accidentally.
And the same thing applies to unions and management. The point of the union forcing a multistep process for dismissal is to make managers do their job and actually manage people instead of just discarding staff because it's "easier" for them.
It's also just a trade-off. It's saying "we'd rather keep some shitty workers employed rather then let a bunch of different workers get fired for no reason".
I think in general we should not look at unionization as a system without trade-offs. It's just that those trade-offs are worth it.
This argument is founded on a wrong, shitty premise. Unions require due process to be followed, they don’t exist to protect bad workers (police are not workers).
I didn't say they existed to protect bad workers. I said that they protect bad workers. It's just part of what they do when they protect their members. It's a side-effect.
Unions protect workers from the excesses of management and capital. That any workers might be considered "bad" is something that must be established through due diligence and proper procedure by the aggrieved party.
My uncle (in a union at the time) almost got dismembered because some other fucking moron (also in that union) removed a lockout/tagout safety from equipment he was working on and a third party, seeing no reason for it to be disabled, turned it on while he was inside the guts of the thing. The moron in question did not lose his job (apparently he "required additional training.") Instead the crew beat the absolute shit out of him later (the aforementioned training.)
I would submit that this is Not Great on a couple of different levels.
What doe an example of individuals disregarding safety regulations have to do with unions?
Also it rules that your uncle's co-workers gave him that "additional training." Again, that doesn't have anything to do with unions, but I bet they internalized the importance of lockout/tagout safety better than if they'd just watched the training video.
Are
Are you being serious right now
You told a pointless story about a shitty workplace being shitty. What do you want?
Gabriel_Pitt on
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HacksawJ. Duggan Esq.Wrestler at LawRegistered Userregular
Really sounds like the non-union third party did their fair share of getting your uncle nearly mutilated, to my mind!
I've seen the heights and the lows of unions, and frankly, they are an inevitability. Collective bargaining is something that will happen, so unless the idea is to let the likes of Pinkerton beat up employees into submission, rather have everything on the open and clear terms.
Also, to the stories said so far:
Both electricity and heavy machinery are really, really, REALLY fucking dangerous. So, rather deal with onerous bureaucratic procedure to ensure that everything is on place than having to deal with a corpse. Because that WILL happen if people are cavalier about procedure. Electricity in particuclar involves dying of "internal burns", which is a very clinical term of what happens when someone's internal organs get carbonized.
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MonwynApathy's a tragedy, and boredom is a crime.A little bit of everything, all of the time.Registered Userregular
"Unions don't exist to prevent bad workers from getting fired, also endangering the lives of their fellow workers shouldn't be a firing offense"
"Unions don't exist to prevent bad workers from getting fired, also endangering the lives of their fellow workers shouldn't be a firing offense"
Real, real glad I don't work with you guys
I mean
No one said he shouldn’t be fired
They just didn’t have much sympathy that the dude got his ass handed to him as a consequence of nearly getting your uncle dismembered. Which, you know, understandable given he almost got your uncle dismembered. Probably should have lost his job but you also didn’t really give much context as to why he did not, just that he did not.
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MonwynApathy's a tragedy, and boredom is a crime.A little bit of everything, all of the time.Registered Userregular
Just to summarize:
1): A union member explicitly ignored safety regs and endangered the life of another worker
2): Due to a clause in the union contract, this employee could not be fired
3): Said person was instead subject to assault and battery
4): None of this has anything to do with unions
5): All of this is cool
1): A union member explicitly ignored safety regs and endangered the life of another worker
2): Due to a clause in the union contract, this employee could not be fired
3): Said person was instead subject to assault and battery
4): None of this has anything to do with unions
5): All of this is cool
Fuckin'
What
I mean you’ve left out context until this post for how the union is responsible for him keeping the job
That is the important part of the argument
So far from your posts the only context we have is “and he was union” and now “there was a clause that prevented it”
What was the clause? What stipulations are there that would allow for termination? Etc.
It seem unfeasible that a union would allow its members to endanger each other’s lives through wreckless behavior to go without being reprimanded if not fired, given the point of a union is to protect its workers. Essentially your point crossed from anecdote to “extraordinary claim”
Lanz on
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MonwynApathy's a tragedy, and boredom is a crime.A little bit of everything, all of the time.Registered Userregular
I'd argue that it was pretty clearly implied and deliberately ignored, but sure
I'd argue that it was pretty clearly implied and deliberately ignored, but sure
Insofar as it resembles the kind of right wing boilerplate anti-union schtick I can remember hearing since I was able to retain long term memory, I suppose
1): A union member explicitly ignored safety regs and endangered the life of another worker
2): Due to a clause in the union contract, this employee could not be fired
3): Said person was instead subject to assault and battery
4): None of this has anything to do with unions
5): All of this is cool
Fuckin'
What
there wasn't a clause in the union contract that prevented the lockout fucker from getting fired, almost certainly. what there was was a rigorous set of procedures that the company had to follow if they wanted to fire someone, that the company either didn't feel like going through or didn't have the documentation to do. it is to the union's (and by extension the workers') benefit to bend the rules on this precisely never, because if the company can show that the union doesn't follow its agreements it makes them much harder to enforce
HacksawJ. Duggan Esq.Wrestler at LawRegistered Userregular
Bending on your own rules for the sake of making things easier for your employer is a great way to undermine your own bargaining position in future negotiations. Best not to do it.
