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Originally Posted by LabRat
What I would really appreciate fellow Cellarites, is anyone's $0.02 on unions.
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Adversarial unions are created by adversarial management. Too often, when management is blaming the union, they forget to notice why the problems originally exist.
In some places, the union does perform well for their people. For example, in GM where plants are innovative, I have seen unions workers intentionally violate union rules only because they want to help out fellow employeess - unionized and otherwise. In some union plants where the work required worker independence, the union negotiated special conditions for those plants that provided workers with more freedom to decide what did and did not need be done. However where GM was making crappy products, top management was always then quick to blame the unions.
One of the many AT&T long distance blackouts in NYC was created by management who did not understand what that red light meant. When batteries died at 2 PM (cutting off the AT&T long distance service to NYC and even shutting down all airports), then Robert Allen was quickly blaming unions for *again* creating problems. But the union guys were all out on a training program. Robert Allen just knew it must have been the unions. Just another reason why AT&T was a dying company for so many decades.
One union guy just happened to stop by about the same time Robert Allen was preaching before the press. He found managers running about in chaos without any idea why the switching station had shut down. He corrected the open switch that management never bothered to comprehend in many union warning memos.
Unions have attempted to unionize Honda on multiple occassions. But Honda does not go about blaming their employees since 85% of all problems are directly traceable to top management. Employees rejected the union because they don't have adversarial (and therefore anti-innovation) management.
You must decide whether the management is there to blame the employees for problems, or to deal with problems at the source - management. Therein lies a criteria for unions. Unions are a symptom of and therefore created by bad (and self serving) management.
Is your management bad? One ball park criteria is their salaries and bonuses. Generally the worst management also tends to be the best paid. Go figure. But that has historically been the trend with but a few very obvious exceptions.