Being in a union is similar to communism in that it severs the cause-effect relationship of getting rewarded for superior work. Management is required to treat all workers as precisely interchangeable. Any preference is given on factors such as seniority and sometimes "pull" that bear little if any connection to the quality or quantity of work produced, and most insidiously, over which one has no immediate control. There's no proper way to better your own situation.
Now I'd say a bad union shop is ideologically about halfway around to the fully Communist management method being tried at 20th Century. Superior performance is still viewed as more desirable in theory, but this just leads to disrespect for any who excel in quantity or quality, because it might raise the performance bar for everyone else.
Now that's in a bad shop. I've also been around union shops in which most were pretty good people who were skilled and did very good work. But it wasn't BECAUSE it was a union shop, it was because they were good people, and avoided the pitfalls the union atmosphere might lead to.
In a sense I have a soft spot for unions conceptually, because to say unions shouldn't exist is to say that management, which surely has the advantage over any one individual, should have to face no equalization in their bargaining power, which seems wrong. As an example I worked in a small consulting business, the vice president of which made a negative comment about unionization and that it was bad because it made it impossible to reward the best employees. BUT, his company had a deal with two competitors in town not to hire each other's employees if they were looking to move. So it's bad if the individuals band together to bargain collectively with larger entities, but it's perfectly OK for several of the larger entities to band together and bargain collectively with INDIVIDUAL employees. I couldn't convince him this was a hypocritical postition. Doh! Now I said I had a soft spot for the theoretical union, and the first ones no doubt did serve a purpose in putting a check on abusive management, but that doesn't mean that I'm sympathetic to the real flesh-and-blood ones and how they normally end up operating.
I worked for a guy with a reputation for ruthlessness in business dealings, usually with competitors. He was honest in the sense that at least theoretically, he intended to give a good product for the money, and he wanted to be a good employer to his people (although now that I think of it, the ways in which he chose to do so often felt a little paternalistic to me).
Anyhow, his business was in serious decline, with maybe 20% of the number of employees that it had at its peak, and he was moving to make everyone, from engineers to machinists, into contractors. And not just in name, paying them by the hour and issuing a 1099, he was having people bid jobs at a flat price. So he was pissed when this one machinist was producing more than he ever did when paid by the hour, even though the piece rate for the part he was making resulted in the boss getting it for less than he did while paying hourly. "Why didn't he work that hard when he was on the clock?" he asked. I found the hypocrisy beyond limits. Everything he ever did in his professional life was to make money and better his own position, but if anyone else works harder when they can make more money, it's the equivalent of stealing from him. Moron. Besides, the company was likely to fold within the next year so it was also possible that the machinist was just making hay in the sunshine by working at a rate he couldn't have sustained indefinitely, which is the mindset you have to have as an hourly employee.
Management does not always have the advantage. I own an architecture firm in Fort Worth. Over the past few years, finding good employees was very difficult because the market was so hot. We decided to give pretty hefty raises to keep the people we had since we couldn't find anyone even marginally qualified. People were moving from firm to firm all over town. Employees had the upper hand.
Now the situation is different. We, as management, have the upper hand as the market cools. It's that same old supply and demand equation.
A century ago, 10,000 employees died every year on America's railroads. The railroad companies simply wrote this off as the cost of doing business. Life had no intrinsic value.
It was the unions that forced safety on the railroads, defining safety standards that still are in effect today.
I know I'm late to the party here. (I probably missed the ping last week.) And this chapter is one of my favorites too. I actually got to read a small excerpt on Rush's show back in 1993. Here's an excerpt fro John Switzer's summary for that day:
Mike suggests that everyone read Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged"; in the book she presents a health care system adopted by a motor company, which is really an allegory for the entire nation. Mike would like to read three sentences from this book, and Rush says this would be okay, as long as they're not "typical, long Ayn Rand sentences." Mike assures him they're not and reads the following:Now, as for "management" being forced to treat all workers as interchangeable, I think some schools of management favor this. I cannot count the number of times someone asked, "What happens if ML/NJ gets run over by a bus?" The implication was that if someone who knew too much about a project left, that that project would be doomed to failure so it was better not to have anyone who was essential to the project. The problem for these management whizes was always that they had much higher probability problems than someone getting run over by a bus."When we voted for the plan, none of us knew just how the plan would work, but every one of us thought that the next fellow knew it. And if anybody had any doubts, he felt guilty and kept his mouth shut because they made it sound like anyone who would oppose this plan was a child-killer at heart and less like a human being.""Just like here," Mike adds. Rush agrees, but says the Clinton plan is even more frightening because the American people want the plan, so much so that they don't care about the details. All they want is secured health care that won't bankrupt them.Mike points out that the story in Rand's book does not come out well; in fact, the result is the complete collapse of the United States, as the providers of services withdraw from business. The "do-gooders" take over, just as is happening now in the United States, and Mike hopes that Rush can continue his efforts to stop this trend.
Rush says he has read some of Rand's work, and he notes there is a near cult of people who are devoted to her writings. What Rush finds amazing about Rand is her ability to use fiction to express points which most others can express only in the dry verbosity of academic writing. Those who find themselves agreeing with Rand's beliefs love the clarity and accessibility of her writings.
Right now one of the DJI corps is in the process of talking an eight figure hit on a very high visibility project because they view the people who do the work as interchangeable pawns. So they replaced a couple of us, who developed the technology involved over several years (company in the process of applying for several patents with our names as inventors), with people who might have been on the cafeteria staff who knew nothing of the work we had done and didn't seem to know that they should care.
Unions are bad, yes, but the people who join them probably view themselves as interchangeable and they should have the right to do so (without having the right to exclude those who do similar work). But unions always need compliant management to accede to their demands.
ML/NJ