1): A union member explicitly ignored safety regs and endangered the life of another worker
2): Due to a clause in the union contract, this employee could not be fired
3): Said person was instead subject to assault and battery
4): None of this has anything to do with unions
5): All of this is cool
Fuckin'
What
there wasn't a clause in the union contract that prevented the lockout fucker from getting fired, almost certainly. what there was was a rigorous set of procedures that the company had to follow if they wanted to fire someone, that the company either didn't feel like going through or didn't have the documentation to do. it is to the union's (and by extension the workers') benefit to bend the rules on this precisely never, because if the company can show that the union doesn't follow its agreements it makes them much harder to enforce
If this is true I'd be interested in hearing how that came to be since that failure nearly out one of heir own in the hospital. Unions are good, and badly needed in the workplace so employees don't get hurt, and the circumstances bought up showed the union failing at their one job. They should get called out for that.
Insofar as it resembles the kind of right wing boilerplate anti-union schtick I can remember hearing since I was able to retain long term memory, I suppose
Reducing any complaint about a union being bad protecting people under its care as right wing propaganda is bad faith. Sometimes unions fuck up, they're not going to learn from mistakes when hey send the people they're supposed two there for into the meat grinder - all that does is give anti-unionists more to use against them.
FWIW econ articles on the effects of unionization and deunionization on workplace accidents are mixed. Most analyses fail to find any effect. Some find a negative correlation between union membership and indicators of safety, some find a positive correlation.
That's the best I can say if I'm being objective and not putting my own spin on it.
IMO the higher-quality studies show improved safety from unionization, though the effect isn't strong. Other studies that show reduced safety can be chalked up to three common confounds: 1) unionization may increase the rate at which accidents are reported, 2) some studies aren't looking at number of accidents, but at the number of days workers take off after accidents, and 3) some studies are looking at compensation for accidents. Since unions can bargain for more days off and/or increased accident compensation, it's not hard to see how 2 and 3 can go up even when overall number of accidents is unchanged (or even slightly reduced).
Studies that control for those confounds do generally find that total number of accidents goes down, while days off per accident goes up.
Edit: corrected a weird typo or autocorrect glitch
Feral on
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.
1): A union member explicitly ignored safety regs and endangered the life of another worker
2): Due to a clause in the union contract, this employee could not be fired
3): Said person was instead subject to assault and battery
4): None of this has anything to do with unions
5): All of this is cool
Fuckin'
What
there wasn't a clause in the union contract that prevented the lockout fucker from getting fired, almost certainly. what there was was a rigorous set of procedures that the company had to follow if they wanted to fire someone, that the company either didn't feel like going through or didn't have the documentation to do. it is to the union's (and by extension the workers') benefit to bend the rules on this precisely never, because if the company can show that the union doesn't follow its agreements it makes them much harder to enforce
If this is true I'd be interested in hearing how that came to be since that failure nearly out one of heir own in the hospital. Unions are good, and badly needed in the workplace so employees don't get hurt, and the circumstances bought up showed the union failing at their one job. They should get called out for that.
Insofar as it resembles the kind of right wing boilerplate anti-union schtick I can remember hearing since I was able to retain long term memory, I suppose
Reducing any complaint about a union being bad protecting people under its care as right wing propaganda is bad faith. Sometimes unions fuck up, they're not going to learn from mistakes when hey send the people they're supposed two there for into the meat grinder - all that does is give anti-unionists more to use against them.
I’m just saying it’s the same kind of “unions let bad employees stay around! Therefore right to work!” Shit I’ve heard all my life. Therefore I’m disinclined to trust it given how often it’s used as a means to ultimately hurt workers by skirting over relevant details or obfuscating shit in order to create anti union narratives
1): A union member explicitly ignored safety regs and endangered the life of another worker
2): Due to a clause in the union contract, this employee could not be fired
3): Said person was instead subject to assault and battery
4): None of this has anything to do with unions
5): All of this is cool
Fuckin'
What
there wasn't a clause in the union contract that prevented the lockout fucker from getting fired, almost certainly. what there was was a rigorous set of procedures that the company had to follow if they wanted to fire someone, that the company either didn't feel like going through or didn't have the documentation to do. it is to the union's (and by extension the workers') benefit to bend the rules on this precisely never, because if the company can show that the union doesn't follow its agreements it makes them much harder to enforce
If this is true I'd be interested in hearing how that came to be since that failure nearly out one of heir own in the hospital. Unions are good, and badly needed in the workplace so employees don't get hurt, and the circumstances bought up showed the union failing at their one job. They should get called out for that.
Insofar as it resembles the kind of right wing boilerplate anti-union schtick I can remember hearing since I was able to retain long term memory, I suppose
Reducing any complaint about a union being bad protecting people under its care as right wing propaganda is bad faith. Sometimes unions fuck up, they're not going to learn from mistakes when hey send the people they're supposed two there for into the meat grinder - all that does is give anti-unionists more to use against them.
