The “work-to-contract” rule works both ways. Employers can use it as an excuse to fire people for union activity, but employees can use it to prove to employers that they have value above and beyond their actual stated responsibilities.
Robin
Quite so. My wife is a Union Rep in her school building, she teaches Elem. Music. In the past 13 years, there have been a few sticky contract negotiation periods. More than once, the Executive Board has instructed the teachers to Work To Rule.
That means, no extra chorus. No recorder groups. No special events from teachers. No coming in a few minutes early or staying late at all. When you Work To Rule, you make darned sure that you don’t violate a single word of the contract- and you also make sure you do not exceed a single demand of the contract in terms of time on site ( in building in this case ), duties performed and so on.
From Kindergarten to Grade 12, the schools all come slowly grinding down. They don’t come to a halt, of course. What happens? No Jr High and HS sports, since no teachers are contractually required to coach sporting events. No musicals. No clubs. No Yearbook. No school paper. No social services performed by students with teachers acting as Advisors. In other words, you Work To Rule.
School Boards are made up of parents. Parents pressure other parents. Eventually, things get worked out. Not always to the teachers’ complete satisfaction, but the information in June that all teachers are Working To Rule come September tends to make those last few negotiating sessions of the school year highly productive !!
The reality of many non-combative workplaces is that everyone greases the skids a little bit to make everyone’s life better. My wife works during some of her Union-guaranteed Prep Periods. That’s fine by her, because every Friday she leaves an hour early to take care of a family committment that’d have been impossible otherwise. Her Principal is cool with that, because the schedule permits it and because she knows my wife more than puts in her full work week every week. Working To Rule would mean that would end immediately. So, that sword slices both ways and all teachers know it. They use that as almost a last ditch effort before striking, because of the severe impact it has on all. Especially the children, and that is not lost on anyone who contemplates this tactic.
Cartooniverse, member of 2 unions ( used to be 3… )
I’m not consuming any dairy products in your town.
Here are a few random points in response to several posts above. (I’m familiar with Canadian unions and management. YMMV.)
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Unions are not only about money, but about getting some respect and recognition as valuable human beings, rather than nearly-worthless and easily-replaced cogs in the machine. (Some might be in jobs that are easy to fill, but they’re still worthwhile people.)
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Most union contracts don’t say that the employer can’t fire a worker, but that firing must be for cause, and follow a certain procedure. See “due process of law” and similar concepts.
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You want to throw out morals because this is business? You can pay me cash in advance for anything you want to buy from me, and expect to get kneecapped if you sell me something I don’t think is as good as you said. Or maybe I’ll just take your stuff by force and kneecap you for fun. (Note that the preceding is purely a rhetorical flourish to make a point.)
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Compulsory arbitration for “essential services” works well in most cases. There are difficulties defining what services are essential, and the arbitrator may not be all that impartial, but c.a. is the best we’ve got for settling those disputes.
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As Cartooniverse says, a non-combative workplace is ideal. The employer gets people who are happy to work for him, and employees get a rewarding place to work. Some of the situations mentioned above don’t come anywhere close to that.
Here’s one more that I intended to put in above.
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“Employers can fire; employees can quit. That’s equal, right?” Wrong. An employer may have millions of dollars coming in, and a resignation costs him a fraction of a percent. An employee has a few thousands coming in, and a firing cost him everything.
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“Union contracts are just creeping socialism/communism!” No, they’re only slightly different than contracting for services with any outside entity. The difference is that in many cases the employer with a union can hire whoever he wants to do the work, while an outside contractor can hire who he wants.
“No skills”? I wasn’t aware that factory/blue-collar work was automatically classed as “unskilled”. I thought that at least some of it is considered “semi-skilled” or “skilled labor”.
Personally, I don’t see why it would be intrinsically immoral or unreasonable for factory workers to make $20–$30 an hour versus $5 an hour. AFAICT, high union wages as a result of collective bargaining are simply a form of charging “what the market will bear”.
Many people who object to unions don’t seem to have a problem with upper management getting hugely inflated executive compensation which is also justified in terms of “market forces”, so I don’t see where the outrage comes from. As a matter of personal preference, I’d rather have factory employees making middle-class wages than making poverty-level wages while their CEO’s become billionaires, but YMMV.
In any case, I’m glad to see the core issue laid out so clearly and honestly here: the reason that blue-collar union employees should not expect to continue making middle-class wages is because they’re competing with foreign workers making poverty-level wages.
In other words, American workers are engaged in an economic “race to the bottom”, just as many globalization opponents foretold. Our current business, economic, and trade policies are destined to make much of the American working class significantly poorer. Well, glad we got that point cleared up.
Nobody can survive long under a microscope, no need to fire for union activity. Like I said above, raise the bar a bit on performance standards and I bet many of the unions biggest supporters will most likely be right below it.
Y 'know, that sounds like just as much an a-priori assumption as the opposite one that automatically presumes a “moral” high ground for the “Little Guy” and presumes the business owner is a plutocratic exploiter of the oppressed masses.
