People NOT Wanting to Join a Union.

In My Humble Opinion
21

This is the key for me. As much as it would suck to be fired for apparently no reason, the majority of companies will not do this to anyone, and in fact value good employees. But they do need to have the freedom to fire those who need to be fired for the good of the company. If unions hinder that freedom, then they’re a bad thing.

Australia is going through a weird adjustment period right now, because we recently had new regulations applied that have crippled the power of unions, and increased the power of the employer. There have been a bunch of ads on TV from the unions that have tried to paint these regulations as terrible and selfish and unfair, but from what I can tell they’re just whining. It’s quite sad.

22

In Tennessee, government employess are forbidden to join a union.

We have an “Employees’ Association”–they are forbidden to strike.
Our wages are 20-30% lower than the same jobs in the private sector.
They never achieved anything, and, after six years, I resigned.
And thus voted myself a pay raise, to the tune of my dues.

I wish there was a real union, but it is illegal here.

23

I initially left this in GD on the off chance the a debate might break out, but this is really a poll (with a lot of posters submitting knee jerk responses), so off to IMHO it goes.

24

I can’t agree, and of course we live in the same state. Governments should NEVER have any unions among their employees. Governments can and do use coercive poewr to extract welath from the population. A union therefore has effectively unlimited funds.

Witness the New York transit strikes (not the jsutt he recent ones; they go back well voer 50 years). It’s literally illegal and almost immoral, given that those workers make decent money for having essentially no job requirements or useful/unique skills whatsoever. You can train a replacement in a week for most represented jobs, grabbing almost anyone off the street. But, because the politicians were not playing with their own money, they didn’t care that much. John Lindsay tried to clean things up back in the 60’s, but he didn’t ahve the clout to do it, and his subordinates wound up giving away the farm behind his back. The more recent strike ended in disaster for the union, of course, and I think their constant whining had much to do with it.

And every government union will eventually hit this point, quite rapidly. With few limits on resources, politicians have ample reason to settle quickly and avoid trouble. Non-elected officials likewise may be inclined to get back to work quickly and avoid bad press (which may hurt their chances to advance).

Like it or not, as a govenrment worker you’ve made a choice to join public service. It’s called public service for a reason. Yes, you are compensated. But no, you probably won’t make as much as in the private sector. This has been constant in America since at least the Antebellum era.

Aside from which, government jobs have excellent job security, holidays, and bennies (I know, I’ve had one and it was sweet :smiley: ). Yes, you get lower pay and sometimes have to deal with politics. AND your superiors are most likely very, very concerned about properly following regulations as much as possible, especially concerning worker safety and so on. Thems the balance.

25

A lot of posters submitting knee jerk reactions? I don’t see that at all. I see quite a few opinions on why some people would/would not want to work in a union shop.

What’s your opinion on unions then tomndebb?

26

I once belonged to the CWA and was unmercifully harassed by management; reason being that I was in truth in the wrong job; I was unqualified and very poorly trained to do what I was supposed to do. Because management couldn’t fire me and wouldn’t provide adequate training, they attempted to drive me into quitting, which I eventually did but on my terms and not theirs. The shop steward sympathized with me, or said he did, but didn’t do a thing on my behalf. All in all, it was a miserable experience.

27 
In at least some places, you won't *have* the same benefits or clout without a union

I work for a government agency. Some jobs are unionized, some are non-union,civil service positions , and some positions are non- union and non- civil service.No one can legally strike, but certain benefits depend on how the job is classified. For example, the union workers get extra pay for on-call or standby duty, because they negotiated for that in their contracts. The non-union workers do not. Union jobs provide more sick leave than the non-union jobs. Those in civil service positions can only be demoted or fired for reasons having to do with job performance. Those in non-civil service positions serve "at the pleasure " of the appointing authority, and can be  ( and are) demoted or fired simply because a new administration comes in . 

