Having grown up in the Steel City I am no stranger to the site of a picket line. A good sign lets the public know the reason for, goals, and the importance of the union to the community. And nowhere is that more apparent than the current Writers Guild of America strike.
The last thing we need is more unscripted reality TV. Support the Writers Guild of America.
Have you ever belonged to a union, Deadsplinters? Or otherwise, affected by a strike? Let us know in the comment section.
In college I worked in the dining hall and the full time employees were prepped to strike because the company that ran the food service wasn’t going to recognize the union. I was prepped to not cross the line. I’m not even sure what the company even wanted student workers to do, because none of us knew how to cook chicken parm for 500 or were even health department certified for food prep — but company gave in at the last minute.
It’s pretty stressful when the union is determining whether or not to strike. It was even more tense when my father joined management, he remained a union man at heart and never would have crossed a picket line. But that could have cost him his job and there was no strike pay since he wasn’t in the union anymore. Fortunately it never happened.
My father was a union member all his life. IBEW, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. He was an engineer at a power plant. This afforded him a small house in a decent suburb and a stay-at-home wife to raise his unruly rat pack. And a brand-spanking new Impala every three years, of which my family has photographic evidence.
Did you do holidays at the Union Hall? I have fond memories of the Christmas party at ours.
Not that I remember. My town (Baby Boom and all) was really focused around the schools and the churches, the Boy and Girl Scouts, the PTA, the K of C, there was a VA hall of course, the Homecoming football games, a whole crowded roster of things for parents and kids to do communally. There were elderly people in the town, people who had been there in the Depression and World War II, when it was much more rural, and they were also constantly volunteering. I guess when you only have three TV stations and PBS, and no social media, it drives people to make their own fun.
I’m very lucky (#blessed) because I loved my childhood and I loved being in crowded classrooms and riding my bike all over the place and all the hospitality that the parents used to show to all their neighbors and their kids. I loved the fact that my huge high school offered so many rigorous mind-expanding classes, including a range of foreign language and art along with all the AP stuff. An excellent preparation for college and life in general.
We had all of that. But the schools, churches in those traditional days were the domain of the moms. The Union Hall was where our dad’s took charge. So events there meant the guys did the cooking and clean up. The women all got tipsy and nobody supervised the children. Good times.
I guess our equivalent was the VA hall, but a lot of my friends’ fathers belonged to unions, but different ones. One of my best friends’ father was a local principal and I think a teacher’s strike would have been unconscionable at the time in that town, but I bet he belonged to a union. Another friend had a father who worked as a newspaper writer, he was in the Writer’s Guild. So glamorous, I thought, at the time. A couple worked in a defense plant, but it wasn’t called that. They were union. We had a cop on our block. A pilot lived not too far away. I think they all must have been union. But the 1970s is not the 2020s, sad as it is to know this.
We had a teachers strike when I was in HS. I brought everything in my locker hime because I knew I wouldn’t be able to cross the picket line to get anything left there. I was glad I did since the strike lasted around a month.
I was an IAM member when I worked for an airline. We never went on strike but came close many times before giving in to management only to see them reward themselves for getting us to cave. It sucked & I refused to pay the $1 to stay a member in good standing when I left. Now I am surrounded by IAM members at Boeing and they strike quite often with varying success. The company has pretty much destroyed their union by moving production lines to SC where they are a “right to work” state so the employees make less than half what they do here for the same thing. For the first year or more of SC building 787’s, not one that came from SC got certified without coming back here to be repaired. Sometimes you get what you pay for! Most Boeing workers here are 2nd or 3rd generation and care about what they do, SC…not so much.
Don’t get me started on the right to work states. Collective bargaining is the best protection you can have as a worker.
Idaho is a right to work state as well. I don’t work in an industry that unionizes, but I certainly sympathize with those that do, and the right to work bullshit is just legalized union busting.
Yep, and too many union workers voted for the very people who busted them up. It defies logic.
The stock valuation models for Wall Street analysts give an automatic bump up for moving plants out of unionized areas, either to the South or out of the US.
But the models limit the deduction of value for defects and returns until later. Which means that execs will go through these kinds of hugely disruptive moves knowing that quality will drop purely for the sake of a period where they can benefit from that differential.
Finance firms put their thumbs on the scales of their models because their profit centers are so heavily weighted toward deals that can be made on financing things like plant construction or carrying out financial restructuring. There’s much less incentive to consider long term value.
It’s not that the models always exclude any consideration of quality declines. But there’s a lot of institutional pressure to treat it as an unknowable variable instead of something that needs to be hedged against.
I thought Boeing moved out of Seattle to Chicago. Did Boeing move again? I didn’t really understand why they moved to Chicago in the first place. I assumed lavish, “job creating” city and state subsidies.