Sometimes it’s like that, sometimes it isn’t.
If someone is being paid 20 dollars an hour to sit in a chair and watch a machine work or to perform a repetitive task on an assembly line, they are making too much money. They drive up labor costs and endanger the long term health of the company. I think it would be better to have a job at ten dollars an hour than to be laid off at twenty.
High labor costs are part of the reason that outsourcing is making economic sense for companies. Take the auto industry, for example. American auto makers appease the unions with high wages and generous pension and health care benefits. To pay for them, they have to raise the prices on the cars. Naturally, the “fairly compensated” union members will produce high quality work in exchange for the pay so the increased cost for the cars will be worth the money…right?
Wrong. Usually, seven or eight out of ten of the annual list of most reliable cars are foreign made. Despite the costs of shipping and importing, foreign cars are cheaper and better made. As a result, sales stagnate for American automakers and they start to lose money. Healthcare costs increase and they lose money. More and more workers start drawing those pensions and they lose money. As a result, plants close and jobs are lost.
Um, sez you. I really don’t see the rationale for assigning an absolute dollar value to any particular task or skillset. I might just as well say that if somebody is being paid 20 million dollars a year to run a company, they are making too much money.
The real issue in each case, IMO, is how the costs of the labor/compensation/profits/whatever are affecting the company’s health and performance. I’m with you on the general principle that too-high labor costs (like any other too-high cost) have a negative impact, but I don’t think it makes sense to arbitrarily decide that any particular wage is “too high” under all circumstances.
In practical terms, I think it’s the other way around: i.e., the relatively recent availability of large-scale outsourcing to much cheaper foreign labor markets is leading companies to consider that domestic labor costs are unnecessarily high. Hence the decline of the good-wage blue-collar job.
Remember, though, it was employers like the auto companies that originally supported the employer-based pension and health care schemes, because they were a form of untaxed compensation, and hence cheaper for the employers than paying higher base wages or paying taxes for socialized health/pension plans. Now that the costs have gone up, employers are howling about the burden of these “cushy” benefit packages, but originally they weren’t seen as all that burdensome, nor were they considered an unreasonable extortion by the unions.
But most if not all of those “most reliable” foreign cars aren’t being made by poverty-wage workers in the Philippines or China or Mexico. So that example is not an argument for expecting American workers to compete at the poverty-wage level with those ultra-cheap labor markets.
The free market usually performs that function. I have always maintained that the only way to make an above average income is to do either one of the following:
Do what others are not willing to do…like work as a roofer or other unpleasant jobs that hold down the supply of workers. A supply limited by the difficulty of the work.
Do what others are incapable of doing. One of the reasons that doctors are paid so much is the fact that they can hack ten years of higher education to qualify for their jobs. A supply limited by the difficulty of qualifying.
Jobs that require less pay less. Trying to change that with artificial manipulation of the law of supply and demand usually has unintended consequences.
And many do. Executive compensation is a favorite target of those who lean left. And they have a point to some degree. But keep in mind that these people decided to go to college and enter the business world and worked hard to climb the ladder. How much is too much for them is a tough question to answer. Executive salaries also tend to follow the law of supply and demand. And I’m not saying that blue-collar folks don’t work hard…but the element of risk for them isn’t there like it is with a white collar vocations. If they are in a union, all they have to do is follow the contract and let the seniority pile up.
This is a chicken/egg argument to some degree. Did the cheap labor lead to outsourcing or did high labor costs cause the seeking of cheaper labor in the first place? There is a middle ground where the company may be willing to pay higher wages to keep the jobs at home. Americans require less training and education than many foreign workers and there are no cross-cultural issues. However, if a union drives labor costs too high, at some point it becomes for cost-effective to outsouce.
This is a good point that I had not considered. However, with the explosion in health care costs, contracts have to be revisited to keep the companies from drowning. Many unions are not willing to budge, creating an impasse.
In my hometown, three firefighters were sacrificed by the union rather than having all of them take on modest increases in health care costs. By the way, at the time the firefighters were paying absolutely nothing for family coverage. That is just not plausible in todays world.
You are correct. They are manufactured in countries whose culture does not support the concept of a labor union or in the United States in states where unions are not as strong. Both factors hold down the end price of the car.
I’m not saying by my arguments in the thread that people do not deserve to be paid a decent wage for their work. What I am saying is that they have to face the fact that the actions of their unions can have a long term negative effect on their jobs when they get too greedy.
No they are made by robots and other automated tools that do the same job more consistently and accurately than a human being could ever dream no matter how much you pay them.
As someone who has some experience in the biz, this is horrific. In my town, thats another engine crew available, something that easily means serious differences in the ability to service that community. People can and will die over the long that didn’t have to because of this kind of a decision by the union. I am equally appalled that the firefighters who are members of that union felt this was any kind of appropriate decision, they know better.