World of Warcraft: Current Year

Sieger said:

State government jobs are not union jobs necessarily, many states don't allow public sector unions. But civil servants are protected by state level "Civil Service Acts" which were developed in the early 20th century to replace the old system of government jobs where you got hired based on what politician you bribed and fired when that politician lost election. These civil service systems are what requires the termination process be followed. Some states do have collective bargaining contracts with public sector unions as well. This is uncommon in the Southeast and many of the big empty states between the Pacific coast and the Mississippi River.

Now your claim about private sector workers misses the point I already made--it's typical in many corporations that you have an annoying HR process to follow to fire someone, it is also not unusual for lax management to occur and ignore bad workers. In other cases, companies which employ lots of low wage workers exercise only minimal oversight of work quality due to the fact low wage positions have such high turnover it's not usually worth the time to attempt to "curate" the workforce that much. Poor quality employees are widely found in every industry and every type of employment.

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My wife got a few 89 day gigs at the Ford parts depot. Basically non union help labor. 89 days only because at 90 days they would have to hire you full time. It was great money at the time, something like $18/hr or whatever, back in the 90s. Job consisted of getting an order slip, taking a giant shopping cart, fillit with the parts and send it off to packaging dept. So one day she gets stopped by some perma workers there and she is told to lay off, slow down, shes making everyone look bad. You see they had unions set up quotas for orders per hour or some shit. So you could never work harder than the dude next to you because you would get slapped down by everybody else. Because if they saw you could do 10 orders per hour and the quota was 5, the quotas would be eventually readjusted and everyone would have to work harder.

I could go on for days about how shitty modern unions are.

Fucker said:

Teamsters are a horrible union with numb, inert workers, and is the primary reason why a vast amount of work is now outsourced. I worked at a company that had Teamsters; they dropped grievances left and right, and for the most trivial shit. You couldn't lift a computer or monitor onto a desk...they had to do it, or move anything over x_pounds. Those idiots were always walking all over the place with their damn hand trucks and their stupid back braces. Every time I saw an unattended hand cart, I'd abscond with it and hide it. If you've ever been in a building and saw a lone hand cart riding the elevators all day, that was me or the work of someone like me.

LMAO at Mist saying Amazon should go Teamsters. Enjoy getting your package in two weeks ya numb fuck.

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Yeah they pulled that shit on us at a GM facility. Most of us were jobbie engineers there doing some program for South America. One day they tell us we need to move to other side of office, probably like 100 yards. But the computers were all GM owned. So they called in the union to move the shit. Took them a week. They sent us all home paid vacation and GM lost out on about 30 of us for a whole week of productivity.

mkopec said:

My wife got a few 89 day gigs at the Ford parts depot. Basically non union help labor. 89 days only because at 90 days they would have to hire you full time. It was great money at the time, something like $18/hr or whatever, back in the 90s. Job consisted of getting an order slip, taking a giant shopping cart, fillit with the parts and send it off to packaging dept. So one day she gets stopped by some perma workers there and she is told to lay off, slow down, shes making everyone look bad. You see they had unions set up quotas for orders per hour or some shit. So you could never work harder than the dude next to you because you would get slapped down by everybody else. Because if they saw you could do 10 orders per hour and the quota was 5, the quotas would be eventually readjusted and everyone would have to work harder.

I could go on for days about how shitty modern unions are.

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This is EXACTLY how it was at UPS.

I used to work unload wall most of the time. Well, the rate at the time was 650 pieces/hour. I had unloaded trucks for another company a few years prior on manual conveyors, so now that I had these fancy, adjustable auto conveyors at UPS, I knew I'd be able to fly. I could usually hit 800+ on most days, especially if it didn't involve super heavy shit like books or ammo. On the JCPenny trailers that were mostly clothes, I'd top 1000+ no problem.

Well, the dudes on sort didn't like having to work hard (more pieces coming at you means you have to sort faster, obviously) and used to bitch up a storm, "Heeeeeyyyyyyy!!! Slow down buddy! Nobody is trying to be Superman over here!!". Eventually they'd just shut the line off. My supervisor would come over and ask what the problem was, and I'd say "Well, Louis is bitching that I'm going too fast, so he shut down the sorter while he "catches up"". My supervisor would say, "Fuck that. When he turns it back on I'll help you burry him. I'm sick of his shit".

No surprise, supervisors/management weren't part of the union. Shit happened almost daily. There were a few sorters who were cool and had no problem keeping up, but there were 4 or 5 that were just absolute trash, trying to do as little work as possible.

I used to be a big, "Rah, rah! Unions protect workers!" dipshit when I was young and naive. It wasn't until I was actually in one that I realized how they actually fuckin' work. Essentially, they only serve the absolute dregs of the workforce. They protect the shittiest, laziest employees that would otherwise be fired for performance/production anywhere else. And they keep down anybody who wants to excel, because everything in terms of promotions, raises, etc. is based on seniority only, performance doesn't mean shit. Being a good, productive employee gets you nowhere. Essentially, "average" is the expectation. Too far below it and the union will protect you, too far above it and you'll get everyone screaming at you for trying to excel.

My wifes dad retired from Ford. Few years before he go the best job in the whole place because of his seniority. Know what it was? A fucking cleaner. Yep cleaned bathrooms and the office trash cans on the midnight shift. Why was it the best job? Because it only took a hour to do it, so he would go home drink beer, come back hour before his shift was up and punch the clock.

Tarisk said:

So you worked 2 years as a hub rat? How did you manage to not get out of that shithole after so long?

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It wasn't quite 2 years. 19ish months. Average seniority level to go driver at our hub was 5 years.

Warrik said:

I took your point to be Alex has the same asshole gene Steve Jobs did. Raging dicks who everyone wanted to be near/loved by.

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Yeah certain people have that charisma. I had a buddy like that. Unlike Alex though, total fucking loser, never had a job in his life for more than a week or two. But yet he had that charisma and people would just gravitate to him, pay for all his shit, even give him free room and board.

Mist said:

This happens at non-union places. I was constantly intimidated and even threatened for working too many tickets at my last job.

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You worked at a unionized IT MSP or whatever?

That is a hell of a unicorn lol.

I like that the argument has devolved to people being annoyed unions allowed them to only suck 20 corporate dicks an hour when they could easily have taken 60.

This is the best thread. Shit, we even got Kreugen back.

elbas said:

The workers become human robots that are junked as surplus if they aren't part of the fastest workers (like Amazon warehouses).

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I've worked in FCs/DCs and warehouses my entire life. I've spent the past 6 years in an FC environment, even for a company like Walmart. This isn't true at all, but keep repeating what the "news" tells you about how "deplorable" those environments are.

xmod2 said:

I like that the argument has devolved to people being annoyed unions allowed them to only suck 20 corporate dicks an hour when they could easily have taken 60.

This is the best thread. Shit, we even got Kreugen back.

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Yeah if you have pleb manual labor jobs like that I guess I can see the appeal. Software developer unions just wouldn't fly because you can always just get another dev job. Especially if you're even average at it. A software developer union would leave you stuck with shitty people.