I mean people are seflish and lazy, especially with little ticky tack stuff like that. It’s not that hard to figure out.
I told my VP I was going to retire 5 months ahead - and everyone ignored it. When it came time everyone panicked. I made out rather well, but I wonder why HR isn’t telling anyone about the filing.
Now this horrible retiring person has probably been fired on a Friday, or saw lots of other people being fired on a Friday, and might not have the proper respect for an employer who does not respect them.
When I was working the standard review process, based on GE, was to grade the top 10 or maybe 20% high, the next 70-80% average, and a required 5 - 10% unsatisfactory and pushed out the door. The many people in the 80% bracket who work hard for the company and get screwed at raise time are going to act accordingly. Unless the job is life-critical, why should co-workers go crazy to pick up the slack, for instance to meet a deadline? Only if they have been indoctrinated and ignore how they are getting screwed.
People who work in manufacturing know to not plan to run a line at very high utilization, since machines break and you had better have spare capacity to keep running. Lots of regular companies seem not to get this. Run lean, expect unpaid overtime, and if things break blame the workers. What if the guy who retired got run over by a bus? Had a heart attack? If a manager’s plan for this is to expect the co-workers to work a bit harder, that manager is an incompetent idiot.
When I was a manager I had secession plans for all jobs in my group. Any manager who doesn’t know what to do in case of emergency is a fool.
I hardly think fraud is a profitable way to go. Even if you score some extra cash. what about the stain on your honor? How will you ever restore your innocence?
Now that’s funny.
In Silicon Valley it used to be a common practice to rush someone saying they were leaving in 2 weeks out the door, in order to keep them from stealing confidential information for their new job. Yeah I know. If they were going to do that, they could have done it before.
Now it is common practice not to tell anyone where you are going.
I’ve never run into an instance of someone not saying they were retiring until the last minute - except for a case where the “retired” person was actually being fired and he was old enough so that him retiring saved face. And then, of course, management knew.
It’s a government agency , so the pension system is separate from any individual agency. And by the time the notification gets from the pension system to agency HR to the person’s actual manager it can take over a week. They haven’t seen people suddenly get fired on a Friday because people rarely get fired and if they are, it’s preceded by a a few weeks of paid suspension ( remember , government and union).
Not every job lends itself to having a succession plan for each employee - for the most common job in my part of the agency ,caseloads will be divided when someone retires, quits or goes out sick. But how they get split up will depend on who leaves, for how long and when because Bob won’t have exactly the same clients in June that he did in January and neither will the people who take over his cases so while you can have a general idea of what to do (reassign cases) far in advance , the specifics ( these cases go to Joe and these to Anita) can only be determined a couple of weeks in advance.
I don’t see any humor in fraud. It harms us all.
Workers in white collar work have lots of protection: The cost of hiring and training them. The onboading process can cost as mich as an annual salary, especially if a headhunting firm is used. Replacing white collar workers is very expensive.
The other protection a worker has comes from being an asset. Companies go through a lots of ZMP (zero marginal productivity) workers, and when they find one who stands above the crowd, they definitely want to keep them. That gives you bargaining power.
Unions are fine when they aren’t forced on employers. Unions do a lot of good for workers who cannot be differentiated on the job, The classic example is an assembly line worker on a gated assembly line where every worker has exactly the same level of productivity. Every X minutes an assembly comes to your station, you put on some bolts, then it goes to the next station. That sort of thing.
Under those conditiins, people are easily replaced. Without union protection, it’s easy for the employer to just fire older workers, or injured workers, or people unlucky enough to get sick a couple of times in a short period and get labelled a risk. Unions can work to protect people in such jobs.
But unionizing white collar work is deadly to productivity, because unionizations pushes conformity, and in the real world there can be a 10-1 difference between the most productive and least productive people in the job. The least productive love the protection of a union, but the ‘A’ employees can’t stand out and benefit from their superior work or work ethic, and will leave the company. Or, they will work to union rule and the employer will lose what was special about them.
Also, a bad employee is very destructive to teamwork. A team with a worker who doesn’t meet commitments or who turns in sub-standard work can cost the team more than that person’s salary. To the extent that unions prevent the weaker workers from being fired, they damage the entire team, and the company.
Then there is the opposition to automation. Union opposition to automation caused huge problems for the ‘big three’ automakers and put them behind foreign carmakers for uears. The Longshoremen working the ports on the west coast are talking about striking to prevent the ports from being automated. Automated ports can handle a lot more traffic for a lot less money. Processing a shipping container in LA costs three times as much as it does at a more automated port.
I don’t see white collar unionization happening anytime soon or being worth it for a variety of reasons, but I think if it ever happened it would wind up being somewhere in between traditional unions and unions for people who have ridiculous career arcs and massive potential for the top performers like SAG or sports unions. Upward mobility is not the biggest issue - IMO a much bigger issue is that white collar workers often don’t have clear job responsibilities and the best ones are constantly doing things that have nothing to do with what’s officially in the job description and figuring out what is and isn’t fair would be a nightmare.
Also, what do you mean by “forced on employers”? Do you mean governmental protections for unions, or do you just mean people going on strike in the abscense of a non-confrontational path to collective bargaining?
What unions aren’t forced on employers?
Getting at what I think you’re getting at, unions work best when they have market power. I’m in the Port Operations industry, we, and our competitors, all have to deal with the same unions. It’s a level playing field. This means we can compete freely for business, negotiate with the union for working rules, and none of us are inherently more competitive.
If unions only existed for a few of our businesses, the landscape would be very different. Not a level playing field with union-driven work rules, it would be a level playing field with non-union work rules. The union shops wouldn’t be able to afford the better working conditions, pay structure and security that the industry has now. We can afford to provide our workers with this today, because it is a cost that we all have to pay.
