During my long working life=over 53 years total=I have had to join 5 different unions. Some of that work was blue collar, most of it was white collar.
I found that those of us who had incentive & motivation, got taken aside & told to stop working so hard. “We were messing up the expectations of the company which the union had worked hard to hold down in individual production”.
I once worked for a fairly large So Calif grocery chain which no longer exists. They had 72 stores, & I worked in the office with 21 others, processing what was then called “DSD”-direct store delivery. Bread, milk, & other perishables were sent directly to the stores, & we processed the invoices on a 5 day a week basis for the 7 days a week of these deliveries.
Of those 72 stores, I personally did the 7 largest stores, with the most volume. The other 21 processed the paperwork for the remaining 65 stores.
I got ‘talked to’ 3 different times in the bathroom by the ‘union steward’. I was stunned. This was against everything I had ever been taught about doing the best I could do. Finally, the union applied enough pressure to the company that I was fired on Friday, Nov 11, 1966. I was told it was because I was being ‘too disruptive’. I was 27.
That was a hard lesson.
After that- I shunned jobs that were union. By the time I was 37, I went out on my own & have been self-employed ever since.
Unions have lost their original purpose.
They now don’t protect the worker so much as they break the back of the employer.
Some day, people are going to figure out that more people might have jobs in the first place if the unions were not involved.
Agree. Here’s another health-care related question to all nurses out there: if you work in a unionized hospital and are compelled to participate in an abortion, do you honestly believe the SEIU would defend your rights? HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!! As I mentioned, I’ve workd in two hospitals where nurses belonged to a union & they had ZERO protection from anything - mandatory OT, huge nurse:patient ratios, unfair scheduling practices, blah blah blah. All the damn union did was siphon cash from their paychecks! WAKE UP!