There was an issue a few years ago where the agency required certain union employees to be on-call 24/7, but did not pay the the on-call pay required by the contract. A grievance was filed, the union won, and the agency had to pay the back pay. Suddenly, those people no longer needed to be on call 24-7. Non-union employees, however, are not entitled to on-call pay, and are therefore still on call

24-7. Even more recently, they tried to slip a change into the employee manual requiring that employees always be in a “fit state to return to duty”- apparently, they wanted to be able to take disciplinary action against anyone who said they were too intoxicated to return to work. The agency later admitted that they knew the contract did not allow this requirement to be imposed without bargaining with the unions, but the unions had to go to court to get it rescinded. If they won’t even abide by the contract they agreed to, I can’t imagine what they would do if there was no contract

 There certainly are some places where a union is not necessary, but I've never worked for one.
28

For my benefit, could you explain this? Surely someone’s sick or not, whether unionised or not…

29 
I've been a member of three different unions ( two working for public employers and one in a private business). In twenty years, I have never seen any of the unions save the job of someone who deserved to be fired *if the supervisors and managers did their jobs*. I have, however, encountered more than once people who never should have completed their probationary period- but you wouldn't know it from all of their satisfactory evaluations. I've seen management try to fire someone after three years of outrageous behavior- but since management completely ignored it until the last incident, the arbitrator could only consider that last incident, which in itself did not warrant termination.
30

I’m either sick or I’m not sick, regardless of whether or not I’m in a union. But in a union job, I would earn one day of paid sick leave every four weeks ( 13 per year). In a non-union job, I would earn four days every six months ( 8 per year). If I ever need to go out sick for an extended period of time , it could make a big difference in how long I continue to be paid.

31

I don’t like unions, but I just don’t like socialism or the “everybody is equal” BS socialism seems to suggest. If you work harder or contribute more to a company, you should have greater rewards.

I worked in a union in a printing press and they were the worse I could imagine. Never had meetings, they threatened us when we (they actually, I was happy with the pay) only got 4% raise for the year (they wanted 6), and they raised our insurance costs twice in one year. I finally left though, mostly to go to college, partially because I hated having to work 60+ hours a week just because I was low seniority.

32

Former federal employee here; I never joined the union for the same reasons DrDeth mentioned. From what I saw, the union there did nothing but send out newsletters taking credit for our annual cost-of-living increase (which was mandated by law) and represent people who claimed they were being discriminated against because they were expected to actually work for their wages. My indifference to the union turned to disgust when they managed to get our contract changed to eliminate graded ratings from our annual work reviews, so that managers could only rate our job performance as Satisfactory or Unsatisfactory. This meant that performance awards could no longer be given based on our reviews, so they also changed the award system to one which required you to be nominated for an award, which then had to be approved by a joint employee/manager panel where any panel member could deny the award. Did I mention that the panel was made up of volunteers, and their decisions were not subject to appeal? As a result of this change in systems I stopped getting my annual “Outstanding Review” award, while other, more popular, employees started getting them

On the other hand, a friend who had worked in the private sector was laid off based on a totally bogus charge of “theft” and after a few months the union got him reinstated with no loss of seniority or salary reduction. But then, the company he worked for was always trying to screw the employees, so his union actually served a useful purpose.

33

Unions are fine when they are totally voluntary. But when they are granted coercive powers by government, they get out of control. Everyone should have the right to organize together to bargain collectively, but the employer should retain the right to fire the lot of them. The power of collective bargaining then comes down to the power of a union to deprive an employer of a large part of the work force and, if they are fired en masse, for the company to absorb the cost of the downtime and retraining costs.

You need those checks and balances to maintain a proper power relationship within a free market. But when the employer is forced to hire only unionized employees by law, and prevented by law from negotiating with individuals, the checks and balances go askew and unions gain too much power.

I work in a non-unionized technical position. My wife worked in a unionized technical position, as part of a public service union. As far as I can tell, the workers in my company were much happier than the workers in hers. Her workers were always having to pick up the slack of the people who constantly called in sick, or who would show up for work and just sit on their asses all day. Some employees were abusive, and it would take months or years to get rid of them, and everyone had to suffer the abuse in the interim.