It has resulted in our workforce seeing a longshore job as a good job, one they can’t replicate by gig work, unemployment, or dozens of open positions up and down every city block. This simply doesn’t happen without our competitors also making their jobs equally valued, and that doesn’t happen with spotty union coverage.
It’s been this way for 40 years at least in IT. And back in the palmy days, people would often leave for a 10-15% increase.
I mean that unions should have the right to strike, but employers should have the right to replace them if they do. The union’s power comes from the ability to force a shutdown, and if the workforce walks away, to impose a huge restaffing problem for the employer.
Here in Alberta, private unions have to work to attract employees, and also to make themselves useful to employers to gain more bargaining power. My brother was union, and he worked alongside non-union people. Most were in the union, though. The union’s bargain with employers is that the union makes sure the workers are properly trained and certified, drug tested if necessary, etc. If the employer needs workers in a hurry for an emergency or something, the union handles it. The union provides benefits to the employer and the employees. In return the employees get collective bargaining, better benefits and salary, and a certain amount of job security, because if one job shuts down the union finds work for the workers elsewhere.
In other places, people are forced to join union shops, somthe union has no incentive to really look after them. The employers are forced to deal with them, so there is no incentive to make sure the employer is satisfied. So you get adversarial relationships, destroyed companies, unhappy workers who feel their dues do nothing for them, and rent-seeking behaviour.
Longshoremen striking to prevent ports from being automated is a good example. Automated ports are faster, cheaper, and lower the price of imprted goods for everyone. If the Longshoremen manage to halt or delay automation of the ports, it will essentially be a wealth transfer to them from the rest of the country. It will make America less competitive, but line the pockets of a small group of workers who have serious leverage. And the port facilities will have no choice but to deal with them,
Another example is in Build Back Better. Under union pressure the subsidy for electric cars goes from $8500 to $12500 if you buy one from a union automaker. This is a wealth transfer from taxpayers to the big three auto makers and their unions. It hurts global warming action by excluding some of the most popular electric cars (Tesla, for example), and pushing demand onto a subset of automakers that are already struggling to meet the current small demand for electric vehicles.
It is counterproductive to everything the bill is supposed to stand for, save that it directs a boatload of money to special interests. That’s what excessive union power does. Look at the wreckage of Detroit and you can see a history of excessive union demands reducing the competitiveness of the American auto industry.
Yeah, sometimes unions legitimately make mistakes and hurt their members.
When they do things that help their members at the expense of society at large, I mean they’re still doing what they were designed to do. Political influence from special interests sucks but if unions exist they may as well play the game.
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“Excessive union power” is a fiction; it does not and never has existed in the US.
100% agree.
If “forcing people to work” means limiting government benefits or adding qualifying hurdles then fine(assuming there is meaningful work) that encourages people to work out of financial necessity. That’s totally normal, IMHO but if someone is financially able to “not work” then how can they be “forced to work”? Rounded up by the gestapo at gunpoint and herded to the salt mines?
It’s a bit weird because unions do actually have been able to have massive political pull in areas that don’t directly involve competing with their employers who of course have much more political pull.
I honestly think Sam is basically right about the union influence in the BBB. Having so much of the incentives for EV go to union shops, largely domestic union shops, (in the unlikely event that any of this happens) would amount to protectionism and limit how much we can green the auto industry.
Still of course doesn’t mean that in some situations, unions can’t be good at what they do, which is help workers get paid what they’re worth and have fewer reasons to worry about some of the arbitrary BS that we’ve discussed here. And “excessive power” is overblowing it by a lot.
Again, I have nothing against unions. But when government forces people to be in them and forces employers to deal with them, there are no checks and balances ensuring that the union’s demands stay within the realm of the reasonable.
The only real check on union excess in the private sector is that they might kill the host by demanding so much that their employer goes bankrupt or is heavily hamstrung in the marketplace. So even unions protected by law have to have some consideration for the financial viability of the businesses that employ them.
This is why I save my harshest criticism for public sector unions. They have no checks and balances on them at all, and always seem to negotiate sweetheart deals for themselves at the expense of taxpayers.
In Alberta, nurses and teachers are in public sector unions. And they make substantially more money, with ridiculously generous benefits and great job security.
For example, elementary school trachers in Alberta make on average $78,000. Teachers overall in all school types average $84,000. They work 1080 hours instead of the 1660 hours average workers work. They can retire on a 70% salary when they hit a combined 85 years of work plus age, meaning that a teacher who starts at 25 can retire at 55 on a full pension. If you get a Masters and are a senior teacher, you can make well over $100,000. If you want to have the same holidays as other workers and therefore work summer school you can bump your salary another $25,000 or so.
Nurses get essentially the same deal. Nurses can also game the system and turn down their regular shift then sign up for holiday shifts or night shift, and bump their salaries significantly. It’s all part of the negotiated union package. Not only does this make management and staffing much more difficult but some nurses make out like bandits.
This would never happen in a private union that doesn’t have the force of government behind it and an endless pool of taxpayer money to draw from.
… followed by 340 words, two examples and a citation describing “why unions are bad”.
Generally speaking, there are typically more problems with sexual harassment in environments were men greatly outnumber women. And your assessment is correct, a hostile environment for women means that good employees are less likely to stick around and it’s more difficult to find decent candidates. If you want to increase your pool of candidates, make sure women aren’t treated like garbage, make sure they have equal pay and opportunities, and make an effort to recruit them.
What other check and balance should there be on a private sector union? You seem to think that union labor should compete against non-union labor, when the entire concept of collective bargaining is dependent on the labor bargaining together, collectively, with the company.
Competing with non-union labor will come down to the total cost of labor for the company, and the core purpose of unions is to shift a portion of earnings away from the company and to the labor. A union that can’t do that is beyond worthless.