That isn't really what the anecdote showed at all. The incident had already happened, the union had nothing to do with it. What I'm saying is that collective bargaining agreements don't have clauses that say management can't fire workers, basically all the stories about unions making it impossible to fire shitty or dangerous workers boil down to management not wanting to do the legwork they agreed they'd do when they want to fire someone
People are ascribing a lot of malice afore thought, to something with a much simpler explanation. No one likes being constrained by rules and most people view themselves as fundamentally good and fair people.
A union isn't some group of meddling kids ruining their dastardly scheme for capitalist riches, its the TSA. Oh do you want to go over there, first wait in this line, take off your shoes and belt, go through this scanner, ohh was there a crumbled receipt in a pocket, time to get pat down. And now the water I already had for a dollar, I have to rebuy for $5.50? What did I gain for this hassle?
I mean I've paid money for the convenience of skipping the TSA lines. That someone would spend money to keep their business from being bound to a bunch of rules and processes they don't want seems an entirely practical decision, even separate from financial incentives or disincentives of dealing with a union.
Also most people-managers included - are over worked. Even if you argue it gives "better" results, if it adds additional steps and time required they don't want it. A one page notice of termination form, or a multi step documentation/grievance/arbitration process is a no brainer. The outcome of the process is moot, that is hours of time. There is a reason 30 Minute Instapot Meals outsells The Complete Guide to French Cuisine.
So, I've mentioned that I work in healhcare IT - have been for all my professional career. And as such I have to deal on a daily basis with HIPAA, which governs how I handle personal health information (PHI) and has serious ramifications for not doing so. It can be a pain to have to deal with those requirements, and some days I bang my head on it repeatedly.
But here's the thing - at the same time, I will defend HIPAA. Does it give me extra work and hassle? Sure. But it does so because the information I work with is sensitive and could cause harm if it gets released, even accidentally.
And the same thing applies to unions and management. The point of the union forcing a multistep process for dismissal is to make managers do their job and actually manage people instead of just discarding staff because it's "easier" for them.
It's also just a trade-off. It's saying "we'd rather keep some shitty workers employed rather then let a bunch of different workers get fired for no reason".
I think in general we should not look at unionization as a system without trade-offs. It's just that those trade-offs are worth it.
This argument is founded on a wrong, shitty premise. Unions require due process to be followed, they don’t exist to protect bad workers (police are not workers).
I didn't say they existed to protect bad workers. I said that they protect bad workers. It's just part of what they do when they protect their members. It's a side-effect.
Unions protect workers from the excesses of management and capital. That any workers might be considered "bad" is something that must be established through due diligence and proper procedure by the aggrieved party.
My uncle (in a union at the time) almost got dismembered because some other fucking moron (also in that union) removed a lockout/tagout safety from equipment he was working on and a third party, seeing no reason for it to be disabled, turned it on while he was inside the guts of the thing. The moron in question did not lose his job (apparently he "required additional training.") Instead the crew beat the absolute shit out of him later (the aforementioned training.)
I would submit that this is Not Great on a couple of different levels.
So I will engage with this as best I can. There was a gross safety violation which resulted in actions we don't know about. We know he wasn't fired for the first offense that did not, on its own, result in gross bodily harm. Any disciplinary action would not be told to the rest of the staff so we don't know if anything happened to either of the two people that caused the unsafe work environment. We don't know what the union contract required, what management did in response, or what would be done differently in a non-union shop.
I will also engage with the idea that this is a "bad worker." He definitely did something incredibly dumb one time. We don't know what the training was to prevent this situation. We know he made one terrible mistake that potentially caused severe bodily harm. This happens in a lot of professions, unfortunately. That doesn't make the worker bad after a single incident.
I agree it is not great, but this situation is not tied to a union. Check out the jobs thread in SE++ for some real horror stories from manufacturing. I think the worst are found in old threads as the posters got better jobs. These were non-union jobs that don't end in firing.
This is really just an anecdote that leads people to assume a lot of bad things about unions while ignoring that management was just as involved. Who bears more responsibility is something we can't actually parse without details we can't get. I am struggling to see where we can draw any scathing indictments about this union in particular let alone generalize to unions more broadly.
1): A union member explicitly ignored safety regs and endangered the life of another worker
2): Due to a clause in the union contract, this employee could not be fired
3): Said person was instead subject to assault and battery
4): None of this has anything to do with unions
5): All of this is cool
Fuckin'
What
there wasn't a clause in the union contract that prevented the lockout fucker from getting fired, almost certainly. what there was was a rigorous set of procedures that the company had to follow if they wanted to fire someone, that the company either didn't feel like going through or didn't have the documentation to do. it is to the union's (and by extension the workers') benefit to bend the rules on this precisely never, because if the company can show that the union doesn't follow its agreements it makes them much harder to enforce
If this is true I'd be interested in hearing how that came to be since that failure nearly out one of heir own in the hospital. Unions are good, and badly needed in the workplace so employees don't get hurt, and the circumstances bought up showed the union failing at their one job. They should get called out for that.
It’s a failure of management to adequately manage the case.
