Actually, it’ll be this afternoon in Seattle, but its pretty close.
Here’s the background:
Back in January I became a state-licensed Weighmaster and I man the scalehouse at my company’s transfer station for eight hours of my scheduled ten hour night. We let just about every hauling company in the area dump at our facility, usually at a lesser rate scale than the city or the county dumps charge.
One of these companies has a respectively large number of employees and vehicles, but they are non-union. As you can imagine, the Teamsters local is not happy about either that fact or that we let them dump there, and today the unhappiness may come to a head.
The Teamsters reps have been harping on the non-union company’s drivers to join up, meeting them at jobsites and other transfer stations with the ‘Go Union’ pap. Most of those drivers have told them to piss up a rope, but there have been a few who have taken the bait. The owner of the non-union company had supposedly said some things that could be construed as anti-unionizing to those drivers and the Teamsters took offence and have filed ‘discriminatory work practices’ charges with the county to see if they can bounce his company out of their county contracts.
Meanwhile, the guys who work in the repair/fabrication shop at my facility have been working without a contract for a while now and the Teamsters are planning on taking advantage of some rule in their old contract that lets them onto the property to do a full court press on the non-union drivers with picketers at the gates and runners to talk to the non-union drivers while they’re trying to dump their loads.
Needless to say, my company isn’t happy about being used as such and has consulted with their lawyers and concluded that while they do have to let the Teamsters onto the grounds of the facility, the company gets to pick where the Teamsters can situate themselves. The Teamsters will probably not be happy with this, as I have seen the chosen location.
Nonetheless, they will have to stand where they are told. Their only other option is to resign from their positions within the company and picket where they want. They have been warned of this and cannot complain ignorance of this fact.
While some of the Teamsters that will be here are drivers from my company, not all of them will be. It will be interesting to see if the picketers from my company will chose their union or their jobs should the group decide to leave their designated area to picket the main gate.
If this does happen, guess who else is going to have to drive through the picket line at the main gate; yep, little old non-union me.
I have taken the courtesy of personally informing the shop steward that I will be allowed through the gate without so much as a scowl from any of the picketers, lest I file harassment charges against any of my co-workers manning the line and that if even one of them touches my truck as I pass through, I will not hesitate to immediately stop my vehicle in the middle of their line and exit it in order to seek immediate physical retribution from said individual and any who plan on backing him up.
He said he did not like my tone, but agreed as we have been through this before. For some history, check below the fold.
So we’ll see what transpires today. Hopefully nothing will happen, but you never can tell with pension chasers who can’t figure out when they are being ripped off by a corporate ponzi scheme called a union.
They get all emotional when in groups.
Shortly after I started working at this company, the Teamster’s contract came up for renewal. Negotiations were getting quite heated between the company and the union and a strike was looking quite eminent. The city’s news stations were bleeding the story of ‘The Impending Garbage Strike� for everything they could and I was caught between the union demanding that my non-union ass not cross their picket line and the company saying that I’d be fired if I didn’t show up for work.
Well, not liking to be pinched, I took it out on those who were putting me in that position; The Union and its members.
The day before what was to be the beginning of the strike, I was confronted by the old shop steward about not crossing the picket line. I told him, in no uncertain terms, that I was crossing that line if I had to run over him, his entire picket crew and 100 cute little puppies to do so. There may have been a ‘stick it up your ass’ in there somewhere as well.
He didn’t like that.
Seeing that I had him red faced pissed I followed up with that not only would I be crossing his line, he would have his crew make way for me and not even think about tapping my Supra (which I still had at the time) with any of their signs.
He didn’t like that either.
We went back and forth until he was cursing at near the top of his lungs and we were interrupted by one of the office managers who separated us. This was a good thing as I knew from his body language that I had him at the limit and would have hated to have had to take a punch from a Vietnam-era submariner before I could leave him bleeding on my office floor.
I was informed less than a half hour later that day that the General Manager had decided that things we getting too heated and all the non-union employees would be bussed onto the facility for the duration of the possible strike.
Later that night, I found out via the late evening news that last minute talks had yielded a contract that the union was going to tell their membership to accept (the fools had accepted a yearly wage increase but got screwed on their healthcare buy-in, and are still paying four to five times what I do for the same coverage). I still showed up the next day with the passenger seat of my car prominently displaying a finely crafted pair of custom machined aluminum rods I’d had built for use in my practicing of a Filipino martial art which, though I have yet to master, I am decently proficient in.
Again, needless to say, the bad blood between the old shop steward and myself continued until he retired, with it getting down to a simmer on most days in his last year. The new shop steward took off right where the old one left off, but he used to be one of the better drivers on my old daytime crew so we can at least make the jabs friendly. He knows where I stand on unions and their tactics and that I will not succumb to them. He also knows how I feel about my property and my personal space.
I resemble the remark about “pension chasers”. Since when does the financial character of one’s employment compensation package become a political point?
I can do all the things in retirement that I want to do because I stuck out two careers and earned pensions, then Social Security, with both of them. Neither of them was what we would call a fat-cat job, but the pensions were a reality (sort of, the State is trying to weasel out of paying part of it’s pension requirements to me as we speak).
Labor unions have devolved from craft guilds, which were, and in a few rare cases, still are the best thing that ever happened to a civilized society. From the idea of protecting and furthering the craft, improving the lives of the crafters and prevailing against bad craft shop conditions, the labor organizations have become a tool of the political left, and they have perfected, not their crafts, but their grafts.
Too bad, but the reactions against the goony labor unions are also over the top. In Oregon, after some spectacular political muscle-flexing by state employee unions in the ’70’s, the GOP not only “refined”, but totally gutted collective-bargaining laws here, and the end result is that no union, large or small, and no company union of any size may effectively bargain with management over any issue.
The development of global-scale commerce seems to prompt business and industry to think that ALL their workers are expendable, and that a satisfied work force isn’t necessary. Those nations with loyal work forces ALWAYS prevail in local AND world markets, but I guess that fact isn’t taught in business schools and can’t be repeated in boardrooms any more.
Sorry if you resemble that remark, RD, but today’s unions are horrible, machinating, money laundering promoters of sloth. The reason I used the term ‘Pension Chasers’ is that that is about all a union can actually offer that a non-union job cannot. AND, just like you stated, a pension still isn’t a guarantee, even if you did put your ‘20’ in.
But, regular jobs offer the 401K, which can be a pension, if you work it right. Speaking of which, next Monday is my next adjustment day, where the company reps come in and give me the opportunity to make changes to my 401K account.
Try getting that on your pension from a union. Hell, try getting a union to not use your pension money to elect Democrats.
I don’t need a union for ‘job security’, I do my job better than anyone else in the company. I don’t need a union for health benefits, it is part of my benefits package and my employer knows that if I don’t like it, I walk. Same goes for the yearly raises.
Why did the Colt Python cost $800 from the factory? The UAW. Why did they stop civilian production? Same three letters.
It is good to hear that you worked for your money and you’re getting the majority of it. But Unions are outdated, outmoded, useless and ultimately, politically crooked ponzi schemes and should be done away with like Social Security and their officers jailed for money laundering and illegal political donations.
Why is Washington NOT a right to work state? Because it is run by Democrats. If there were Right To Work laws in every state, the unions wouldn’t be bitching about their low membership rates because they’d be gone, kaput, el no moray.