I’m very surprised at your reaction to the union representative.
The union draws payments from its members for their own mutual benefit, not the public.
You should also consider that workers in roles that face the puBlic get plenty of abuse even when they are working perfecty acceptably.Frontline workers often get the blame when corporate decisions are taken - its the workers who are in the front line, and its the workers who get the worst of the most distorted images that the media can generate.
The public are not some forgiving generous minded group as a whole, its full of decent folk, and more than a few absolute idiots, who swear, abuse and vomit all over most pubic transit systems. Quite often hold ups on public transit systems are due to poor public behaviour from assaulting staff through to disobeying safety instructions such as to not walk across rail track, etc.
Hardly surprising that the union representative has a somewhat jaundiced view.
Why would any union official place the public first and members second? Of course the individual union representative may have all sorts of personal views on the behaviour of the sleeping workers but nevertheless their role is to defend their members.
It is very easy to catch a few unguarded words from anybody, and then take those words and set them completely out of context, or even to paraphrase them to say something not intended. The press needs to sell space, advertising etc and the best way to arouse public interest is to artificially generate controversey, blow things out of proportion.
I notice in your link, no mention at all of the shift patterns of the workers, not any mention of the fact that the way the job is designed might be incredibly tedious and boring, nor any blame being apportioned on to the fist level supervisors, and do senior managers actually make spot checks and inspections? The article quite clearly places all blame on the individual workers, but you know what? there is an old saying in industrial relations - there are no bad workers, only bad managers .
Good managers would not allow this to happen, they would, like, y’know, manage.The trouble is that this probably means that the managers themselves are asleep in their own offices, my experience of this sort of thing is that managers are usually hardly ever leading from the front - the place is likely run on lowest staffing levels possible with virtually no supervision or even just a colleague to talk to.
You don’t see business leaders getting all sentimental, nor do they have any shame in taking large bonuses in corporations that are failing, that is what they do, similarly, you cannot expect a union representative to put members interests behind those of the public, though they will often take an approach that places the public interest alongside that of the members for instance in the event of safety cutbacks.