Let me be clear here for all of you who have never worked in a job like this before; LOTO systems are (should be ) sacrosanct. They are in place precisely to prevent exactly this sort of thing occurring. In heavy industry, there is nothing more likely to get you sacked than breaching the LOTO system, particularly to the extent this guy did. A few reasons off the top of my head why the guys was actually not fired:
1) his was a routine violation (in OHS parlance, look up James Reason if you want more info), so they didn’t feel they could do terminate him for something they allow everyone else to do.
2) the company had not developed a safe system of work, and they knew that if they tried to fire this guy, they would have to expose how negligent the company had been in controlling hazards
3) the management were lazy/too busy to see it through
4) someone or someones were matesy with this guy, and stopped him getting fired
5) Monwyn made the story up/embellished his uncle’s story for an online debate
6) Monwyn’s uncle made up a story for his nephew, which Monwyn took as gospel
Are there any international studies that compare health and hygiene stats from nations with strong trades unions and those without that you’ve read?
On a broad national level? No. Those would have too many confounds to be useful anyway. Most of the studies are stuff like the one linked below; confined to a specific country and industry.
At my work there are two types of management, project and line. Project tells people what to do at any one time, line tracks people's hours (how much on which project), finds then new project to work on when they are done with previous ones, and evaluates their performance based on feedback from project managers and other coworkers. Project is allowed to be in the union, line is not.
The Union is the kind where everyone is automatically enrolled, but paying dues is voluntary and comes with some small additional perks (union throws a xmas party that's free to dues payers, there is (tiny) scholarships available to dues payers kids college, etc...). As far as i know there is no way to see who does and doesn't pay unless you're in the union leadership, but i don't really know if the line managers can see it or not.
Work is hourly, but everyone works 40/week. Some projects get authorized for overtime, but I've never known one that made it mandatory. Generally the peoplev with little kids so their 40 and those that could use the extra cash or time off (a 1 for 1 hour option) take it. Due to arcane rules, overtime is a 1.5 multiplier just for folks first starting out (that is too say that with low overall salary), and the multiplier quickly drops so if you've been there just a few years it's just 1x your normal hourly.
Based on your performance review, your yearly goes up by $0/750/1500, or you get a one time payout of the same without it affecting your yearly. Can't get more that $1500 overall. There is no mechanism for it to go down, and there is a mechanism that says you can't get 0 two years in a row. There is a hard cap that most people reach after 15-25 years working there, where you can't get the permanent increases (just the one time payouts) unless you move into project pr line management. And even there the project has to be off a certain money size or you have to be in line management a few years before it happens. I've been at the low level of project management for a few years now, not enough to unlock the cap which i should be hitting sometime this year.
From what i understand, it's very hard for anyone to get fired, but i don't have the details. I've only known one person that got fired, they were also in legal trouble. I also heard a rumor that one person got fired for a porn addiction, watching it all day at work. The line managers have to find work for everyone they are responsible for, or put them on "busywork" projects that are paid for by taxing other projects.
The system means that some people (it's a small but noticable percentage) at some point in their career "check out" and do the bare minimum, knowing they just sit it at cap or slowly advance toward it. Frankly i feel that would be very boring, but it is what it is. The only time it's annoyed me it's when line managers got someone completely useless onto a team i was on, which means we still had the amount of work to do that was sized for X people to do for the year, but had X-1 to do it with.
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.
In this moment, I am euphoric. Not because of any phony god’s blessing. But because, I am enlightened by my intelligence.
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.
Yes, we should ban companies for being corrupt as fuck.
Edit: To be slightly less snarky - corruption is a tangential issue, because its a temptation that exists for any group with power.
People are ascribing a lot of malice afore thought, to something with a much simpler explanation. No one likes being constrained by rules and most people view themselves as fundamentally good and fair people.
A union isn't some group of meddling kids ruining their dastardly scheme for capitalist riches, its the TSA. Oh do you want to go over there, first wait in this line, take off your shoes and belt, go through this scanner, ohh was there a crumbled receipt in a pocket, time to get pat down. And now the water I already had for a dollar, I have to rebuy for $5.50? What did I gain for this hassle?
I mean I've paid money for the convenience of skipping the TSA lines. That someone would spend money to keep their business from being bound to a bunch of rules and processes they don't want seems an entirely practical decision, even separate from financial incentives or disincentives of dealing with a union.
Also most people-managers included - are over worked. Even if you argue it gives "better" results, if it adds additional steps and time required they don't want it. A one page notice of termination form, or a multi step documentation/grievance/arbitration process is a no brainer. The outcome of the process is moot, that is hours of time. There is a reason 30 Minute Instapot Meals outsells The Complete Guide to French Cuisine.
So, I've mentioned that I work in healhcare IT - have been for all my professional career. And as such I have to deal on a daily basis with HIPAA, which governs how I handle personal health information (PHI) and has serious ramifications for not doing so. It can be a pain to have to deal with those requirements, and some days I bang my head on it repeatedly.
But here's the thing - at the same time, I will defend HIPAA. Does it give me extra work and hassle? Sure. But it does so because the information I work with is sensitive and could cause harm if it gets released, even accidentally.
