As you can see from this very topic the pros of unions tend to be ignored while the pain of them is repeated.
Higher wages tend to be ignored as it is vague. Harder to fire is tainted by police unions protecting cops from their own actions.
You end up with the benefits being vague and the problems being obvious. Dues are frustrating and any bad union leaders get tons of attention.
For better or worse everyone tends to assume the things unions work for are a given. So the only real talking points become the bad things. Not that this is unique to unions lol.
Union protected programmers made me decide against pursuing a career doing tech for the Illinois EPA. It was impossible to get people who couldn't actually write software out of the way.
Some time in the past I had a mildly critical system in a remote office go down. A technician would have to simply replace a part. However, because it required a Union guy to go in there to remove a screw first, it had to wait over the weekend --meaning the company now had to take modest losses over the weekend.
The guy couldn't sneak in a screw driver as that could potentially end up costing the company more money.
This is where unions earn some of their great reputation among stiffs.
On the flip side, the employer signed the same agreement as the union/employees. If the company valued weekend up-time, they could have negotiated a higher weekend rate to get a union guy in to fix the problem. The company prioritized low labor costs over uptime, so they're at least 50% to blame here.
The alternative is anyone who knows how to use a screwdriver could do it in 30-seconds.
Talk about waste of resources, fuel, etc., etc.
Oh, Oh, Oh! I know, if they let this one time slip HERE in THIS INSTANCE is where the SLIPPERY SLOPE applies, but, obviously no where else, especially in politics.
Apparently, that's not what the contract says. It says just certain job titles can do that work. So it sounds like thr alternative is to pay the OT, which is at the discretion of management.
Obviously both are true, by definition. The ridiculousness of the situation is not about the choices made by the technician and the company, but the fact that the guy that was already there was prohibited from using a screwdriver.
In my first job after college, I shared a cubicle with another worker. For whatever reasons, our desks were next to each other, rather than spaced out. I wanted to rotate my desk 90 degrees and had mentioned this to my manager. In a near panic, he asked if I'd moved anything. I hadn't moved anything, so he told me the proper procedure to move the desk.
I put in the request and about 3 weeks later, two people came to move the desk. I'd already unplugged any wiring, so one guy simply picked it up and rotated it. At that point, I found out my network cable (this is in the days before WiFi) for my PC was too short to reach the new desk location. I had to put in another request for wiring, and had to wait a week and a half for someone to come with a longer cable. During that time, I sat on the floor, with my monitor sitting on my chair. While installing the new cable, he asked if I'd unplugged the previous cable before the desk move. When I told him yes, he told me not to worry and that he wouldn't note that, but that I shouldn't do it again.
While I totally understand work rules that exist to ensure that workers aren't being made to perform duties that they're not contracted for AND to prevent companies from simply doing end-runs around them, when things reach this level of absurdity, it really sours things. Of course, the nature of "contract" is that common sense is hard to dictate and it does open the slippery slope. "I was just moving the desk in my cube" becomes "I was just moving the desk to the cube next door" to "I was just moving it on the same floor" etc.
Ha! I recall something similar some time ago at one of the then big valley companies. There was a big procedure around moving equipment and one could not do it oneself --it required a ticket and then a day or so later some guys would come over and move things that I could have done myself with one of those rubbermaid restaurant service carts.
Ironically, my previous job was an internship at a big valley company, who's former HQ is now occupied by one of the biggest valley companies. There, I needed to ship a bunch of equipment to another office. It needed to be there in 3 weeks, but the soonest the shipping department could pick it up was 4 weeks for some reason. However, there was an unspoken agreement w/the folks there that anything that made it to the shipping area would be shipped w/no questions asked as long as it "just appeared" there. So, over the course of a few nights, I stayed late and moved the equipment to the dock, labeled it appropriately, and everything made it to the destination on time.
Reminds me of a teacher I know in a small town. Their school lost their sole librarian and the library was closed. The teacher volunteered to run the library so it could stay open. Union says it's not allowed, library stays closed.
If the librarian was paid, the union's position makes a certain amount of sense.
Also, the library is open during school hours, so does the teacher not teach during that time? The school has replaced the lost librarian but is effectively short a teacher now.
The position was a paid one. I suppose the offer to keep it open by volunteering would have been worked around their class schedule and be at a reduced level of service compared to before. Still, it would have been open.
Screw it! Let's outlaw volunteerism, it obviously undercuts the labor market and that is not allowed. Volunteers are anti-labor capitalists disguised as goody two shoes serving the community.
The teacher thing is a real and complex problem. Police is a bad example though, they aren't labor unions in any meaningful sense. No police union has joined a labor dispute on the side of labor. But they have, time and again, intimidated, arrested, threatened, even killed workers exercising their rights.
Public sector unions (police, teachers, etc) are a whole different animal. While they serve the same function for employees on paper, the politics and negotiations involved are different enough that they really should be a separate conversation.
Both categories of unions have problems and benefits, but they don't overlap 100%.
Public sector unions are a seperate problem. When youbfind somethibg thats a step too far for FDR you should probably think twice about it.
Private sector unions really depend on the industry and the union itself. they can be good, they can be bad. the only time inreally have a problem with them is when they arent voluntary.
Higher wages tend to be ignored as it is vague. Harder to fire is tainted by police unions protecting cops from their own actions.
You end up with the benefits being vague and the problems being obvious. Dues are frustrating and any bad union leaders get tons of attention.
For better or worse everyone tends to assume the things unions work for are a given. So the only real talking points become the bad things. Not that this is unique to unions lol.