David S. :
Do you actually have any real world experience in dealing with unions or is your knowledge purely academic?
Let me fill you in on some things.
My father was a union organizer for much of my childhood. I grew up handing out Democratic campaign literature outside our local polling place and spending most of our “social” time at the Union Hall. My father was the assistant manager of the local electrician’s union (and my grandfather had been the manager of one of California’s heavy equipment operators union). When my father’s boss, the manager of the union, was voted out he lost his job. Thankfully he had pursued a juris doctorate in Labor Relations and was able to get a job at a corporation in Human Resources.
Let’s skip forward a few years. At the plant my father worked at the union voted to strike every two years – every time the contract came up for renewal. The plant was owned by a Japanese company, and they became progressively upset by the actions of the union.
I had a VERY good paying job at the plant, and I (along with a number of others) refused to join the union. Thank God for Right to Work states! I had no intention of losing two to three months of income due to a union strike when annual layoffs always deprived the majority of workers of at least two months wages. You do the math.
The time came, the union voted. It was supposed to be a secret ballot vote. My boyfriend at the time was a union member – what he (and others) told me was that the president of the union told all of those who wanted to strike to go to one side of the room, and those that did not want to strike go to the other side of the room. FYI, that was illegal. FYI, it made no difference. There were a number of people I personally knew who DID NOT want to strike – yet they were so scared of the management of the union and some of their coworkers, that they went to the “strike” side of the room.
There is a very serious reason why the secret ballot is so important.
So. The union “voted” to strike. What were the issues they were losing wages over?
1) Management wanted to staff lines by seniority so that they did not have to retrain hundreds of workers during each layoff, they could just lay off each line by seniority. The union claimed that workers would be “losing their seniority benefits”.
2) Management wanted to standardize the health insurance program and make the salaried employees’ insurance plan the plan for the entire company. This would have raised the physician co-pay from $10 per office visit to $15 per office visit.
That’s it. Those issues caused a strike that lasted almost three months, depriving union employees of those wages and costing the company money in lost productivity and increased security costs.
My father tried to negotiate with the union. There was no negotiating. When the strike came the company moved my family to a hotel in another town because of death threats and what had happened to previous HR management in my father’s position. Think rattlesnakes in the mail box, bombs wired to the car, shots fired towards the house. These things had all happened in previous strikes.
I crossed the strike lines to work. I was HAPPY with my benefits and wages, and had no problem with the plans management had. Strikers tried to overturn cars entering the plant. They succeeded with one, a small car belonging to one of the managers. They threw rocks and other missiles at cars as they entered or exited. There is news footage out there of them attacking my father’s truck, throwing rocks and trying to rock it over.
Eventually the strike ended. The Japanese who owned the plant were losing too much money and were most unhappy – so they signed on the dotted line and union workers went back to work. Temporarily.
They immediately started researching alternate locations for their plant. They decided upon Tijuana, Mexico. They transferred those in management they deemed essential to their operation (including my father) to San Diego. They closed the plant, which was the primary employer for all the small towns in the area.
All those wonderful union members lost their jobs. Except the president of the union.
Oh, and as a side note. Did you know that it’s almost impossible to join the AFL/CIO as a national employee unless you’ve run a “successful” strike? After the strike, the president of our union left the state to go to work for – you guessed it, the AFL/CIO.
So, David S., until you have real world experience in dealing with unions your opinion is worth exactly jack. I’ve been around them my entire life, and while they once served a purpose, they are now totally corrupt. They exist not for the betterment of the worker – but for the advancement of the union leaders. The workers are just fodder.
