I have worked for two unions. I see a lot of praise for unions. I see people want unions. Unions are good and not bad. But they also are not great and not all unions are made the same.
The first union I worked for was some $10 a month membership pseudo union for a regional lumber supplier. It was OK. They still ended up letting me go around 2008 because of the recession and I had worked there for 1/2 years. I got a pay out of my retirement account for like $3500. It wasn’t bad. Pretty fair. But I still got laid off and they still would have some guy watching me work with a clipboard counting my inventory progress Like micro management.
Ok.
Fast-ward to now. I work for a government and we get a union. It’s $100 a month out of my paycheck. What do I get? Nothing. During the pandemic they cut our pay (significant) and in the end it was for NOTHING. People who got laid off were making more then I was. I would have rather been laid off to be honest. Then the managers. Top down to the frontline supervisor they all subvert the union. They don’t run the place like a union push us harder then some of my friends in private so I am overworked and overpaid. I wake up at 5am sometimes miserable to work from my computer and then stay there until 6pm. Those are not my “official” hours. Some of my other co workers send my emails at 9pm. So it’s not just me. What they do is about a 3rd of the workers get a “union life” and I’ve seen those workers 5 times in person since even before corona. They never commuted they were work from home since I started before corona. And before corona the rest of us did GRUELING commutes. Like these commutes cause Massive turn over. 2/3/4 hours a day. 180 miles round trip. You’d think a UNION would not run this way.
Yet they say oh the “high performers”
It’s favoritism plain simple vanilla.
These favored employees talk bad to us less favored folks and we all do the same work. And the managers are all in bed together right to the top.
I contacted my Union rep who says they’ll try to do something. Follow up. HR for my department is defending the managers. “What do you want us to do? We can’t fire them”
And that’s when I found out.
A union is only any good if the MANAGERS are also cooperating and not in cahoots all together against the union. If that’s the case the union is just taking money out of your paycheck really for nothing. They barley protect my benefits, we are losing them just more slowly then other governments without a union.