In my job, we get annual performance reviews. Those reviews are directly tied to benefits and raises. If you do an excellent job, you’re rewarded for it. This makes it a lot easier to tolerate the dead weight, as you know you’re probably making more money than them, and that if they keep it up they’ll be gone soon enough anyway.

Public unions are also partly responsible for the skyrocketing cost of government. Here in Alberta, the nurses union just negotiated a new contract that is unbelievably generous. As in, a senior nurse who is wiling to work night shift can make almost $100,000/yr now. Nurses right out of college with a 4-year degree can make $60-$70K. They get personal leave days, 4-6 weeks of vacation, education benefits, you name it.

This drives up the cost of health care for everyone. They now make more than the managers who manage them, so the government will have trouble recruiting managers from the nursing ranks. So managers salaries will have to go up. And on up the line. Health care gets more expensive at a time when we need to figure out how to make it less expensive. And nurses in that union now make far more money than anyone else with equivalent educations in other fields.

34

No.
Our higher-ups couldn’t give a damn about employee safety, another reason I’d like things to change. :mad:

35

Then call OSHA. That’s what they’re for.

36

[Moderator Underoos On]Note the question asked in the OP. This is not a debate about unions. This is a query as to why someone would not want to join a union. If your answer involves wanting to join a union, you might want to either start your own separate thread in IMHO, or start a debate in Great Debates.
Thank you.[/Moderator Underoos On]

37

I’ve worked (as an engineering but not in management) at manufactures that were both union and non-union shops. My impression from dealing with the floor workers was that the guys at the non-union shop were a hell of a lot happier and had fewer gripes. It probably didn’t hurt that the company was in competition with other fab shops to get and keep qualified welders and CAM techs, and so they tended to bend over backwards to accomodate good people while wasting no time in chucking out the bad, but overall there were few complaints and work got done on schedule. In the union shop (same industry, construction equipment) there were always complaints, and most seemed to pertain to the union; that So-and-So got promoted to lead welder because of seniority even though he came in stone drunk every day; that some worker wasn’t getting an assembly problem filtered up through the union management to Engineering, that they only bought a keg of beer at the union meeting with 300 attendees, et cetera. In the union shop, because of seniority rules, we had two welders in the prototype shop who were legally blind (one out-and-out refused to wear the correct shield) and couldn’t hold a bead to save their lives, so you had to carefully schedule work with the prototype shop manager so that no critical structural work was done by them. And the union reps were always coming out with outrageous demands for both shop procedures and benefits. The shop had almost exactly the same benefits plan as the office people (slight differences to fit to the union contract, but effectively the same benefits) but even as the company was cutting our benefits and requiring that we pay higher premiums, the union was campaigning for better benefits. Needless to say, that company and that chapter of the union no longer exists; the company that purchased that one shut it down and moved operations to their own facilities, deeming it ultimately less expensive to extend their site than to deal with the union.

Maybe this is an unfair comparison of a good non-union shop against a really craptastical union, and I know that unions have been integral to improving working conditions in the past, but the default position that unions are good and make things better just isn’t a given. The management of many unions–especially large national unions and those affilliated with–are just as self-serving as any corporation and are in the business of legalized, government-protected extortion, often at the expense of the very workers they represent, and beyond merely fiscially irresponsible with pension funds and well into gross corruption. In any other context, this is called extortion and is illegal, but when a union does it, it has considerable protection. And unions are highly favored when it comes into entering a non-union plant and campaigning; at the non-union shop where I worked, AFL-CIO came in with an affilliate making claims and offering benefits for which they had no justification, and the management had to just sit still and take it without addressing even the most absurd claims. That the union initiative got shut down hard–even after a second, goverment-mandated vote–says to me that the only people attempting any exploitation was the union itself, and that aside from a few disgruntled workers nobody needed or saw any use for a union at that company.

