Posted by Matt Wilson [71.170.81.169] on Friday, March 14, 2014 at 21:39:13 :
In Reply to: Re:clueless come to earth posted by mike stone [71.39.211.42] on Friday, March 14, 2014 at 20:47:25 :
Much of America was built with union labor, but I don't think union labor is quite as much to be proud of anymore. I believe they had their place for a long time, and probably still do in some circumstances, but a lot of what they do seems to me to be legalized extortion.
My perspective may be jaded, but in my experience, the unions allow for gross inefficiencies to flourish in the work place. I spent some time at GM in the early 90's, where I dealt with union shop guys on a daily basis. To this day, I am amazed at how much slack time they got away with, and yet still had the worst attitudes of anyone I had ever met. Prior to that, I had worked in a shop alongside non-union workers who got paid substantially less than the union guys, but worked much harder and had much better attitudes. They actually appreciated their jobs.
At GM, many of the union guys had the easiest jobs I had ever seen - not kidding about this - basically sitting at a table doing literally nothing most of their shift. I worked in a heat treat shop, so most of the work involved "tending" to the heat treat furnaces. Every once in a while (which in practice turned out to be when they felt like it), the workers were supposed to get up and check the temperatures and gas flow rates on the heat treat furnaces, and maybe a few other basic checks. This would take a couple of minutes, and they could go sit down at their table and go back to reading the newspaper. Sometimes, if the heat treating was completed during their shift, they would have to remove the bin of parts from the furnace and take it to another location in the building - that was it. Many times, their entire shift would go by without the bin of parts being completed, because many parts had to be left in the furnaces for longer than one shift. So they literally had hours of time on their hands. Maybe boredom contributed to their bad attitudes, but I doubt it. If you asked them to add anything to their work load, such as writing down the temperatures they were observing, even just temporarily - and even if it was not against any union rules and would not be taking someone else's job - they would pitch the biggest fits. Completely spoiled and the source of huge inefficiencies - and it was very difficult to do anything to improve that situation because these people were protected. That would be completely unacceptable in a non-union situation, and that is a significant contributor to the downfall of many once-great American companies. Notice I didn't say it was the biggest contributor, but certainly a very significant one.
The same kinds of things go on in the union shop where I work now (aerospace). If one of the workers is fast, efficient, and does good work, it is not long before the other workers begin hiding his tools and pulling other shenanigans that bring down his productivity to the lowest common denominator. Again, this should be completely unacceptable, but the companies are all but powerless to do anything about it.
Don't get me wrong - companies and their workers have also seen plenty of management abuses as well, but that doesn't seem to be the topic at hand right now, so I'll stop here.
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