I do believe it, but I also believe (and feel certain you’ll agree) that it is not the norm for US companies to be structured that way or to function like that.
Labor frequently isn’t that big a piece of the problem to be effective. One plant manager I worked for remarked that everybody in the plant could work for free, and it wouldn’t make a 10% difference in the product price. Concessions are usually just putting lipstick on a pig.
Northwest Airlines mechanics often feel they were shafted by the union in this manner - at least the ones I’ve talked to - and I’ve talked to a former Northwest Airlines flight attendant who thinks the union was more interested in themselves then the workers. The flight attendants mostly work for Delta since the buyout - both my mechanic neighbors no longer work on planes.
Of course, there isn’t documentation about these things - you need to talk to the workers - who have an obviously skewed view. But big unions are their own layer of management, with their own interests and their own internal politics which might override the interests of the members.
Hey everyone, I figured I update y’all for anyone interested.
For starters, I think at the end of this thread I was left with no real desire to unionize - mostly the thought of having to work with totally incompetent people was something hard for me to stomach. Most of the folks I work with are great, but since I’ve been at this place there’s been some people who have come and gone that I would shudder at the thought of having to spend 8 hours a day next to for years on end.
But it turns out the total buyout of the company by a much larger and better capitalized company is a foregone conclusion. I found this and a bunch of other things out at a “secret” meeting we had with the union rep. In reality, a lot of people seem to have known a lot of things for at least a few months before I ever knew anything. The company buying our company has been talking to the union to try to figure out what the plan is; the company that owns us now knows we will probably unionize and is not opposed.
The list of demands the workers make is pretty specific and we all vote on them. I think in this instance, the union rep will probably guide us in the whole process - to some extent he is almost more of a referee. What he wants I think is for the new, better capitalized company to buy us out and for us to come up with reasonable demands. It’s kind of weird, but everyone is kind of on the same page, there is nothing really adversarial about the situation. The thing that did kind of turn me off about the union guy is his ability to willy nilly sling mud at both companies for no apparent reason. Well, I guess he probably always feels the need to pander to a certain disgruntled part of the workforce or something in order to gain worker consensus.
I actually wonder if the company buying us might see an advantage to a unionized workforce as long as the demands are reasonable.
They might if they’re looking to work with “bargaining units” rather than negotiating with every individual employee.
Personally I rather welcome the idea of being a nameless faceless cog in the machinery of this large corporation, I find something comforting in that.
If it’s an European company, or one with a large presence in Europe, they’re already used to working with “barganining units”, sometimes even as part of a “unit” themselves.
I’m glad the union guy is good.
This thread is exactly why I would never work for a big company.
I do not know squat about unions, only ones I have ever talked to either hate the union or love the union.
I wonder at what point in employee numbers that the unions get interested?
Biggest company that I ever worked for was the US ARMY. We did not get unions for some reason.
The only company’s that I worked for more than two weeks had 36 employees.
I never would work at a company that the owner was not also a worker, or had to have the company to survive in a material way.
Even if I got better than average pay, I could not, would not work under a union but I also would not work in a big company.
Best story I know of:
Chris Craft boats was pretty big and had gone union.
Mr. Garwood made similar boats but was much smaller. The union guys from Chris Craft came and told the workers all about the stuff they would gain by being unionized. Garwood told them not to do it. They were paid better and had better benefits than any other comparable boat builder or other workers doing similar work in other industries.
Well, they went and voted to drink the Koolaid anyway.
They went into tell Mr Garwood. He said nothing. Just got up from the desk and went around locking up the factory.
The union got them to go from the best paid & best treated workers in their field to unemployed in a matter of 2-3 days. ( Chris Craft was not hiring at that time. )
That is the story as I heard it.
What do unions say to get the best paid employees in an industry to unionize against their employer?
I have heard that unions in many cases have prevented companies from going out of business & the courts backed them up. How is this possible?
I’ve been management in a union shop (Teamsters). My company had a great relationship between management and union; in fact the only Teamster I fired …well let’s just say the Union Steward was the one that brought the issue up to me. We worked on a contract in support of a GM plant (UAW) and I worked regularly with both management reps and key hourly members inside the plant.
Potential downsides:
- Only part of your dues goes in to supporting things that directly affect the members in the shop. They support another layer of bureaucracy (union leadership) and frequently get contributed to political causes that as an individual member may or may not support.
- Inefficiencies can get in to the system because the contract is inflexibile. The GM plant I supported had a ping pong table outside a break room. It’s existence and location were specified in the long term contract. Want to move the ping pong table 50 feet to rework the process flow… call the lawyers.
- Unions can protect those who genuinely are bad employees that aren’t good for the rest of union members or management.
- Greater pay can be a myth depending on market power. My shop got a small raise when they first got the contract. New hires, though, came in at a lower rate with minimal seniority based raises that weren’t much more than cost of living adjustments. In the long run average wages tended to go down due to turnover. Employees paid for the privilege with dues.
What’s the usual rate for union dues in the US? (as a point of comparison, for most German unions it’s 1% of gross pay, and it’s an expense that you can deduce from taxable income).
I believe unions are good but the only thing I can see against it is that slackers get the same pay as hard workers.