As for the decline of unions, I think they largely have themselves to answer to. People often point to the 1981 PATCO strike and Reagan’s subsequent actions as “breaking the back of unions”, but while I’m no defender of Reagan’s policies, in this case I don’t think he was in the wrong. What PATCO did was clearly and blatantly in violation of law (and their demands were far in excess of even the most liberal job benefits today) and also created a potential hazard for the flying public. If that was “breaking the back of the unions” then it was well overdue. Similarly, unions like the Teamsters and their affiliates have used their collective power to muscle businesses not just into giving better benefits to workers but actually handing over money or assets to the union management itself, which then laundered it and stashed it away for personal use.

I’m not against unions making reasonable demands and providing job security for hard-working, qualified employees, but many unions seem at best apathetic or worse toward members, while largely functioning as a self-protecting entity mostly focused on increasing its own wealth…not unlike the exploitative companies that the workers once formed unions to fight. Personally, I wouldn’t want to pay fees for that kind of “service”.

Stranger

38

I hate unions just as much as anyone possibly can for both idealistic and practical reasons. I heard the AFL-CIO say a couple of years ago that they wanted to expand into the professional sectors like IT. I can’t imagine that in a million years for an infinite number of reasons. Anyone that would desire that is probably a bad fit for the industry anyway regardless of the fact that it the vast majority of people working in those sectors don’t want unions anyway.

This isn’t about that however. When I got my first professional job as a corporate manager at a large New England supermarket chain, part of my orientation was to go to one of our distribution centers for a tour. The distribution center was a Teamsters operation and within minutes, I found out something alarming. Virtually everything was based on seniority. One of the first things they showed me was the vacation matrix. People with over 20 years service got 6 weeks of vacation which is very generous in the U.S. That part wasn’t so bad. What was bad was that the most senior members of the union got to pick all six of their vacation weeks first and it moved on down the line to the people that had 4 weeks and then down to those that had two weeks. The newest members that had two weeks of vacation got the dregs of what was left.

We then moved on to the actual jobs. Everything there was seniority based as well. The highest ranked people got to pick their job every day when they came in and that was never rotated or varied, The choice jobs were operating an automated picking system that was basically a robot followed by forklift driving. People with less than ten years of service were usually left picking boxes by hand or loading 18 wheelers.

It was clear within minutes that this wasn’t about worker rights or fairness. No corporation would allow people to run over all the others based strictly on longevity and screw everyone else to hell in regards to basically everything. It was perfectly clear that the union only rewarded those that had been in the union the longest and thus those that had paid the most into the union. The whole thing is disgusting and costs the less senior members of the union dearly in terms of their job situation and it stays that way for years.

I find it hard to have any kind of professional respect for anyone that belongs to a union except under unusual circumstances and I would absolutely never belong to one myself and wouldn’t want family members involved in such activity either.

39

Well, to answer the OP’s question: When the shop steward refuses to show up at a new employee orientation meeting, without even the common courtesy to say he wouldn’t be coming, especially when it’s a closed shop workplace, I’m going to think that the union is a worthless suck of money, esp. for part timers.

40

Exactly right. Seen this myself. I had even suggested a certain employee not be allowed to continue past his training period (during your 1st year, they can pretty well just say “We don’t think you’re working out. Thanks, bye.”) but my Manager didn’t want to do even the super minimum paperwark involved in letting him go.

Two years later and he’s still deadweight. Now his new Mgr tries to get him fired over something trivial, the deadweight files a grievance and he wins. He wins because his Mgr is also incompent and fucks up the whole process. Everyone knows that employee is deadweight, but all Mgt would have to do is
1.document his lateness-talk to him, (or talk to the entire group)
2.document next incident- write it up,
3.document next incident- punish him,
4.document next incident- fire him.

But Mgt is too lazy to follow those steps. (he is always 5-15 minutes late. That small amount of lateness requires those several steps, but it is 100% sure and solid way of firing someone). Around step 3, you pretty well have to make sure other workers aren’t coming in as late as often, too.

Yes, those 4 steps are a bit of work. But would you rather; “Bob, you’re five minutes late today, you’re fired” out of the blue, while the Mgrs buddies come and go as they please?