The Fall f the United States, The End

[Jeff Niceswanger]

Originally Posted by Greg Reimer 7376

I worked for the City of Los Angeles for almost 30 years before I retired, and the procedures described in the previous posts are almost verbatim the procedures employed by the city in regards to employee conduct. The demands indicated here and under what I worked under are certainly not unreasonable. The stuff on the list of disciplinable conduct has no excuse for happening anyplace. We never had a strike during the entire time I worked there,although there were a couple of bad supervisors that got put on the spot in front of upper management and department heads much to their detriment. There was no doubt as to what was expected of us, and most of us were very glad to have that job and the benefits. The problem i had with unions was that they seemed to have varying standards of enforcement of things based along politically correct lines. Some persons were allowed a lot of leeway to be bad employees and the rest of us took a dim view of it. It was hard to fire a bad employee, it took months of careful documentation and much extra work to stay on top of it all. Some of these persons would have been super star employees if they put the amount of time and effort into doing their jobs as they did doing everything else. One thing some slackers did was to get involved in union activities, being a rep, a steward, and all that stuff. Some of them would charge several hours at a time for "union business", they were gone a lot and nobody seemed to care. They made slackerhood an art form. I feel our department heads sometimes were a bit too nice in order to keep the peace, some of that is certainly necessary, but the rest of us knew they were taking the place for a ride.
It was nice to have the benefits and perks and incentives that the place provided, since a properly treated workforce was the best bet, but a couple of slackers and troublemakers sure can aggravate the rest of us who appreciated being paid well to do a good job.The main problem with the union there was that the union leadership was always going off on political junkets to Sacramento to hobnob with the liberal elites at the state capital instead of being here in LA doing their jobs.

I'm curious on a couple things Greg. What International Union was it. How did these slackers get voted in to union activity jobs? And why didn't they get voted out when their performance failed. (We had yearly elections). Did you happen to go to the Unions meetings and discuss these topics? Thirty years is a long time to witness all that crap. In those 30 years did you ever get involved and try to make it better? Maybe you did? Sounds like you would have been really good at it. Your ethics are certainly in the right place. One thing is front and center. Leadership in one's Local is of utter importance. They can lead you up the hill, or right down into the drain pipe. Sounds like you had the drain pipe and nobody like yourself would step up to the plate.
That being said, I can only speak for myself in saying my standard of living was the reason I stayed with unions all my life. And if you notice, all the bitches comes from the language sections. Even thou we did a good job with ours and had few complaints, its evident some locals did not. Just look at the complaints on here including yourself. Its all Language. Not a word in the Wages and Benefits sections.. My Wages, Pension, Benefits, Vacations, Healthcare and tons of other ones are King. At least to me. Frankly that's how this whole discussion started... "I vote with my wallet."