And the same thing applies to unions and management. The point of the union forcing a multistep process for dismissal is to make managers do their job and actually manage people instead of just discarding staff because it's "easier" for them.
It's also just a trade-off. It's saying "we'd rather keep some shitty workers employed rather then let a bunch of different workers get fired for no reason".
I think in general we should not look at unionization as a system without trade-offs. It's just that those trade-offs are worth it.
This argument is founded on a wrong, shitty premise. Unions require due process to be followed, they don’t exist to protect bad workers (police are not workers).
I didn't say they existed to protect bad workers. I said that they protect bad workers. It's just part of what they do when they protect their members. It's a side-effect.
Unions protect workers from the excesses of management and capital. That any workers might be considered "bad" is something that must be established through due diligence and proper procedure by the aggrieved party.
My uncle (in a union at the time) almost got dismembered because some other fucking moron (also in that union) removed a lockout/tagout safety from equipment he was working on and a third party, seeing no reason for it to be disabled, turned it on while he was inside the guts of the thing. The moron in question did not lose his job (apparently he "required additional training.") Instead the crew beat the absolute shit out of him later (the aforementioned training.)
I would submit that this is Not Great on a couple of different levels.
What this says to me is that management put someone on the floor that wasn’t trained in safety procedures, or couldn’t prove that they had trained them with any documentation.
So when the worker screwed up, management had to rectify their mistake to prevent that employee from making more mistakes.
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.
Yes, we should ban companies for being corrupt as fuck.
Edit: To be slightly less snarky - corruption is a tangential issue, because its a temptation that exists for any group with power.
Ok the discussion has been around "do unions make work (as in pointless jobs) for people?" Some examples given have been refuted e.g. the amazing post by @Hacksaw. I have posted an example of how this can undeniably happen. Then point out the only reason it happens is because of complicity of the companies involved. Which I think further cements the idea that this doesn't really happen, and when it does, There are worse things at play.
In this moment, I am euphoric. Not because of any phony god’s blessing. But because, I am enlightened by my intelligence.
Yeah, but the problem is corruption is corruption. It's not inherent in unions, it's not somehow more problematic in unions, but corporate propaganda will absolutely play it out like it is. Nevermind that corporate corruption cost us more in 2008 than pretty much the history of union corruption....
Hell, I'd argue corruption in corporation is probably more inherent to them than unions. If unions are run the way they should, it gets pretty hard for a corrupt fucker to stay in, no impossible, but the union membership has the option to vote a corrupt fucker out and awful business leaders are going to gun for them, if that corruption doesn't benefit them. With a corporation, it's much harder because those tend to be rather undemocratic in their setup.
No the TSA choice was specific. Because I think for most people who deal with unions - as opposed to being in unions- its mostly dealing with a bunch of seemingly arbitrary rules with no obvious benefit.
note: I had to get this off a contractors site because the official McCormic Center Labor Rules Page...doesn't actually have a link to the rules. Which is just the most typical Chicago bullshit.
What do Stagehands do in a Production Area for a General Session / Keynote?
Install and remove electrically powered production equipment including lighting, sound, and AV equipment. This also includes rigging of production related equipment which is suspended overhead.
Includes running all of the associated cables, and power cords, and plugging the equipment into finished receptacles after Electricians have installed and energized power services and disconnects.
Install and dismantle LCD, LED, and Plasma displays connected to video control systems.
What do Electricians do in a General Session / Keynote?
Deliver power drops from floor boxes or bus ducts and handle electrical connections that cannot be accomplished by simply plugging into a finished receptacle.
Turn house power on and off to circuits that provide power to the electrical drops.
Program house lighting controls and in some cases operate house lights.
So, If I am setting up a TV at my stage and I need an extension drop. I need to have a union electrician come in and run it...Okay sure I can buy that don't need 1000 vendors all doing their own thing blowing circuits. But then I need a separate person, from a different union to come plug it into the outlet? Because a master electrician, who just ran the actual cable...can't handle that for some reason? And I just being a normal everyday person, am apparently not able to plug in electronics.
And all these functions if they are done in a meeting room? That's a different IBEW union that has a specific contract with MCP, rather than the one my contractor would use for the booth. Unless I am going to use that room as a press room-or several other features-, in which case it is back to my contractors. Also I my require an IATSE Projectionists Local #110 member to actually play the video. I can't be sure, because again the rules aren't posted.
Now maybe there is some great rational for the convoluted mess of all that. But looking at it it looks pretty much like "labor theater" to me - or we could just use the proper economics term and call it rent seeking.
And generally the crying foul on the TSA as a choice is a bit ironic, since the TSA is of course unionize under AFGE.
Oh hi there, tradeshow worker here! Happy to address this!
So first of all, IBEW and IATSE (electricians and stagehands, respectively) are vastly different unions with dissimilar (but overlapping) responsibilities and jurisdictions. The reason an IBEW electrician has to run the extension cable from the wall source is because they're the only ones with the knowledge pertaining to circuit load. If I (an IATSE stagehand) were to plug a monitor into the wrong circuit, I might blow out the whole thing because I don't know how close it is to its operating limit. The electrician isn't going to plug anything into the circuit (even if the plug is right there) because our unions have already negotiated jurisdiction over who gets to do that sort of thing. The long and short of it is, he's not going to plug it in because he doesn't know what it's for or how to service/troubleshoot it. I know those things, so it's my responsibility.
