[Devils'Advocate]

I'm ambivelant about unions. I do belong to a union, and I know that if I didn't have a good union I wouldn't have the pay and benefits that I have now. On the other hand, I've had so many run-ins with my own union that they **** me off.

I work in systems for the federal government. Until 2003 I was a programmer and ever since I've been supervising programmers. And I can't get rid of the slackers. I've had this guy that reads the newspaper all day. I had another guy that would disappear for hours at a time. I had another guy that played games on his computer all day. I give these guys lousy performance appraisals.. one guy threw it back in my face and said "Watcha gonna do? Fire me? Ha!" And it's true... the union will go to the wall to protect the slacker a-holes, but won't lift a finger to help me get the work done. I had one ass-wipe that purposefully broke our security regulations and I had the proof. Yet the director said that it would take a full year of my time in front of tribunals, of paperwork, of testimony in front of lawyers to get rid of this guy, so it just wasn't cost effective. So yes, unions **** me off. Yet I would never leave this job BECAUSE of my union.

My mother worked for MT&T (now Aliant Telecom) for 18 years. Two years from a partial pension, they laid her off. They laid off everyone that was close to getting their pension and kept the young low-paid people. Everyone knew that the company was no longer making a profit, so cuts were coming - but they just gutted the non-union workers with massive layoffs while on the other hand the union workers they reduced through attrition.

I've seen far too many good people work very, very hard just get slapped down. Without a union to back you up, employers have almost carte blanche. I once worked in a non-unionized private sector job where the most competent project leader was fired "for not being a team player" because she wouldn't follow managements demand to force one of her programmers to work extra hours when she knew this programmer had a very ill wife that needed taking care of. I've witnessed my fair share of the good guy finishing last because they had nobody backing them up against the whims of the powerful execs.


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All that to say that I think unions are still necessary because employers still abuse their power to treat good people badly. I just think that unions are still stuck in the 1920s and think of the employer as the enemy and will do anything in their power to cause the company to be more inefficient. I find myself butting heads more with the union more than I do upper management. And it just shouldn't be that way. But I don't know how to fix it.