this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2023
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The union at my plant is trash. All they do is benefit whoever has been there the longest and the lazy workers (which are most often one and the same). As a hard worker, I've always promoted very quickly at non union companies. At my current union plant I've had managers, supervisors, and every mechanic on A shift say they want me on their respective shift. Because of union seniority rules, I'm placed after our worst mechanic, and employees that are constantly late, call in, and lazy AF, get their jobs back time and time again. I won't be giving my money to a crap union like that. Looking forward to that union negotiated 2% raise next year (which took them 18 months of negotiations)... SMFH...
Its seems you are most interested in competing against your coworkers.
Unions are useful when workers notice that they share the same interests, and build power collectively against the bosses.
I'm trying to better my life, period. If I have the knowledge and work ethic to make myself valuable enough to a company that warrants higher pay and a better position, then I feel I've earned it (which I've managed to do at several companies before). I'm not the type to just sit back and wait for my employee number to carry me forward.
For my coworkers, the union is only a means to do as little as possible and keep their job, or get hired back when fired. The union rep during orientation literally told us he's been fired twice (at least once for testing dirty) and the union got him his job back twice. So the union is great. Join it... That was pretty much his whole pitch.
I'm definitely not saying all unions are bad, and you shouldn't be trying to sell all unions as good either. The union at my work is garbage and does nothing but keep the worst of them employed.
You may feel your knowledge and attitude make you valuable to your company, but your life is improved, in economic terms, by higher income from wages. In turn, your wages are not determined by your own abstract beliefs or feelings about your value, but rather by the economic rule of supply and demand. As such, if labor is available to your employer and other employers in excessive supply, then its value in economic terms is diminished, that is, your wages are depressed.
Therefore, your enthusiasm over providing labor, and your doubtfulness for the union as a mechanism for strategically withholding your labor collectively with coworkers, are together contributing to your wages being depressed.
If your only ambition is to have higher pay than your coworkers, then, as long as you are successful in competing against them, your interest may be served by continuing the way you describe.
If, however, your interest is in having the highest possible pay, then the more suitable choice would be supporting labor organization through your union, even if a further effect of such a choice may be helping your coworkers also have higher pay, despite your ill feelings toward them.
By competing against your coworkers without supporting the union, the best outcome you should expect is that you would have more pay than other workers as an effect that only partially offsets the opposing effect, the stronger of the two, of wages for everyone, including for yourself, being depressed.
Generally, while I understand your frustration with your union, I wonder how much sympathy you may reasonably expect, as long as your attitude remains as one that would contribute to sabotaging its efficacy.
Yeah, unfortunately this can happen