FLU: Speaking of anti-union bias: I never had an anti-union bias until I actually started working with unions and union workers.
Case in point. I did a pair of retrofits for a client with facilities in Michigan and Colorado. Both projects were completely identical, I mean right down to the bolt specifications. However, in Michigan, we had to use union labor and in Colorado we didn’t.
The difference in labor costs was astounding. We paid nearly $600k for labor in Michigan and $470k for labor in Colorado and for identical jobs, with identical scopes of work. The non-union project went off without a hitch, but the union job was a frickin’ nightmare. We had supervision issues (they tried to charge us for three supervisors to watch eight employees, when only one supervisor was necessary), work stoppage issues (they would stop work at the slightest change in scope of work), and were constantly threatened with litigation (they tried to claim slip-and-fall when one of their guys had his foot slip from the second rung of a ladder and said that his knee was “blown”). Absolutely infuriating, especially when these clowns would come to work in hard hats proudly displaying the American flag and claiming that “union labor built the USA”. Maybe so, but this generation of union labor sure as shit didn’t. They weren’t just lazy, they were criminally stupid, too.
That was unfortunately the first of now dozens of projects where I’ve had to deal with unions and, nearly without exception, those same experiences have repeated themselves.
We’re now fundamentally an unserious country. The nation that beat the Germans, Japanese and the Soviets and put a man on the moon, cannot figure out how to cap an oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. We wring our hands and point fingers and speechify, but don’t DO shit.
Sorry to vent, but this crap drives me crazy. Get the fucking lawyers and politicians and lobbyists and “advocates” and psychologists the hell out of the way and let those of us that want to work and succeed and excel do exactly that.[/quote]
Welcome to the darkside, my friend. I wasn’t kidding about issues I’ve had in my more youthful years working at a bureaucratic company so think in read tape that I couldn’t physically move my computer 2 doors down because it violated “union rules” to move anything without getting the movers to move it (which would take 2-3 weeks)…
I don’t want to generalize that “everyone is like this”, because not everyone is…BUT, I can’t help feel that we (americans) have gotten pretty frickin arrogant, even in this day and age with a terrible economic climate. It’s horrible. Government given themselves big fat pension raises. Exec’s giving themselves big fat bonuses the moment they are “profitable” (with the help of government subsidies). UAW demanding big salary adjustments just now right at the point that Ford is recovering and doing better….I mean, all these early preliminary successes are just that…Preliminary….And then there’s the litigate for every imaginable piece of B.S. lawsuit, slip/fall/etc….It’s like everyone feels entitled to big cake without doing the heavy lifting…
No shit businesses hesitate to do things here and why we’re gitting our asses kicked on the economic front. Folks are so overly concerned aabout the H1-B invasion, but then at the same time there’s not enough folks going to science/technology, and folks always say “doesn’t pay enough, cost too much in terms of schooling/etc”. Folks are already predicting a shortage in high skilled worker bees in about 10 years… I don’t know what to say… I guess the economy hasn’t gotten THAT bad yet for folks, since this sort of crap still goes on. Everytime I see those “Shame on XXX, Labor Dispute”, I just want to hurdle my shoe at the signs, yet I can’t even do that because those folks picketing aren’t even the would be workers that are on strike..They’re outsourced 🙂 !
Why do folks feel like they’re victim of something or the other these days???
Oh well, welcome to the nanny state of america.
Ah well, at least you didn’t have this happen to you….
