(This is pretty long winded)
I just watched an episode of Penn and Teller's Bullshit and they were talking about Walmart and it's fight to keep unions away which got me thinking about my hatred towards unions.
Personally I am anti union. I have worked for both union and non union companies and I have to say I preffered the non union employers.
Here's my reasons why.
I spent two years working for a union company. During my two years I was consistantly in the top 10% of the sales force. I got along with all of my co-workers, met all the objectives and was well within every one of the desired metrics. Towards the end of my 2 year tenure I got on the bad side of sales manager. She and I just didn't click. Needless to say I was taken into an office and suspended with termination pending for accessing the internet and specifically the content of ***boat. The union rep told me they could do nothing for me even though EVERY SINGLE person on the sales floor used the internet and probably had worse internet content chached in their machines then mine.
Six months prior to my employment demise our sales training class rooms were flooded with a bunch of nimrods. I found out that the recent surge of nimrod trainees was due to a suit the union had recently won. The people in training were former sales reps who were terminated a few years prior due to not being able to obtain sales objectives said to be "unreasonable." At the time of these peoples departure their sales objectives were about 20% of the current objectives. Just for showing up to the first day of training they were given 2 years of paid health benefits for them and their families and 6 months of target pay (roughly $30,000). Half showed up the first day collected their checks, filled out their insurance forms, and left never to return. The other half tried to make it, but out of about 30 people only 1 person managed to get past the 90 day probationary period once on the sales floor, none of the rest could make the target numbers.
After several talks with people who work for union organizations and my own experience I can only arrive at one conclusion. Unions only protect those who don't deserve to have the job they have in the first place. They promote poor work ethics and harbor people who continually drain their employers. Yet they do nothing to protect those who actually NEED and DESERVE their help.
Recently I attended a convention in Las Vegas as an Exhibitor. In Las Vegas you are not allowed to transport any of your own freight from the dock to your booth, it must be hauled in by union employees. Also, if hanging signage, building anything, and so on so forth you are not allowed to do it yourself you must hire union employees to do it for you. The union employees are hard on your equipment. I can't tell you how many crates I seen dropped including my own (these crates contain 100's of thousands of $$ worth of mechandise). Everything is done on "their" time and at "their" pace and you are not to complain about it! To save time I brought in a genie material lift to lift a large overhead part of my exhibit display. I put it in a nice crate with a door and so on so I could get it in and out with ease. I used it to lift one small part of my exhibit and put it away. At the end of the show the crate containg my lift was returned to me with all the hinges and locks ripped off of it and about 15 screws holding on what was once the access door. When I removed the lift to take down my display I noticed it had been damaged, one of the legs was bent in a manner that made it inoperable, luckily I beat it enough with a hammer that it was operable again. It was later explained to me that this type of thing was common and privately encouraged by the union officials. It's the teamsters way of saying "Don't mess with the union." So this union protects it's employees so they can wreck peoples things, transport peoples belongings in a wreckless fashion, and treat their customers like shit.
How are unions suppose to be any good? Why in the hell do Americans still allow this organized bullshit to go on???
What's your take?