umm, may I make an observation?
Virtually every post in this thread has been from either a manager, a government employee with no worries about his job, or a skilled technician. And they are all opposed to unions, not surprisingly.
It might be more interesting to ask a few hispanic workers from a minimum-wage meat packing plant how they would feel about having a union.
Many poor people are very stupid. This si a problem for those who want to help them, and a solution for those who want to exploit them.
BTW, unions are great. We need a lot more of them, especially in the white collar sector. Most office workers should be in a union of some sort.
Yes it would…in another thread.
Please see post #36.
FWIW, not a computer technician. First union job I’d had was in a grocery store, second with ConEd. Unions can be good, or bad. But it wasn’t til I got to ConEd that I saw how a union should treat its members. Which is pretty effing ironic, considering it was the grocery store that was working minimum wage part-timers just under the “we have to pay for benefits” amount, continually, and resisting any call to reduce the number of part timers and hire full time workers, instead. i.e. at ConEd where nothing I saw came near to exploitative the union was involved and active. At the job where it seemed that a large fraction of the workers had legitimate concerns, the union had told the part-timers, “suck eggs.”
Sorry 'bout that , chief.
[Chief]Max!![/Chief]
Sorry about that. Good point.
I don’t know much about unions, other than the fact that my parents were both in a union throughout their careers, and now that they’re retired, they’re enjoying a nice pension and other benefits that would’ve been hard to get without the union. So they’re biased.
I know that the threat of a union is a big incentive to keep non-union companies from abusing their employees. At my last job, the truck drivers had attempted to unionize a few years prior, but management was able to negotiate better salaries and working conditions with them in return for keeping the union out. So the employees got some of the benefits of a union, without needing to pay the dues. I imagine this happens a lot.
Although I fit into “a government employee with no worries about his job” I am *not *opposed to Unions, I am pro-unions. In general.
Just to clarify, back to “why do people not want to join a union”. 
I got a call on my shoe-phone.
Quite simply, I don’t trust unions and I don’t see the need for them. Of course, I also don’t trust pension funds, the Social Security system, and several other things that would directly affect me but that I have no control over.
I knew a guy in high school who worked part-time at a local grocery store. They were going to force him (as he told it, anyway) to join the union and pay a large amount of his salary (part-time high school student under 18, remember) in dues. He walked out instead and everyone who was there when I heard this story agreed with him walking out.
I belong to the most powerful union in California, and I don’t like it all that much. I hate the national union so much that I refuse to pay dues to it, prefering the money go to the American Cancer Society instead. But I support my local whole-heartedly.
Unions are like any other organization: once they get past a certain size, they are all mouth and no brains. Any time a union has as chief officials people who aren’t doing the job of union workers every day of the week, then you are looking for trouble.
State Governments are exempt from OSHA standards.
Most States obey em anyways, but Tennessee has yet to be dragged, kicking & squealing, into the post-WW1 era.
I am a clerical worker. A pretty high up clerical worker (Executive Assistant to the owner of the company), but most folks would consider me a clerk/secretary nonetheless.
I would not want to join a union because-
I would never want to be told, for whatever reason, that because of a job action I couldn’t work.
I would not want to see my union dues being spent on political action committees I might not agree with.
I believe in a merit system, and my history tells me that I would be held back by a system where “everyone is on the same level.”
I would be pissed off if I thought that my union was carrying members who couldn’t shift their own weight in the workplace.
Some people I know, and people I’ve read about, have suffered terrible abuse from their unions. I had one friend several years ago who was a very nervous guy. During a strike his manager called him personally and asked him to come to work. He agreed and the union made his life hell. Mailings to members telling them not to talk to him. A year later he was still suffering from the abuse. Lost track of him after that.
The other reason I’d stay away from unions is that they don’t really add anything to our wealth. They don’t create more products and services. At best they help to re-distribute wealth. At worst they cause a lot of problems and promote hatred and class warfare where there should be cooperation.
The structural problem with unions is that if unions are run by the workers, they’re going to be run by people who by definition aren’t good managers. If they were good managers they wouldn’t be union reps, they’d managers and making 10 times the salary. The unions are always run by guys who are out of their league. And if the unions aren’t run by the workers, but rather by professionals, that’s even worse.
The other problem is that in technology companies the divide between “managment” and “labor” just doesn’t exist. For any white collar type of job the division is entirely arbitrary, and it will continue to make less and less sense as the blue-collar sector of the economy gets smaller and smaller.
Well, if it is not too late for me to respond, I still believe in my original points, that unions are necessary to secure the rights of workers. I have to admit though, some people have brought up some very interesting points on this discussion. And I have found this discussion to be very thought provoking. Thank you everyone for sharing your stories and views on the matter.
I had the opportunity to take a union job once, and didn’t - I’d been a contractor.
Why not - job didn’t pay as well as I could get elsewhere. Sure, if I played the seniority system and spent 20 years there, I’d get a pension and make almost as much as I could without the union, but I don’t want to be tied to a job for 20 years to get the benefits I could get today on merit. And they promised job security.
As it turned out, the position I didn’t take did get eliminated - and with no seniority I would have been screwed.
I work in a service industry. But, I’m pretty happy with my managers. Most of the problems in my job come from my co-workers. If they had a union rep protecting them, they would be even more obnoxious.