The other thing to take into consideration is that electricians usually lay down power and skidaddle before everyone else, opting to leave a few people on site for additional power runs or questions pertaining to circuit load. By the time monitors and projectors and lights show up, IBEW is gone. Then it's IATSE's game. We operate based on knowledge furnished to us by IBEW and the show's production company. The reason you don't know who has jurisdiction over what is because the producers probably didn't tell you. Now in their defense, they're probably very overloaded trying to get things up and running while also worrying about how things will get broken down and out of the building. This is to say nothing of considerations for meals, breaks, overtime, etc. It's a complicated situation that you have no knowledge of because, broadly speaking, you're not directly footing the bill for the labor.
Remember: if you have questions, ask! We're usually happy to answer. Most of the people who work on big shows like that are very well aware of their role and jurisdictional limitations in any given situation, so putting a few questions to us isn't going to break our brains or anything.
A bit of advice: a lot of the frustration you'll run into is because someone didn't have their shit taken care of ahead of time. I cannot tell you the amount of presenters who have come to me at the 11th hour and asked us to rotate the stage, add more lights, take lights away, use different equipment all together, etc. etc. We'll usually try to accommodate their requests to the best of our abilities, but if you show up and you aren't ready to go, that's not on us.
As someone that also does trade shows and uses a lot of power at them (100 amp splitter box type power), everyone that complains about the unions/convention center are grumpy assholes that aren't paying attention to what is happening around them, didn't properly prep for their show, or have never met someone who can say no to them because they are very petty and stupid.
tinwiskers is being a goose with their examples, specifically choosing the TSA and "chicago unions" are both dog whistles.
Even with a corrupt union the workers will have more benefits and protections than working for a corrupt non-union corporation.
I'll take a corrupt union over a corrupt corporation any day. You know, if we have to choose between the two.
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ElJeffeNot actually a mod.Roaming the streets, waving his gun around.Moderator, ClubPAmod
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!
I submitted an entry to Lego Ideas, and if 10,000 people support me, it'll be turned into an actual Lego set!If you'd like to see and support my submission, follow this link.
I think you are missing the point. It's not that people are saying they don't come with drawbacks, most people I've seen have been arguing that the drawbacks are an accepted cost of doing business because the alternative is far worse. The good of the many and all that.
Unions are a perfect example of nothing being black or white. They are also a good example of why we shouldn't let perfect be the enemy of better.
I'd rather have union with all it's drawbacks, than to be in a situation where I'm without a union and completely at the mercy of my employer. I mean FFS when Is till had a job that was exactly the setup and my former employer absolutely fucked me over.
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 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!
That hard case is a desired outcome.
The bosses might not like a non functional employee, but fuck em. Especially if they've designed an office thus that one broken cog cripples the machine. The problem you're seeing there is with management not properly designing the office and staffing so that a single person dropping slack fucks everything up. There should be redundancy to prevent that because everyone has bad times and might become a non functional cog in the machine for a while.
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!
I can only speak for me, but I am not trying to argue that unions don't cause headaches. Of course more paperwork causes more headaches. It is the bane of my existence, and the thought of more of it make me recoil in fear.
That said, I am arguing that unions don't create these problems in a vacuum. There is nothing intrinsic to the concept of a union that forces this pain upon us. It is the result of management and the union negotiating to advance their sides interests. To blame the union solely for them is to miss the forest for the trees.
Take your example. The union did not hire this person, and did not push to have her do the job with no training. The unions part in this is forcing management to show their work. In this instance the end result was that the person could not do the job. However, management was willing to throw someone at the job without investing the energy to set them up for success. Management created a really bad situation and everyone suffered. The unions responsibility is in forcing management to actually do their job they agreed to.
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.
it's pretty common to have long onerous firing processes in non-union workplaces, too
maybe the CEO can just shout "you're fired" at somebody but low level management usually needs to put in the work and put people on improvement plans and all that stuff, it isn't specifically a union thing
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
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?
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.
Posts
You told a pointless story about a shitty workplace being shitty. What do you want?
Also, to the stories said so far:
Both electricity and heavy machinery are really, really, REALLY fucking dangerous. So, rather deal with onerous bureaucratic procedure to ensure that everything is on place than having to deal with a corpse. Because that WILL happen if people are cavalier about procedure. Electricity in particuclar involves dying of "internal burns", which is a very clinical term of what happens when someone's internal organs get carbonized.
Real, real glad I don't work with you guys
real cool to be arguing against shit no one said
hitting hot metal with hammers
I mean
No one said he shouldn’t be fired
They just didn’t have much sympathy that the dude got his ass handed to him as a consequence of nearly getting your uncle dismembered. Which, you know, understandable given he almost got your uncle dismembered. Probably should have lost his job but you also didn’t really give much context as to why he did not, just that he did not.
