re: Unions = Major Problem...to say the least.

There’s a reason most companies outsource their production from the United States, especially car companies. F unions.

I have never had a problem with labor unions...
I feel like they should be free to negotiate based on the workers and skills they provide. It’s a competitive market.

I was in a union for 5 years. I had to join it to get the job, but was offered the job by the company. It embraces mediocrity.

Went to a private company afterward. Immediately noticed a huge difference. There are hard workers and smooth workers, but the hard workers are promited/recognized, etc.

I saw the disadvantages of the private company though.

Overall private is better.

My last job in the Corporate world was for a hospital owned by a fairly well known Nashville based company. It went to the SEIU after the parent company agreed not to contest the union for several Florida based hospitals to satisfy the union lobbyists.

I’d spent the previous two decades in academic facilities. I can honestly say it was the worst experience of my life due in large part to the Union. I agree that unions have brought some positive workforce changes to the country.

As the person managing a few hundred employees it cuts off the direct line of communication with staff. Everything goes through a Steward. Even so much as a vacation request needed approval from the Stewards. The Union also negotiated raises and wage increases. As a result, everyone got the same raise. Making it impossible for Management to give better merit increases to the most valued employees. As a result; the high performers quickly realize that they could do better elsewhere and leave.

Heaven forbid you didn’t pay dues. If you got in any sort of disciplinary trouble the Union would hang you out to dry. Nearly 40% of the staff didn’t pay dues. It probably comes as no surprise that the worst performing employees knew the SEIU handbook verbatim and were huge fans of the Union.

We had an incident where a Radiology employee administered intravenous contrast medium to a patient despite a physicians order explicitly stating not to as the patient was in kidney failure. This is a cardinal sin that’s drilled into every Radiology employee from day one in college. The employee realized they messed up and started pumping several liters of IV fluids into the patient in an attempt to flush it out of the patient. Trouble is, that’s outside of his scope of practice and if the kidneys aren’t working you are only complicating the patients condition further. Bottom line, the patient bottomed out and was rushed to another hospital to undergo emergency dialysis. The patient could have died.

The Union agreed that the employee should be suspended until an investigation was performed. The hospital argued the employee should be terminated for gross negligence and defying physicians orders. The Unions position was that the job description needed to be updated to make clear that administering medication without a Physicians order isn’t okay and the employee should paid in full while on leave before being allowed to return to work.

6 months later the hospital won and the employee was terminated. Come to find out it was this employees second such incident in a matter of years. All the while during that 6 months the employee was paid in full and had actually found work at another hospital. So he was getting paid double. Making matters worse; we couldn’t refill his position during the investigation/arbitration making his peers bear the burden of huge amounts of overtime for those months.

So it goes without saying, I’m not a huge fan of Unions to this day.