Well, I thought that I would share some of my experiences with unions after reading this thread. First off, I will state that I am a member of two unions and couldn't care less that I am. I am not a part of any of the benefits programs they offer and get no benefits from them whatsoever. The reason I am a member is because if I didn't become a member, the same sort of crap that happened to C-town, would probably have happened to our construction company, and some of it did. We have a truck with at telescoping crane on it and I became pretty efficient at operating it. We did a job about 15 years ago that was on a big apartment complex, having numerous sub contractors, some union and some not. About half way through the job, a rep from the operating engineers came over and said we needed to have a 101 man on the crane and that I couldn't operate. My dad told him to sit there and watch for awhile, and he could then observe that in fact, I could operate it. This wasn't the answer he was looking for. After hounding us for several months, he set up a picket at the entrance to the job site, and pretty much shut the whole job down, because one person was not a member of his local. After much haggling, my dad finally asked them, what is it gonna take to get you off our back and they said if he joins the union, then we will leave you alone. We paid the quarterly dues, and never saw him again. All he wanted was to get his commission off the dues, and he was a happy camper. And after reading all of the paperwork associated with the benefits program, you didn't become vested into the pension fund until you had paid in for a minumum of 10 years and it was all or nothing. If you put in for 9 years and 6 months, and for one reason or another went into a new profession, you got not one dime of that when you could retire. Where or who does that money go to???
Example 2 A friend of mine works at a Ford assembly plant. I talked to him for the first time in about a year and asked him what he was doing up there. He said he was a "Heyboy". I said what in the hell is that and he said that he goes and fills in for people who are on vacation or have health issues or who get sh!tfaced drunk on their lunch hour and come back to the plant and jump on a forklift. He said he was presently running a fork lift because two guys went to a local watering hole on their lunch hour and got blitzed, came back to work stumbling drunk and got on a heavy piece of equipment and about killed some people. I asked him if they got fired and he said are you kidding, the union went to bat for them and they got suspended for two weeks, WITH PAY. They get twisted on their lunch hour, about kill some people and the union supports this kind of conduct.
I've got more but I think you get me drift. As dawgball stated, FDC I don't know the union you represent and I'm sure if you didn't feel strongly about it, then you wouldn't be working there. I think unions were formed originally many years ago when there were a lot of facactories with very poor working conditions, but I don't think that is the case so much anymore.