1): A union member explicitly ignored safety regs and endangered the life of another worker
2): Due to a clause in the union contract, this employee could not be fired
3): Said person was instead subject to assault and battery
4): None of this has anything to do with unions
5): All of this is cool
Fuckin'
What
I mean you’ve left out context until this post for how the union is responsible for him keeping the job
That is the important part of the argument
So far from your posts the only context we have is “and he was union” and now “there was a clause that prevented it”
What was the clause? What stipulations are there that would allow for termination? Etc.
It seem unfeasible that a union would allow its members to endanger each other’s lives through wreckless behavior to go without being reprimanded if not fired, given the point of a union is to protect its workers. Essentially your point crossed from anecdote to “extraordinary claim”
Insofar as it resembles the kind of right wing boilerplate anti-union schtick I can remember hearing since I was able to retain long term memory, I suppose
there wasn't a clause in the union contract that prevented the lockout fucker from getting fired, almost certainly. what there was was a rigorous set of procedures that the company had to follow if they wanted to fire someone, that the company either didn't feel like going through or didn't have the documentation to do. it is to the union's (and by extension the workers') benefit to bend the rules on this precisely never, because if the company can show that the union doesn't follow its agreements it makes them much harder to enforce
hitting hot metal with hammers
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better
bit.ly/2XQM1ke
If this is true I'd be interested in hearing how that came to be since that failure nearly out one of heir own in the hospital. Unions are good, and badly needed in the workplace so employees don't get hurt, and the circumstances bought up showed the union failing at their one job. They should get called out for that.
Reducing any complaint about a union being bad protecting people under its care as right wing propaganda is bad faith. Sometimes unions fuck up, they're not going to learn from mistakes when hey send the people they're supposed two there for into the meat grinder - all that does is give anti-unionists more to use against them.
That's the best I can say if I'm being objective and not putting my own spin on it.
IMO the higher-quality studies show improved safety from unionization, though the effect isn't strong. Other studies that show reduced safety can be chalked up to three common confounds: 1) unionization may increase the rate at which accidents are reported, 2) some studies aren't looking at number of accidents, but at the number of days workers take off after accidents, and 3) some studies are looking at compensation for accidents. Since unions can bargain for more days off and/or increased accident compensation, it's not hard to see how 2 and 3 can go up even when overall number of accidents is unchanged (or even slightly reduced).
Studies that control for those confounds do generally find that total number of accidents goes down, while days off per accident goes up.
Edit: corrected a weird typo or autocorrect glitch
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I’m just saying it’s the same kind of “unions let bad employees stay around! Therefore right to work!” Shit I’ve heard all my life. Therefore I’m disinclined to trust it given how often it’s used as a means to ultimately hurt workers by skirting over relevant details or obfuscating shit in order to create anti union narratives
That isn't really what the anecdote showed at all. The incident had already happened, the union had nothing to do with it. What I'm saying is that collective bargaining agreements don't have clauses that say management can't fire workers, basically all the stories about unions making it impossible to fire shitty or dangerous workers boil down to management not wanting to do the legwork they agreed they'd do when they want to fire someone
hitting hot metal with hammers
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better
bit.ly/2XQM1ke
So I will engage with this as best I can. There was a gross safety violation which resulted in actions we don't know about. We know he wasn't fired for the first offense that did not, on its own, result in gross bodily harm. Any disciplinary action would not be told to the rest of the staff so we don't know if anything happened to either of the two people that caused the unsafe work environment. We don't know what the union contract required, what management did in response, or what would be done differently in a non-union shop.
I will also engage with the idea that this is a "bad worker." He definitely did something incredibly dumb one time. We don't know what the training was to prevent this situation. We know he made one terrible mistake that potentially caused severe bodily harm. This happens in a lot of professions, unfortunately. That doesn't make the worker bad after a single incident.
I agree it is not great, but this situation is not tied to a union. Check out the jobs thread in SE++ for some real horror stories from manufacturing. I think the worst are found in old threads as the posters got better jobs. These were non-union jobs that don't end in firing.
This is really just an anecdote that leads people to assume a lot of bad things about unions while ignoring that management was just as involved. Who bears more responsibility is something we can't actually parse without details we can't get. I am struggling to see where we can draw any scathing indictments about this union in particular let alone generalize to unions more broadly.
It’s a failure of management to adequately manage the case.
Let me be clear here for all of you who have never worked in a job like this before; LOTO systems are (should be ) sacrosanct. They are in place precisely to prevent exactly this sort of thing occurring. In heavy industry, there is nothing more likely to get you sacked than breaching the LOTO system, particularly to the extent this guy did. A few reasons off the top of my head why the guys was actually not fired:
1) his was a routine violation (in OHS parlance, look up James Reason if you want more info), so they didn’t feel they could do terminate him for something they allow everyone else to do.
