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 rather work with one union than a few hundred.
Between our management and the outside world, the union has been beaten to a point that no person with any kind of leadership potential wants to waste his or her time beating their heads against walls and ceilings. So, we get people with lots of ambition and very little ability, people who couldn't lead salmon to the ocean and back. When others in the union see this void, they play the hokey-pokey. They put their right foot in, say some things that stir up the troops, then the put their right foot out. Time passes. Then they put their left foot in, say some things to stir up different troops, and they put their left foot out.
The result is a bunch of different groups are all fired up about totally disparate things, and union leadership does not know whether to fish or cut bait. They aren't the sharpest knives in the drawer to start with, and all this action turns them into bowls of quivering jello. Now, when the organization is headless (for all intents and purposes), who do you deal with to make things better? How do you fix things?
I say this because we're in the middle of negotiations for a new union contract, and I'm the oddball non-HR person on the management side. It's really tough to negotiate with a sand dune. As soon as we think we have a deal the wind will blow. When that happens, the dune changes shape and the whole deal collapses.
I've been told that it wasn't like this in the past. The union delegates knew their business and knew the history, and they understood how far they could push the company (most of the time - they did bungle themselves into strikes a couple times). More importantly, they knew how far they could push their membership. They knew what they should tell the rank-and-file and they knew what not to tell the rank-and-file. They controlled the people. This batch we're working with now control the union but they sure as hell don't control the people.
Middle managers like us need to walk a very fine line. We need to support the union so that it functions when we need it to function. Yes, they can be near-sighted, destructive, selfish bastids who are pains in the backside to deal with. Yes, they greive the silliest small injustices, causing us more work that we don't need. It's still better than chaos.
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 rather work with one union than a few hundred.
Between our management and the outside world, the union has been beaten to a point that no person with any kind of leadership potential wants to waste his or her time beating their heads against walls and ceilings. So, we get people with lots of ambition and very little ability, people who couldn't lead salmon to the ocean and back. When others in the union see this void, they play the hokey-pokey. They put their right foot in, say some things that stir up the troops, then the put their right foot out. Time passes. Then they put their left foot in, say some things to stir up different troops, and they put their left foot out.
The result is a bunch of different groups are all fired up about totally disparate things, and union leadership does not know whether to fish or cut bait. They aren't the sharpest knives in the drawer to start with, and all this action turns them into bowls of quivering jello. Now, when the organization is headless (for all intents and purposes), who do you deal with to make things better? How do you fix things?
I say this because we're in the middle of negotiations for a new union contract, and I'm the oddball non-HR person on the management side. It's really tough to negotiate with a sand dune. As soon as we think we have a deal the wind will blow. When that happens, the dune changes shape and the whole deal collapses.
I've been told that it wasn't like this in the past. The union delegates knew their business and knew the history, and they understood how far they could push the company (most of the time - they did bungle themselves into strikes a couple times). More importantly, they knew how far they could push their membership. They knew what they should tell the rank-and-file and they knew what not to tell the rank-and-file. They controlled the people. This batch we're working with now control the union but they sure as hell don't control the people.
Middle managers like us need to walk a very fine line. We need to support the union so that it functions when we need it to function. Yes, they can be near-sighted, destructive, selfish bastids who are pains in the backside to deal with. Yes, they greive the silliest small injustices, causing us more work that we don't need. It's still better than chaos.
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