Re: How unions help all workers

Posted by caveat on August 6, 2008, 3:41 am

My experience with unions is as follows. . .

I used to work in the Phoenix Arizona area as a telecom. tech. installing
PBX (large phone systems) and large WANs.
The company I worked for was nation wide.
A little before Y2K we had a union, I think it was CWA, try to get into our
co..
It turns out that the increase that they claimed we would get in pay was not
much more than we were getting once you counted in the union dues.
Also, the benefit package was not much different than what we were already
getting.
The union was not voted in except in New York.

The techs that I talked to who worked jobs in New York said that they never
had so many problems installing a project as they had in New York.
In Arizona, or other states, they could do their job as needed. If they had
to run a #6 ground wire from an electrical panel then they did it. If they
needed to install some ladder rack or cable trays then they simply did it.
If they needed to mount some plywood on the wall for a backboard then they
simply did it.
They were able to keep their hours with in what was sold on the job.

However, in New York they were always waiting on the union guys to come in
and perform the needed work as they were not allowed to run wires because
that was the job for the union electricians, they were sometimes not allowed
to actually touch the programming terminal because that was the job of the
union programmer, etc..

Yes, our company was smart enough to sell extra hours for waiting on the
union guys to come in and do their work and yes the techs did find other
things to do to keep busy while waiting on the union guys but there were
times when all it did was slow them down. For example, one programmer who
can type over 100wpm and could program in her sleep was not allowed to touch
the programming terminal because it was a union job so all she could do was
tell (teach) the union programmer what to type and she said that it would
take about a week to get programmed what she could do in a day.
What is the added *union* value of having our non-union employee walk,
step-by-step, a union programmer through the program while turning a one day
job into a week? It simply made sure that another person was paid for
another week of work but was not needed to complete the job - it was simply
waste.

I understand that part of the selling point of a union is that the work is
done correctly and to local code by experienced people but often, like with
my former company, it simply meant that we had to pay an extra person or
subcontractor to do the very same work that our techs were trained in and
experienced in. Hell, we sometimes had to train them to do our job so what
is the union added quality of that?

I'm not saying that unions don't offer any value, I know there are many
situations where union work does offer some assurance that you are getting
quality work.
What I am saying is that sometimes all that a union does is add unneeded
complexity, cost and time to a job that can be done just as well if not
sometimes better than a non-union job.

There are jobs where unions work well to improve the job from start to
finish but there are also places where unions simply get in the way.

It's a balancing act, union vs. non-union for some jobs, factory trained vs.
non-factory trained for another and experienced contractor vs. newbe for
other jobs. It all comes down to the quality you expect from the contractor
and union vs. non-union is not the only or even always the primary
measurement.

Chris

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