If I were trying to pick up a prescription for a family member, any union picketers would be well advised to step out of my path. And I see no need to ask anyone’s permission first.
Regards,
Shodan
Of course. This situation was more like:
“Hey, I just wanted to know that I support you guys but I ordered a prescription here before the strike and I just need to pick it up.”
“No worries. Thanks for the support.”
As long as the picketer reacts in the same way when my first sentence is “Get out of my way, I’m in a hurry”, then we have no problem.
Regards,
Shodan
During the strikes out here, they didn’t get in anyone’s way. In fact, they didn’t give me so much as a dirty look when I went into the store. The “picketing” consisted of holding a bunch of signs off to the side and someone sitting at a little table with information for those who were interested.
My mileage varied. The last time I crossed a picket line, one or two of the picketers made it a point of stepping directly in front of me while saying “please respect our picket line”.
Regards,
Shodan
During that last big grocery strike in CA, my experience was more aligned with Shodan’s. They also made rude comments to me and stuff. I mean, I get it: this is an important issue to you, but I’m also not driving 30 minutes across town to the non-striking grocery store.
One of the first things my Granddad told me was never cross a picket line and it is an instruction I have always obeyed.
Depends on the issue.
This idea that the picketers have anything to say to me or they have any right to block my entrance to the store is very irritating to me. As far as I know, it isn’t legal for picketers to harass people crossing the picket line.
I’m finding the results of this thread very interesting; for free market Capitalists, you guys are sounding kind of Socialist. 
German companies have union officials sitting on the boards of many companies, and yet this left wing dictatoriat seems to be bailing out the rest of Europe.
The reason I say there are no bad workers, just bad managers, is simple, who hires the workers? The management is directly responsible for the behaviour of the workforce, through pay, incentives, hiring, firing, training, promotion - the lot. If the workforce is useless, idle or greedy you need only to look at useless greedy and ineffectual management.
Good industrial relations is not an add on for business, in advanced economies it is seen as essential for good business, how many innovations come from the shop floor? How many stupid ideas come from managers that bankrupt companies?
A responsive management enables the workforce to be productive, and makes it worth their time and effort. The workforce wants income, and gets it through partnership, where it can put ideas up and be rewarded. Bad management works against this.
And if management isn’t allowed to fire poorly performing workers because of union rules, then what?
If you spend money there (anywhere), you are involved. You might as well disavow the actions of the government that collects your taxes. You fund it, you make it possible.
Of course it is your prerogative to not care what is done with your money in each case, but you are assuredly part of it.
I despise unions, so it would brighten my day to cross a picket line.
I think your logic is flawed for the most part, but even acknowledging it, the amount of money I give them as a percentage of all the money they get means that the tiny bit of concern I gave the workers was commensurate with how much say I have in anything.
You have 100% say in whether you’re a part of it. At least for the consumer choices; the taxpayer participation is a tougher nut.
I don’t rightly know…but I suppose they might have blocked me, or restrained me, or at least jeered me…but I had legitimate business there. I grew up learning to respect what my parents told me about unions and picket lines. And I refused to seek employment as a scab.
The idea of an employment contract includes rules of conduct and discipline, including performance and gross misconduct.
What happens is that many managers are simply incompetent at applying those polices, or are incompetent at managing their workforce.
There will be outlying exceptions on both sides, from genuinely unfair dismissals through the spectrum of regular personnel management through to overprotected workers, but it still boils down to employee management, effective recruitment policies and clear contractual arrangements.
I have seen entire industries effectively closed down because ineffectual managers simply were not able to counter union excesses, there’s plenty of them in the UK. if you have a nepotistic and biased system of management recruitment then it is hardly surprising that you had ineffective management. UK industry has been plagued by non-meritorious management recruitment and selection processes for generations.
There is a case to be made that this has happened to a greater extent in state run industries compared to private ones, and perhaps you can make a good case out for this still happening today - but at the end of it all, it still boils down to poor management rather than bad workers.
I can cite personal cases I have dealt with as a union rep where managers have not even read their own procedures, in one case a manager who told the gathering of her department that neither she, nor her managers had time to read such policies, which is a shame because when she was involved in an unfair dismissal case just prior to her own retirement, she could have got rid of an underperforming member of staff very easily, if only she had followed the management of attendance policy on sickness - which is one of the more widely used and invoked personnel polices in my current employers HR handbook. Not only that but I would have tended to agree with her assessment, but as a union rep, my remit is to ensure the managements’ own rules are followed correctly and fairly.
Just two days ago I had cause to send guidance to a particular manager who was attempting to discipline a member of staff because of a failure to take a certain course of action, and I had to point out that the deadline for that course of action was 48 hours, and not 12 hours as the manager had wrongly required. This is not an obscure little paragraph somewhere, it happens to be a central part of a discipline process that is known right throughout an organisation with 22k direct employees dealing with around 90k of prisoners.
This is why I state that there are no bad workers, just bad managers. Good managers will tend to have few HR problems, not just because they are consistent with their application of policy, but because they see themselves as senior colleagues of their workforce and are able to communicate their objectives and requirements well - in other words they are capable of partnership, guidance and leadership and free from arbitrary favouritism where they treat different workers in different ways according to personal preference instead of objective assessment.
[QUOTE=casdave]
The management is directly responsible for the behaviour of the workforce, through pay, incentives, hiring, firing, training, promotion - the lot. If the workforce is useless, idle or greedy you need only to look at useless greedy and ineffectual management.
[/QUOTE]
Well spoken. The solution to greedy behavior on the part of unions is that they need to be fired when they go on strike.
Regards,
Shodan
But you are applying different standards of “good” and “bad” depending on whether someone is a worker or manager. I work in the private rather than the public sector so can’t say whether such a view is common there but it seems a very backward-looking and divisive stand to take. Certainly in the last 15 years I haven’t worked anywhere with such a simple division of status as the vast majority of people I work with are both “workers” and “managers” at the same time.
You repeat your statement as if it were obviously true and yet in 20+ years of managing people it isn’t true by any definition I understand. It is perfectly possible for a bad “worker” to exists and survive and then screw things up royally, it may also be true that a manager* could’ve* prevented it and was incompetent in not doing so…but not always.
I think casdave’s statment would make a little more sense if he were referring to the workforce, collectively. There are certainly bad individucal workers, and to assert otherwise is absurd.