|
I get in quite a bit of trouble when I loudly voice my "opinion" that unions are just "Socialists in disguise trying to extort business owners out of their hard earned money. Unions should be completely out-lawed so that everyone has the freedom to negotiate the wage they want to be paid."
I say "opinion" because it's the opposite of the point I am trying to make. A lot of my friends are union millrights, machinists, or firefighters, and I do not know of one that is a progressive.
One of the points that union members is that unions serve as a barrier to stupid management, and actually help run a company better.
On the mill-side of things, the example is usually given that the company is adding a new machine to the production line, or adding a new turbine, or whatever it is. What usually happens is that management does not take into consideration the maintence needs of the machine, and when left to it's own devices, would put it in a place where it makes maintence more difficult; to the extent of having to shut down other working machines to make way to transport a part for the broken machine. A good union foreman (because there are bad ones too like any other place) keeps management from making stupid/uninformed decisions that save company time and money in the long run.
In the public service sector, it is much of the same thing. City managers who are facing budget constraints look at the Fire Departments of their cities, and want to make staffing cuts but receive the same kind of services. A lot of the times, it is something that is simply not possible to do without compromising the service that they are providing. There is a bare minimum number of people that are needed to put out a structure fire and still maintain some degree of safety, and when you have to wake people up in the night that are not on duty to be the first responders to a fire, then your response time is going to go up, and your house is going to be a "surround and drowned" operation by the time an adequate number of people get there.
|