Trump found guilty!

[Jeff Niceswanger]

Originally Posted by jmcarter

Everyone has their own perspective on unions but I can share mine based on managing a team of 200 machinist members of the IAM. Negotiating contracts and the language for distribution of overtime and such was never a huge problem. Hourly rate was always negotiated fairly easily unless the fully burdened rate would render our products too costly to compete. Larger issues were implementing productivity and/or quality improvements that the union felt could chip away at the total number of paying members. The poor performers were shielded by the union because again, the number of paying members were of the utmost importance to the union, not the productivity of the shop. A huge amount of my time was devoted to the discussion and arbitration of fairly petty issues. After two years in that role I was relieved to return to managing salaried employees, not to mention cutting my workweek from 70 to 50 hours

Hi Jim
We found that the issue you speak of on any type of poor performance issue with select members was entirely the lazy company bosses that did not want to go through the correct, agreed upon process. The contract specifically lays out the steps taken to reprimand or terminate. It's agreed upon by both sides in negotiations. Bosses just don't want to mess with it. Many times, if they did actually do the process right, their previous inaction on buddy's, relatives, or favorites stopped a valid write up. When joe blows drinking buddy did the same identical violations last year and nobody said a Dag gone thing... why? One thing a local cannot tolerate is favoritism. Do it right or don't do it. We were fine with reprimand write ups and encouraged them if members were causing other members increased workloads at no fault of their own. We had nothing to do with the hiring or number of members in the workforce. That was clearly written up in Management Rights. They own the place; they staff it to their desire. Not real sure how your commits on staffing related to the local as most Management Rights are very similar. We did sit in on the interviews as the company wanted our input. Sometimes we could spot BS when management couldn't.