2) the company had not developed a safe system of work, and they knew that if they tried to fire this guy, they would have to expose how negligent the company had been in controlling hazards
3) the management were lazy/too busy to see it through
4) someone or someones were matesy with this guy, and stopped him getting fired
5) Monwyn made the story up/embellished his uncle’s story for an online debate
6) Monwyn’s uncle made up a story for his nephew, which Monwyn took as gospel
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better
bit.ly/2XQM1ke
On a broad national level? No. Those would have too many confounds to be useful anyway. Most of the studies are stuff like the one linked below; confined to a specific country and industry.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/001979391306600104
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
The Union is the kind where everyone is automatically enrolled, but paying dues is voluntary and comes with some small additional perks (union throws a xmas party that's free to dues payers, there is (tiny) scholarships available to dues payers kids college, etc...). As far as i know there is no way to see who does and doesn't pay unless you're in the union leadership, but i don't really know if the line managers can see it or not.
Work is hourly, but everyone works 40/week. Some projects get authorized for overtime, but I've never known one that made it mandatory. Generally the peoplev with little kids so their 40 and those that could use the extra cash or time off (a 1 for 1 hour option) take it. Due to arcane rules, overtime is a 1.5 multiplier just for folks first starting out (that is too say that with low overall salary), and the multiplier quickly drops so if you've been there just a few years it's just 1x your normal hourly.
Based on your performance review, your yearly goes up by $0/750/1500, or you get a one time payout of the same without it affecting your yearly. Can't get more that $1500 overall. There is no mechanism for it to go down, and there is a mechanism that says you can't get 0 two years in a row. There is a hard cap that most people reach after 15-25 years working there, where you can't get the permanent increases (just the one time payouts) unless you move into project pr line management. And even there the project has to be off a certain money size or you have to be in line management a few years before it happens. I've been at the low level of project management for a few years now, not enough to unlock the cap which i should be hitting sometime this year.
From what i understand, it's very hard for anyone to get fired, but i don't have the details. I've only known one person that got fired, they were also in legal trouble. I also heard a rumor that one person got fired for a porn addiction, watching it all day at work. The line managers have to find work for everyone they are responsible for, or put them on "busywork" projects that are paid for by taxing other projects.
The system means that some people (it's a small but noticable percentage) at some point in their career "check out" and do the bare minimum, knowing they just sit it at cap or slowly advance toward it. Frankly i feel that would be very boring, but it is what it is. The only time it's annoyed me it's when line managers got someone completely useless onto a team i was on, which means we still had the amount of work to do that was sized for X people to do for the year, but had X-1 to do it with.
Choose Your Own Chat 1 Choose Your Own Chat 2 Choose Your Own Chat 3
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html
That elsewhere in the world isn't some labour rights hellhole, but specifically France.
But how did this happen?
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.
Yes, we should ban companies for being corrupt as fuck.
Edit: To be slightly less snarky - corruption is a tangential issue, because its a temptation that exists for any group with power.
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What this says to me is that management put someone on the floor that wasn’t trained in safety procedures, or couldn’t prove that they had trained them with any documentation.
So when the worker screwed up, management had to rectify their mistake to prevent that employee from making more mistakes.
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Ok the discussion has been around "do unions make work (as in pointless jobs) for people?" Some examples given have been refuted e.g. the amazing post by @Hacksaw. I have posted an example of how this can undeniably happen. Then point out the only reason it happens is because of complicity of the companies involved. Which I think further cements the idea that this doesn't really happen, and when it does, There are worse things at play.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
As someone that also does trade shows and uses a lot of power at them (100 amp splitter box type power), everyone that complains about the unions/convention center are grumpy assholes that aren't paying attention to what is happening around them, didn't properly prep for their show, or have never met someone who can say no to them because they are very petty and stupid.
tinwiskers is being a goose with their examples, specifically choosing the TSA and "chicago unions" are both dog whistles.
I'll take a corrupt union over a corrupt corporation any day. You know, if we have to choose between the two.
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!
I'd rather have union with all it's drawbacks, than to be in a situation where I'm without a union and completely at the mercy of my employer. I mean FFS when Is till had a job that was exactly the setup and my former employer absolutely fucked me over.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
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.
That hard case is a desired outcome.
The bosses might not like a non functional employee, but fuck em. Especially if they've designed an office thus that one broken cog cripples the machine. The problem you're seeing there is with management not properly designing the office and staffing so that a single person dropping slack fucks everything up. There should be redundancy to prevent that because everyone has bad times and might become a non functional cog in the machine for a while.
I can only speak for me, but I am not trying to argue that unions don't cause headaches. Of course more paperwork causes more headaches. It is the bane of my existence, and the thought of more of it make me recoil in fear.
That said, I am arguing that unions don't create these problems in a vacuum. There is nothing intrinsic to the concept of a union that forces this pain upon us. It is the result of management and the union negotiating to advance their sides interests. To blame the union solely for them is to miss the forest for the trees.
Take your example. The union did not hire this person, and did not push to have her do the job with no training. The unions part in this is forcing management to show their work. In this instance the end result was that the person could not do the job. However, management was willing to throw someone at the job without investing the energy to set them up for success. Management created a really bad situation and everyone suffered. The unions responsibility is in forcing management to actually do their job they agreed to.
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.
maybe the CEO can just shout "you're fired" at somebody but low level management usually needs to put in the work and put people on improvement plans and all that stuff, it isn't specifically a union thing
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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
How do you think France mitigates that?
What are they doing better?
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.