It depends. Some professions don't have the inherent leverage for unionizing to be of any practical benefit.
Maybe 8 or 9 years ago the union that grocery store workers are a part of went on strike here in California. IMO it's ********* for those workers to be unionized. Their expertise wouldn't appear to be specialized enough to have any leverage. People who stock and perform checkout and bagging would seem to be a dime a dozen.
Those people you could theoretically fire and probably be operating efficiently enough in 2 weeks with new employees.:dunno:
On the other hand, people who do specialized enough work where you couldn't just find 50 of them just by stepping outside...would probably have a point in marshaling their collective leverage.
The problem with some of the unions isn't the concept of marshaling leverage...it's that some end up not realizing at what point their efforts are biting the hand that feeds them and end up engaging in policies that are not in their long term interests.
Sometimes, not always. But I'll still take corrupt unions over the unchecked power of management.
Two excellent posts! :thumbsup:
My grandfather worked for a coal mining company in the early part of the 1900's. He didn't work inside the mine but he saw how the miners were generally treated by the company. This was back in the days of company towns, company houses and getting paid in script (company currency that was only good in the company store). Anyone who wants to get a decent idea of what it was like back then, watch the movie
Matewan.
So I can appreciate the plight of workers in various industries (autos, mining, etc.). But because of what I do, I've usually been on the other side of the line from the union... though sometimes not willingly. Some companies really do treat their employees like ****, and I don't blame them for unionizing. And by improving processes and introducing more automation, over time, some workers do lose their jobs when more efficient processes take hold. I've always tried to approach it so that when a workers is displaced by automation, he is cross-trained to do another job. Hopefully something new, that the company has brought in because it now has greater capacity. But I don't deny that some companies just want to reduce head count. And that's why unions often try to resist working with people like me. But if the company is truly in a predicament, resisting efficiencies (and accepting a small hit to the workforce) might mean the entire facility is shut down and relocated to a lower cost area that is usually/often in a right-to-work state, or another country altogether.
I think where unions get a bad name is when they spend too much time defending drunks and "lunch buckets", who only still have their jobs because the union has gone to bat for them so many times. With public employees, where I have a beef with unions is when they defend bad cops or worthless teachers. I think we all know that there are some people who really do need to be fired. When unions stand in the way of that, and JUST rely on how much seniority a person has, I don't agree with that.