Middle Management Blues

I've been around a bargaining unit all my working life, so unions are natural to me. I was even in one, once. My personal opinion is that unions are a creation of management - if management treats their employees like crap, the employee have very little chance except to form and/or support a union. My company thinks that middle managers like me should go out of our way to crush the union, and the union leaders think they should go out of their way to be pains in the backsides of middle managers like me. That's not the way it usually works. Our CEO came from one of these ivory tower consulting firms, and his HR manager used to be the old CEO's admin (I'm not kidding) and so their combined clue is about the same as three paramecia. They don't understand the types of relationships we need to promote to keep the wheels on the road. We work with these people every day. I actually like most of them. I want their union to have some solidarity, because I'd rat...

In a screwed up organization, it is not unusual to have a dead man walking. He knows the axe is coming, and he’s half-way to zombie land. It’s no use to try to explain anything remotely complicated, because he will zone out before you get to the interesting parts and you will have to do it again (at least once). One mill manager we had went through this for 6 or 7 weeks before the Nazis came in to help him clean out his personal things. This same guy once told me that if he pursued the course of action I was advocating, I would receive “the new mill manager bonus”, i.e. a new mill manager. (He must have been very experienced at pacing along the gallows…)(And he blew me off that time though he admitted that I was right…) You might remember that my boss got the heave-ho a few weeks back, and now we have the new boss bonus. The new boss is interim. He came from headquarters. He is the VP’s designated troubleshooter. (Can you get the flavor for this already? This bonus is not ...