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Dial U for Union
An Anonymous Coward sent in this story about a communications union trying to expand into the Internet age. Any Slashdot readers with Internet/programming-type jobs in a union?
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Unions have traditionally been very important to make sure that employee rights are not neglected.
In bad times when some employers could pay people obscenely small amounts of money for hard work, because people seriously couldn't afford loosing that income either, unions played a pretty important role, at least in some countries.
Just because things are generally better now, doesn't mean that it will always be that way.
I know plenty of people that work in professions where the employer have all the power, that are very glad for the added security that union-membership gives you.
Unions (as long as they operate within the current system, instead of trying to destroy the system), isn't necessarily a foe of the free market, it is actually part of the free market. Just as coorporations make alliances and merges, so must employees be able to.
If me being a Union-member can get me some benefits, I see nothing wrong with it.
Of course, the norwegian law sucks in the way that in some professions you are automatically a union-member, and the union provides funds for the election-campaign of the Labour-party in Norway. This means that some people are forced to support the Labour-party with their union-fees.
Well, just my 2 cents...
You seem to have had a particularly bad experience. Up until recently I was the union rep for a bunch of programmers in a telco, and I can tell you straight people did need the union.
Yes, everyone has rights, but the management are often clueless or deliberately lax in applying the rules. Far from promoting by merit when left to themselves, management promoted cronies, and almost exclusively male cronies at that. Managers in some projects had told their team that if they applied for their time off in lieu (the alternative to overtime) it would count against them at appraisals; and so on. I was personally involved in discovering some duplicity in company pay negotiations - as a result of which 10,000 people did not get their pay cut by £150 pa.
Asking the union for help in the UK at least is not like the Teamster example earlier in this thread where we smash up cars. In disputes workers here have a right to be accompanied by someone else in any meeting with management, and 9 times out of 10 they chose a union rep rather than a friend because we'd been through these meetings before, had been through courses on employment law, and could make sure the employee got a fair deal.
If the company wanted to sack a lazy, theiving or stupid employee as characterized by you they had procedures they had agreed to follow to make sure it was fair and not the product of a local grudge. If the company gave the worker a fair hearing and they should be sacked, they were sacked. We didnt stand in their way.
On the politics angle, our union (given its white collar background) was fairly apolitical, and under UK law the union members voted to stop political contributions. I personally knew members who stood for elected office for each of the 3 main parties in this country - hardly evidence of losing your political views.
Teachers' unions (and I'm speaking of the NEA, the behemoth here in the US) can be the worst. First of all, they certainly aren't getting done what they supposedly exist to do -- getting teachers paid more. My hunch is that they actually are keeping salaries down by not allowing school districts to evaluate teachers and introduce competition. Really, all the NEA does is work to maintain the public education monopoly, claiming they're fighting "for the children".
Teachers are professionals, should be treated as such, and should not be forced to be unionized to get a job. Perhaps then we can start paying the good ones what they're worth.
Unions are diverse I'm gonna talk about something most people on /. don't have in whatever subject they are writing about... personal experience. When I say a union can do something, that doesn't mean every union will. There are hundreds, if not thousands of unions in this country and each one is different. There are really bad ones, there are really good ones, and there are a lot in between. Employee's vote in the union that they belong to (often against very steep odds considering the tactics and "natural" advantage the employer has against its employees) and they can vote to decertify a union as well (which, when it happens is most often a switch to a different union rather than choosing to go unrepresented). In my opinion, the best unions are the ones with the most member participation. This means that people need to be active in their unions for them to serve their needs. More on that in a bit, to get back to the bold, the point I am trying to make here is that your mileage may vary, just like some employers are better than others, some grocery stores are better, some parents are better. It's not realistic to assume that every union could be perfect and like with so many other things, you're not going to hear as much about the success stories than the failures (for every Jimmy Hoffa there are hundreds of "good" organizers like myself, who are really committed to building a better workplace).
Unions can better bad policy People think that it's all about wages or seniority. It's not. There are a lot of things that come standard in your average tech job you might not like. Do you like anti-drug flyers they make you sign saying that you wont do things the company doesn't like outside of its walls (13th amendment violation anyone?)? Do you like illegal non-competition clauses in your contract? Do you enjoy that your supervisor often has the power to enact pointless and ill-planned workplace rules that you have to follow and might have very little luck in changing? Those are all the type of things that a union, if its membership is motivated to do so, can change or work to change. The university has to notify my union when they change a workplace rule (so we can fight it if there is a complaint) and they are prohibited from enacting workplace rules that they can't prove are necessary or even beneficial.
Unions give you a voice I have a lot of friends that work for a certain LARGE corporation that hires a lot of programmers. One of them told me that at their company, you only matter if you're a vice-president or above. In fact, when you call tech support internally there, if you're a vp you go to the special pool of techs to help you, if you're just a worker, who knows when you'll get help. This point is to illustrate that no matter how important you think you are, no matter how much you think your boss loves you, it all comes down to the bottom line and quite often you're not on it. Unions give workers with common interests a common voice to negotiate as "equals" with their employers. If you're in a good union, it might be you that does the negotiations, or someone you know and respect. Working as a group you can get a lot more done that working locally, and I know, a lot of you might be thinking that you are doing fine on your own, well, there's probably a lot of people where you work that aren't getting the sweet deal that you're getting and that probably doesn't make your job easier.
