Hold West said:
As a dirty member of management who has worked in both union (predominately Teamster) and non-union environments, I can with out a doubt say union employees are much easier to manipulate then non-union ones.
For example at one company the union would actively assist us in firing people with less than 10yrs seniority. This was because they knew the person was being eliminated but not the job so they could gain another initiation fee, they wouldn’t have to pay any pension benefits (even though the party had paid in for several years), etc. The ease in contract negotiations was directly correlated to how much assistance we could provide the union (not the employees) in making $$$. Every contract I have ever seen includes the provision for forced overtime (though done by seniority), granted everyone wanted extra $$$ it was never an issue but legally we could force and the worker would have to accept the overtime; you can’t do that to a non-union employee.
In terms of firing people it is a lot easier to do in a union environment because the work rules are covered in a contract, merely find somebody breaking a rule and fire them. Generally after 2-3 trips down the hall and they lose their job and really have no legal recourse. With non-union employees you have a greater potential for a lawsuit and because often times work rules are loosely implemented (Timmy is always late but because he is a good worker doesn’t get in trouble, but Billy is late 3-4 times and gets fired).
Non union workers tend to be better able to switch jobs so you have to work a bit harder to hold onto them as people compete for them. Union workers have standard pensions so they are less likely to leave so you can treat them like ********************. While they tend to earn better initially in the long run they tend to earn less then their non-union counterparts but by the time that happens they would have to lose pensions and start again at the bottom of the ladder so they are stuck.
Because again Union workers are tied to benefits packages it is very easy to get them to vote on whatever you want through wage/benefit scales. Tell your current workers you will give them a raise in exchange for screwing new hires and you can pretty much get whatever you want. Tell them if they don’t give you what you want that you will kill their pension and they will agree to anything. No employee union or non-union really gives a ******************** about his fellow worker only his own direct benefit so he will gladly screw another employee over if it benefits him. The beauty of a union is you don’t have to individually get 1,000 people to screw each other over you can just present a document and get them all to screw each other at once!
Union threatens to strike, its no problem just lock them out and hire replacements (be sure to unionize them so instead of having to control 1,000’s of individuals you only have to control a couple union officials and repeat the process).
Personally I really don’t see any good served by unions, in most cases they are worse then the employer.
