Quote:
Originally Posted by DAVES
Speaking from personal choices. I was self employed. Self employed means when you complain about or to the boss some see you are talking to yourself. When, they SCREAM how little they make and tax write offs that a business takes, they do NOT mention UNTAXED benefits.
I started over three times over 40 years. Union, you do your 20 years and retire to the villages with a pension and benefits. I am still taxed to pay for it.
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I never got any tax writeoffs as an employed person, in or out of a union. I was in a few unions. One of them was great. The others sucked. The purpose of unions is important, and should be supported. The implementation, not so much. It depends on the union.
The employee-run union at the phone company back when I first started working there in the 1990's was excellent. They negotiated paid insurance premiums on our choice of plans, including an HMO that was top-notch and affiliated with Yale University Hospital. Coordination of care was flawless between PCPs and specialists. We had something crazy like 11 paid holidays, plus 4 "personal days," 2 weeks paid vacation, bereavement pay, and 14 sick days per year that were stackable up to 28 days. We had our own on-staff nurse and wellness office, so anyone who wasn't feeling well could get a preliminary check right down the hall (I worked in Human Resources, so the nurse was on our floor).
We had a cafeteria that served pretty good food (for cafeterias), and we were just a block away from the edge of Downtown New Haven and could walk during our 45-minute (unpaid) break to just about any kind of grastronomic delight that interested us that day. I often went to Mamoun's Falafel Palace for a hummus plate and cardamom tea, and walked through the Yale Law School corridor on the way back to enjoy the architecture, and would sometimes sit outside the Beineke library to marvel at its translucent marble walls.
We had a pension rather than a 401k. Fully funded and matched up to 5% of our paycheck by the company. Our pay was excellent. My starting pay in 1991 was $10.00/hour. Minimum wage in 1991 was $4.25/hour, for comparison. I was what old-school phone workers called "steno." A departmental secretary who typed up stuff for the entire department, not just one boss.
And then, the CUTW was taken over by CWA, and everything went to crap. They wanted MORE and were adamant about not signing a contract that didn't give us MORE. We already got more than most corporations in the state - our dues were reasonable - but they had to "prove" to the employees that their union were bulldogs, and turned it into an us vs. them mentality. Previously, union negotiations were (mostly) civil. Now, they were combative.
They conceded job satisfaction in exchange for job security which felt more like jail. If a department needed to let someone go, that person could become a 3rd shift operator who now had quotas for upselling to customers calling them to fix problems.
Upward mobility became more difficult, and dues went up. I quit before things got too bad. I blame the union around 70% for the degradation of the employee trust, and 30% on the company's takeover by Whitacre and Southwestern Bell.
And so - unions absolutely have their place. But employee union members need to be pro-active, responsible, and keep themselves informed about what the union is doing to "protect" them. Sometimes they don't need protection and the union needs to just step back. When they are given free reign, they destroy more than they protect.