Well said. My biggest complaint is with White Collar unions - why the heck are they needed?
Well said. My biggest complaint is with White Collar unions - why the heck are they needed?""
They are not needed. IMO.
In Nov 1966 I was fired from the office of a large Grocery chain in Los Angeles because I was "doing too much work" and "making the 32 other women in the office look bad".
We (33)did the daily paperwork for 77 stores, and I did the 7 largest stores, and did all my work every day. After getting acosted verbally in the ladies room a cxouple of times, they went to management and got me fired or they would wildcat strike. True Story. Needless to say, I didn't then nor do I now feel warm and fuzzy over unions. I had just bought my first house in May of that year, also.
Just curious if you know anything about white collar unions? What you hear about mostly are the thugs in the blue collar unions. There aren't that many large professional unions around. The most successful ones have a good working relationship with the Company. I am actually on a Partnership/ Leadership committee where we meet weekly with the Chief Engineering Manager of the Company to hash out concerns of both management and union. We try to stop any problems occurring before they start.
We can make recommendations to our membership that benefits the Company. For example, a while ago, the Company wanted everyone to sign an ethics commitment because certain leaders from our company were getting fired for unethical conduct. Because the CEO's were getting fired, they wanted the workers to show how ethical they were. No one wanted to do that, because it was so vague and it looked like you were signing your life away. Would you sign something like that? Union leadership saw that it was a good thing for the Company, so they recommended that members sign it and if there were any repurcussions from it, the Union would protect them. The Company got what it wanted in that situation by working with the Union.
For our latest contract negotiations, we worked from a place of trust on both sides, where no one would screw the other. It worked and it looks like a model that other unions can use successfully.
There are also laws that say if you don't want to belong to a union, you have certain ways to opt out. There is what is called the Beck objector law.
If you worked in a large company of say over 100,000 employees, wouldn't you feel more comfortable knowing that someone had your back? A person can feel pretty insignificant in a company that size.