Unions don't support mediocrity I should have made this point #1 cause it's often the #1 argument I hear. First of all, most union contracts don't prevent anyone from making more than anyone else. If you're hot shit and you're employer wants you, there's most likely nothing the union would do to tell the employer that they can't hire you at a higher rate than anyone else (however, on the flip side, if you're the boss' nephew and you're getting the big raise because of that, the union might, rightly so, have something to say about that). They also aren't entirely based on seniority (although they can be) but what is wrong with that anyway? The reason unions often choose seniority as the marker is because it's pretty objective. It makes sense that the longer you work for a company you should make more money. It also doesn't seem too horrible to me that if i work hard for my employer for 30 years, I'll have a little protection for myself. Most of us are real young here, when you're pushing 55-60 and looking a little less attractive, we'll see what tune you're singing then. It is true that unions work to benefit the majority of their workers. This might leave some of the very very best a little in the cold and bring the very very worst up a little bit more than they deserve, but for the majority of us (since we can't all be the very very best) it's much better (and the fact that the very very best can be expected to get their own additional increases since they are so awesome).
Unions start with you There is this idea that a union comes from the outside and does things to its members. This may be how a bad union works, but it's not how the one I work for works. In UPTE its almost all rank and file run. This means that the members make all the decisions and it's very locally based. There's not some guy in a limo calling strikes or making all the decisions here, it's the guy in the cube next to you, or hopefully you yourself.
Well, that's about all the rant I can handle right now. It's not everything I could say, but it's better than nothing. But even if it didn't convince you, try this. For the next month, anytime there's something stupid that happens at your job, some stupid rule or management decision that makes your job not-so-fun, think about if it's the kind of thing you might be able to change if you had the organized support of all your fellow co-workers.
Tony
I doubt most of you have worked in a union shop at any point in your lives.
Imagine the most incestuos, concentrated group of incompetents on charge of your job, your welfare and your career, and that's only the tip of the iceberg. The people who survive 30 years in a union shop to get the highest union positions are not the skilled, not the caring and not the intelligent - they are the stubborn, backstabbing, self-righteous oafs who push everyone out. They are encouraged to do so by management, which of course wants to break up a union and how else to do so but by making the union turn upon itself?
Unlike (I assume) most people who read slashdot, I've worked in "real" jobs that involve intense physical labor, and two of them were complete union shops. While I understand there being a need to protect employees from exploitation, do you think a programmer earning at least 2-3 times the gross national average needs protection? Even in extreme situations (coal mines, heavy labor factories), the union is a necessary evil, not a righter of wrongs.
With unions come politics, internal, external, and "fringe", as in Jimmy Hoffa "fringe". Blue collar workers have learned how to deal with the downsides of the union over the past century, they know how to prolong its usefulness. White collar workers have no such experience, they will have their unions manipulated and twisted into the personal tools of whoever happens to have the most influence in the union.
What will your union provide you with? Medical benefits? Job security? Work safety regulations? Don't make me laugh. You have all that and more, and it's NOT worth giving up a meritocratic system of advancement, peace of mind and your political views over.
I'm a little segfault, short and stout.
--As an ex-Teamster from NY I can tell you that although there were imagined benefits of being in a Union none were realized. Union representitives never came to the aid of any of the employees in my ex-company. The shop steward was railroaded out of his $17US an hour job and the Union's response was to immediately appoint another steward. This wasn't a guy who was likely to make very much more than $17US bucks an hour. He lost his livelyhood trying to protect his fellow workers. The company wasn't evil or mean, but simply trying to save money by asking people to go home early. Most people jumped at the opprotunity.
--For $20US a paycheck ($40 US a month + $250 to join) we got nothing. The employees recently voted the Union out of their building. The Union sued the company and the company agreed to allow the Union to stay for 2 more years.
--Parking lot vandalism has markedly gone up. On 06.04.01 a Union Representitive was arrested for smashing windshields in the parking lot.
--Certainly this individual is not the whole of the Unions of America but one of the bad apples. However if the employees of a company decide they do not want a union protecting them they should be allowed to be rid of them.
--Imagine if you were at an ISP that was unionized and you were unable to get rid of them. Be carful what you wish for.
---
This
I'm a Programmer/Network Specialist for a state government agency, and required to join a Union.
I pay like $30/month but that includes good dental and vision benefits. I also get up to $2000 a year for tuition reimbursement through the union.
It's a great deal; I'm getting paid a good salary for interesting work, I'm not a slave, have a great pension plan (which is guaranteed by the state constitution) and 401k-like plan and am getting a free master's degree.
The union isn't a be-all end-all, but it serves a purpose. Unless you are a "superstar" who sacrifices his social life to keep completely up-to-date on the hottest tech fads, it is impossible to negotiate a good deal with a large corporation or government agency.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK