Here’s another difference between labour law in France and the United States. Under American labour law, managers do not have the right to join unions.
I’m not sure I entirely understand this description, but I can’t think of any way in which it would jive with my experience. Here, everything depends on the contract negotiated between the union and management. I suppose the contract under which you worked might have had such provisions, but I have never encountered a situation in which the union is empowered to make managerial decisions – decisions about which particular person is to report to what location and what tasks he or she is assigned is management’s domain.
I have not encountered any such conditions.
They are “salaried” and “non-union” because they are management (also referred to as “exempt,” as in “exempted from the Labour Act’s grant of collective bargaining rights” or that their employment conditions are “exempt from the terms of the agreement.”). I don’t understand what “actually belong to the company” means. Both union and management are considered employed by the company and receive their compensation from the company and are answerable to the company, not to the union. The union is not given authority to monitor an employee’s performance or discipline him or her.
They have this reaction because, as I said, in America, people who are empowered to make managerial decisions in a company are not allowed to join unions and, although it is not forbidden, usually union members are not included in discussions in which high officers of the company make important decisions.
Wombat, you misunderstand what “closed shop” means. A closed shop is where only union members can be hired. This is illegal. Your job is a “union shop”, where everyone hired must join the union (actually you can’t be required to join the union, rather you are required to pay union dues whether you join the union or not). This may seem a subtle difference, but it is important. In a union shop management can hire anyone for the job, they just have to join the union afterwards. In a closed shop management can only hire from a pool of current union members. In a closed shop you wouldn’t have been hired or even considered for the teaching job since you weren’t a member of the union.
Not saying that it doesn’t suck to be forced to pay union dues to a union you don’t want to join, but that isn’t a closed shop.
Although rare, it is possibile for a union member to be presented with a vote on which union will get to represent him. On these infrequent occasions, a sufficient number of unionized employees at a particular place of employment will become dissatisfied with the present union and petition to make a change, either to a different, existing union, or a new one that the dissatisfield employees wish to form. All affected employees vote, and if the new union wins a majority, it is then certified as the new union to represent those employees.
(I’m not a labor lawyer, at least not in this sense, but believe this to be an accurate summary. Apologies if Gfactor’s already made this point - I’m in a rush today and didn’t have a chance to read it.)
Oh, and one other clarification on the managerial employee/union issue.
I have come accross a few situations where a first tier manager (usually called a foreman) is eligible to join the union. My impression is that this is not usual, though.
Actually, having thought about it, I came up with some situations that might be closer to what Nava, described. These are in industries in which each “job” is basically an ad hoc arrangement.
This is most common with things like building construction and motion picture and musical theatre production. A project is defined and a handful of company representatives puts together a team of what are more or less freelance workers to complete the job.
In such cases, the management might just call up the union hall and say “send us X electricians” or whatever. Unless the management asks for specific people, the union has its own system for deciding how to parcel out the jobs. In that case, the employment contracts that apply have often been negotiated in advance between the union and the entire industry.
The stereotype of wasteful union contracts is that the union will strictly enforce the contract, even if the job conditions don’t exactly match. So if the contract says that a major Broadway theatre must hire 20 violinists, or that a movie producer must hire five truck drivers, then so it shall be, even if they aren’t needed. In addition, such employees are not permitted to do work beyond their defined duties. So, if a truck driver is needed for only two hours in the morning and an hour in the even, five of them will just sit around the rest of the day collecting their hours.
If I understand you correctly, then it’s far more than just a stereotype. I had been showing my company’s products at various trade shows for a few years before I first encountered a strictly union venue (it was in New York City).
I couldn’t carry my gear up from the car to the exhibit room, even though it was all light and portable, and I could have easily done so in three or four trips without a cart–or one trip with a standard hotel luggage cart. Instead I had to pay an hour’s time to a teamster who did the job in five minutes.
I couldn’t set up my own display booth, even though I had designed and built the darned thing. Instead, I was required to hire two union decorators and pay their minimum (an hour each), when I could have done it myself in half the time.
I couldn’t hook up my own equipment. I had to hire a union electrician, even though all I was doing was plugging in a power strip, a desktop computer, and a monitor.
All in all, it took me longer to set up using those four extra people than it would have taken me to just do it myself, and it ended up costing me a bunch of money for nothing.
Examples like that are why so many people in the U.S. think “wasted money” when someone mentions unions.
To be fair, in such situations, management also does not hesitate to enforce an agreement to the letter when it is in its interest, no matter how unreasonable it might seem. It has more to do with the history of union-management interactions (including, you know, murder and all that) than with the nature of unions. Employment contracts are hard won and I don’t blame them for insisting on everything they managed to get.
Good point, acsenray. You could broaden the brush even more, though, and say that darned near everyone wants to enforce any contract that’s in their favor.
My biggest complaint about unions is that they seem to be striving to inconvenience everybody except the people they are trying to influence. When UPS went on strike, I was running a home-based business, and those union workers hurt me badly. I had no influence over their damned contract. When baseball players went on strike, they pissed off their fans far more than they pissed off the owners (it’s all just business to the owners, but the fans took it personally).
In the example I gave above, management of the hotels and convention centers had no incentive whatsoever to argue with the unions. They weren’t the ones paying the bills. Exhibitors like me had to pay the bills.
When I was forced into a union back when I was teaching, I had expertise in a subject the school needed badly. I could have easily negotiated a higher salary than the union got me. The collective bargaining actually lowered my salary.
Before I get accused of union-bashing, I understand that unions have their place. There is bad management and there is good management, and there are times that unions are a necessity to keep people from being taken advantage of. Unfortunately, there are too many unions that take advantage of the members even more than the management does. I remember working for a company in the 70s where our top management made less than the union leaders did–and offered significantly more benefits to the employees than the union did, too!
i was once a union carpenter. my four years as an apprentice and a year as a journeyman were in teh mid seventies, a turbulent economic time. we were hired out of the union hall much like friend acsenray describes.
a few problems in that type of arrangement: dues continued regardless of your work status. laid off? too bad. the dues must continue to be paid. we were awful top heavy with officers and business agents who were paid journeyman’s wages plus expenses. i spent quite alot of time working non union jobs where ever i could just to make ends meet while i was laid off and waiting my turn to get sent to another union job.
at the end, there were more than 800 men ahead of me on that list. i was working a scab job and one of the business agents showed up to recruit us into the union. in the middle off his pitch, i asked him why he was looking for more members when he had so many members out of work. he told me that he could revoke my membership for working on a non-union job. i tore my card in half and handed it to him
when i got home, i added up all of my dues and school fees paid over the five years. it added up to quite a bit less than i had been paid from the union jobs i had worked.
i would never consider another job where i was required to join a union.
It’s fairly common for first ( and even second) tier supervisors to be eligible to join a union. But in my experience those supervisors eligible to join unions are not managers. I am a first level supervisor who is also a union member. The main difference between my job and the job of the manager who is my immediate supervisor is that I supervise about 20 people and make sure they are complying with various policies. He supervises 2 people (me and another supervisor) and sets the policies.