Having been in three different unions for low-payed, unskilled labor like being a warehouse picker is, I can tell you that the union was never on my side for anything and mostly served to help management pay everyone the minimum rather than based on performance.
And yes, the union reps got the best positions, the best hours and two salaries. The next best positions and best hours went to their friends.
The unions only stepped in for the most egregious cases but not in the way you might think: When Buffalo NY's Tops International Market fired their baker for literally urinating in the cake batter used to make the store cakes, the union stepped in to defend the employee because as part of the union contract employees were not supposed to be on camera to perform their duties. They fought hard to get their baker reinstated and won.
Outside of federal employment and outside of hollywood, where the strongest unions are anyway, the history of union activity in the US is quite unremarkable. It is most frequently anti-consumer and often works against the long term interests of the workers that it's supposed to represent.
Literally 99% of the time I hear somebody shouting support of unions here, they've either never been in one or they've always been the reps. Voices like mine, of those who've been in unions and got the shit end of the stick, get shouted down.
I would rather die than participate in a labor union again, for as long as I live.
> When Buffalo NY's Tops International Market fired their baker for literally urinating in the cake batter used to make the store cakes, the union stepped in to defend the employee because as part of the union contract employees were not supposed to be on camera to perform their duties. They fought hard to get their baker reinstated and won.
Do you have a source for this? It's a rather serious claim to make without any evidence and I haven't been able to find anything other than your comment when searching.
That kinda buries the lede there. I imagine that type of defense (being able to have input on whether or how cameras are employed) would seem pretty sweet to a bunch of Amazon drivers right now.
Now as far as the urinating in batter? Abhorrent, and disgusting. Totally worth a firing or severance with cause. Contract's a contract though. You catch that sort of thing, when you're doing something you've promised specifically not to do, you better bloody have an alternate way of acting on it.
Also, I'd need deets. I'd actually not be convinced of a breach if the work was being done somewhere with a security camera and somebody caught him doing so on unrelated footage. There's a difference between "here's your company issued camera to surveil yourself" and "WTF the security guy was reviewing some footage for something else, what the hell do you think you're doing?!"
It's called good faith. Not everyone has it, and it leads to some shitty behavior, but it is what it is. No reason to demonize a union over.
> It's a rather serious claim to make without any evidence and I haven't been able to find anything other than your comment when searching.
It's also the kind of thing that every party involved would try very hard to keep on the down low. I can definitely see it not making the news since there's probably only about half a dozen people party to it and nobody is a celebrity or otherwise public personality.
Because it's the kind of thing that makes it around the workplace.
Nobody's gonna leak that to the news because "trashy line cook does something trashy" isn't really a story worth getting a new job over. You just joke about it with your coworkers friends and move on.
I had a similar experience in IBEW Local 58 before I left the trade to pursue a career in tech. I'm not sure why the negative experiences of those who've seen the dark side of union orgs, aren't welcome.
They tend to be "I was overqualified for my temp hustle and they didn't specifically cater to my needs." Yet they still picked union jobs, likely as it provided them better conditions than the alternatives.
That's the issue though. The inability to be treated as an individual.
Time is the most precious commodity in life that we have -- the only thing that we can't get back. Nobody values your time as much as you will. I don't know about you, but being able to negotiate my own exchange of time/labor allows me to conserve as much of that resource as I can. I can negotiate for myself to the fullest. I have the option to walk away and negotiate elsewhere -- in most unionized positions in the US that is simply not possible.
Nobody negotiating for you is going to put the same value on your time that you do. It's not fair-trade.
Try posting your story and watch the roller coaster your Karma goes through, including people who get so incensed at what you said that they start hate-downvoting multiple pages of your comment history.
And yes, the union reps got the best positions, the best hours and two salaries. The next best positions and best hours went to their friends.
The unions only stepped in for the most egregious cases but not in the way you might think: When Buffalo NY's Tops International Market fired their baker for literally urinating in the cake batter used to make the store cakes, the union stepped in to defend the employee because as part of the union contract employees were not supposed to be on camera to perform their duties. They fought hard to get their baker reinstated and won.
Outside of federal employment and outside of hollywood, where the strongest unions are anyway, the history of union activity in the US is quite unremarkable. It is most frequently anti-consumer and often works against the long term interests of the workers that it's supposed to represent.
Literally 99% of the time I hear somebody shouting support of unions here, they've either never been in one or they've always been the reps. Voices like mine, of those who've been in unions and got the shit end of the stick, get shouted down.
I would rather die than participate in a labor union again, for as long as I live.