Shagnasty:
The blue-collar workers in my factory are going to be surprised by your revelations. They got Labor Day off like they do every year and they are not unionized. It is as blue-collar, shift work as it gets and we wouldn’t think of making them work on official holidays.
They get tons of other benefits as well including a very generous retirement plan, cheap health insurance, paid college tuition and floating holidays that they can use as they see fit among many other things including very expensive appreciation gifts for doing a good job.
You don’t have to have a union to be treated well even in the bluest collar of settings. I am not one of the blue-collar workers but I have been forced to take time off even when it caused a major project delay just because my managers know that family comes before work both for themselves and everyone under them. The same idea applies to everyone. The people that work on holidays or other off-schedule times are all volunteers and well-compensated for it.
Shagnasty , do you think that your work situation in this respect is common for most Americans? Do you think that most employers treat their employees the way that your employers do?
sleestak:
Which unions? The ones that originated to give workers more power so that wages matched the work being done? The mob controlled unions that put the strong arm on legitimate business men and women? The local union which forces business to hire injured workers for insane wages to do trivial jobs?*
Like everything else in life, unions can be either good or bad.
I built a casino I.T. system. The server room was on the second floor. There was a freight elevator to get large items to the second floor. The elevator had four buttons, 1, 2, open and close. The first day on the job we went to use the elevator and attempted to press a button. A union guy was sitting in a chair with a book. He got all pissed because it was his job to push the buttons. I talked to him about the job, he was an electrician and had one of those nonspecific back problems that the docs could never figure out. So he became an elevator operator. He made about 90,000 a year to push the buttons. Since the elevator was rarely used after the first week or so, he sat and read. It was a giant waste of money but the union had it’s rules.
The same union guys did the low voltage cabling. They used 4 or 5 different naming conventions on the panels. It was a giant mess. We tried to get different electricians in but the union wouldn’t go for it. It took about three years to get that mess cleaned up.
Some if the union guys rocked but the ones that sucked couldn’t be fired so a shitload of work had to be redone. The casino engineering department hated the union guys because they had to clean up ton of work, like none of the electrical work being tied down right. That little problem almost pushed back the opening because the inspection failed. So the non-union casino engineers had to go redo half the work.
Nothing in my experience points to any advantage for using union labor. Unless of course you are a member of a union .
Slee
I’m not sure your brush could be any wider in those last two sentences, slee .