Union workers who hate unions. I don't get it.

[hay rick]

133. My firsthand experience is very different from your secondhand account.

I was a union member, officer, and steward for 30+ years in the Postal Service. My union is the NALC (city letter carrier craft).

My father dealt with workers who were thieves (stealing parts from the factory for fun and profit); they would catch them, get them convicted in court, and they would be back on the factory floor (usually stealing again) within days.

Over my career, a small number of people where I worked were charged with petty theft. They were all fired.

Then there were the guys who came to work drunk or drugged out; people get hurt when that happens, but the union always managed to "protect" the "chosen ones"

I only had one drug/drinking case to deal with and it happened to be my last one. The Postal Service received an anonymous call stating that a carrier was drinking on the job at a bar. Management stopped him after he had returned to delivering his route. He admitted to having one drink that was bought for him by a patron after he entered the bar to use a restroom. He offered to take a blood test or a breathalyzer test. They declined the offer and put him on immediate suspension. They then issued a letter of removal (firing him). The carrier had over 40 years of service and the only discipline in his file was for missing a 12:00 delivery on a single Express Mail. I filed the grievance but retired before the case was settled. I understand he returned to work after 6 months. I don't know if he was awarded back pay or not. I do know that he was financially hurt as he always worked a lot of overtime (which he would not get under any settlement) and he had a kid in college.

One of the cases I remember as a child that had my father livid furious involved a "union rep" who had other people punch his time card in, and then didn't actually bother to come to work.

I never had experience with a union rep or craft employee falsifying time cards. I had experience with two managers who falsified time records. One was allowed to resign. The other was recent and the manager was suspended and his fate undetermined when I left. He was cheating employees out of time worked (the union uncovered his fraudulent entries) and they were still in the process of going through the pay records to determine the magnitude of the problem.

The FIL story is too vague to compare to my experience- but I can tell you that I never sacrificed the rights or interests of one employee to advance the interests of another employee. I don't understand the "volunteer" aspect of the story either. In my union, stewards are paid nominal wages- absolutely no one does it for the money- but they receive comprehensive training, and if they are green, somebody with experience holds their hand.

Then there is my husband's uncle; his stories are nearly as annoyed. Because the unions "protected" people once they hit a certain seniority position, three guys would be assigned to do a job that one working man could easily do.

Again, never had the pleasure of seeing anything remotely similar. When I first started 35 years ago, there were a couple old guys who worked slowly- but they worked at their pace for 8 hours. In recent years the much more common trend was to see people working through their lunch and breaks- and still being harassed.

...my husband was walking the floor one evening, and got to observe one of the maintenance guys come out from the "sleeping area", and (not seeing my husband) walk over with a wrench and whack something off of one of the machines, and then walk away as some kind of alarm went off.

Again, I have no comparable experience. I will say that if management couldn't figure out and solve the problem then management was inept or corrupt. That is not a union problem. I also wouldn't tout that situation as evidence of a "strong" union. A strong union seeks to keep the enterprise alive.

Did your husband report the incident and take an interest in the outcome?

For someone who believes in "the concept of unions" you sure seem anxious to get all your negative stories out there. The media loves your kind of story. A couple years ago, the New York Post and the New York Daily News both had a cover story about the overweight head of a plumbers local who had embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay for hookers, expensive cars, etc. That evening, I went to an officer's meeting for my local. At the time, I was a trustee and dealt with the branch finances. The President announced that we had a financial problem- officers were putting in too many compensation requests for additional work done on their own time over and above what was required in the job description. The reason for this was that the Postal Service had started issuing more discipline and it was requiring more time to provide representation. As a trustee, I knew that we didn't have more money in the budget. The President's solution was simple: officers could continue to put in the requests, but the compensation rate would be cut in half. We all laughed- and that's what we agreed to do. It was typical- and nobody heard about it except the people who attended the next membership meeting. But everybody read about the corrupt head of the plumbers...

I know that unions are not perfect, but extrapolating from my personal experience, I believe that, on balance, they are forces for good.