I was there as a forklift driver because I was in a terrible place in life and just needed to work somewhere.
I was glad to be working but that place was terrible. These was a manager on the dock that was a huge jerk. His nickname was Sweets.
The dockworkers all wore their union shirts and it was very obvious that they had no pride in Yellow Freight.
Being a temp I was way out of place. The management hated everyone and the union didn't welcome me at all. I was there about two months and almost no one ever spoke to me.
In the summer of 1970, I was working on road construction in MN. The construction company fired the Teamsters dump truck driver for joy riding down main street honking at the girls.
They had me fill in since I had a chauffeur’s licence. The union boss kept coming around to make me sign up and pay the union dues. The road crew would alert me so I could park the truck and pick up a shovel. No one on the crew could tell the union guy where the temp driver was. That went on for several weeks until I left for school in the Fall.
It was the best summer job ever.
During a summer of my college years a buddy and I had a factory job via a temp firm. The employees were union. It was clear we weren’t liked. We worked harder. You could see them looking at us with a stare, at break time they avoided us like the plague. We’d done nothing to them, it was only later that I learned they were union and hated us because we were making them look bad.
Once I graduated and had a good job, I was scolded by my boss for moving my PC from one desk area to another because I had to unplug & plugin to another outlet - that was union electrician’s job.
In another instance I was writing the technical manuals for custom machinery, the union (within the customer) couldn’t agree if certain tasks were ‘electrical or mechanical’ in nature, so the documentation couldn’t be finished and the machine sat on our floor for months (no delivery until the documentation was complete), while we charged them for it taking floor space. Unreal.
I can appreciate unions having their place. I see it like minimum wage though, I don’t see anyone making that...the market demands more. Would ‘evil’ employers take advantage of employees without unions? Sure, but there’s a lot of jobs out there and people won’t put up with much crap. My only experiences with unions have shown they slow everything down and make everything cost a lot more - to the point where the company is no longer competitive.
I’d argue the threat of employees forming a union provides enough of a motivation to keep employers honest. Once unionized though, the primary goal of the union is to protect the union - not what is best for all.