They moved their corporate office to Chicago to be close to United who was their best customer at the time but soon after UA had serious financial problems. The SC thing is a production facility specifically for the 787 Dreamliner which is supposed to be their best seller. It has had a shaky production history and schedule. The 737 is still the most popular for sales though even after the crashes a few years ago. Those planes and most other Boeing planes are made in Everett & Renton WA.
Oh, that’s interesting, that makes sense. I have a friend who is obsessed with airplane design, past, present, and future (he’s not in the industry), and when I used to fly he would ask what kind of plane I was on. I never had any idea, but I could tell him the airline and the destination, and he could tell me, “Oh, that must have been a [whatever].” Sounds like a strange hobby to me, but I’m the go-to-guy if you want to know European royal families’ genealogy going back to the Renaissance. It’s surprising how infrequently this topic comes up in my day-to-day life.
<– union.
👍🏼
Never part of a union but I would never, ever, EVER cross a picket line.
You’re a good man.
Same. I grew up in the restaurant business during a time when labor laws stopped at the kitchen door. Then I was working in pro audio where literally everyone was an independent contractor. Now I work in a tech field, in a union-friendly state, but which has no union supporting us. If there was a push for one I would sign up in a heartbeat.
A few years ago, the grocery chain where I shop had a strike and I sucked it up and shopped everywhere else to support the union. Eventually the company accepted the union demands, but it was the longest three weeks of my life trying to figure out where to shop that wasn’t either a fucking dump, or had a decent selection, or wasn’t Whole Paycheck.
Every industry needs a union.
The way I was raised, crossing a picket line was out of the question.
Even now my father would haunt the hell out of me, full on poltergeist shit, if I even thought about it!
The grocery store union (UFCW local 655) went on strike when I was in my 20s, I believe. But there was a different market nearby that wasn’t union so I just shopped there instead for the few weeks it was going on.
Typically the strikes I see are more workers during a project, not existing businesses. Like the local Operating Engineers union went on strike last week here and it stopped a lot of road work in process. But also, we’re so used to Missouri Dept of Transportation being so fucking slow that I don’t think any drivers were like “wow the workers are on strike” so much as “yep guess this is just gonna sit around half fucking done for a while, thanks MODOT.”
We’re a right to work state so there are very few union jobs. The state fights bitterly with the Feds for insisting on hiring union workers for federal projects.
Missouri is right to work as well, and it’s just bullshit.
metalworkers union here….never had a strike yet
tho i think back when i was still a temp ive been called in to cover for striking metalworkers before
i kinda figure we should strike tho… not so much coz we need to…but everyone else is….i kinda feel left out
Yikes, called in to cover for the strikers. 🤨 That kind of thing used to get a guy killed in certain parts of the country here.
A strike can be a little fun if it doesn’t last too long.
doesnt exactly win you friends here either… but unlike salaried workers temps dont get paid if they dont work…
so you know… not a whole lot of choice there
I grew up in a management family…
My dad worked for Ontario Hydro and had been involved with several strikes. During one strike he and several of his nuclear engineer coworkers were assigned to shovel coal at a nearby coal fired station, but he luckily avoided being one of the black lung gang because someone realized he was the best qualified reactor operator and was sent to run one of the reactors instead.
My parents never mentioned the bonuses or overtime they got for working 12 hour shifts (or they get killed by angry union members.)
However, I never grew up with the contempt for unions that other management kids did mostly because I never cared about class divides (still don’t.)
Never worked at a union shop till I got to Nortel. Still wasn’t unionized, but my coworkers were.
By this time, I learned that if you had decent management then unions wouldn’t need to exist but who the hell has decent management? Have you met most managers?
After working at the current place (strongly anti-union) as a working man, I learned yet again why unions have a place in this world.
One of the funniest moments was I was accused of by my then supervisor of leading a worker revolt against him after he tried to fuck with me with my review.
A few months earlier I ended up using the performance improvement plan against the company and making my then supervisor look like a weak, ineffectual leader (which he is/was.) Fast forward several months later a bunch of enraged coworkers asked me for advice on how to deal with him. I told them what i would do and how to do it. Next thing I know, my shift became a hot bed of insurrection.
Things got so bad that the supervisor ended up getting transferred off the shift.
The reason why things were so funny to me is that my supervisor is a racist who only wanted “his” people on his team and ended up transferring many of my friends (who were not “his” people) off his shift leaving me and a couple of other people surrounded by “his” people. He thought he could isolate me but it turned out I got along well with “his” people (I trained most of them and helped them when they asked me for advice) and “his” people actually hated him more than I did.
This is why management doesn’t fuck with me. They fear(ed) that I could be that guy, the union messiah who could organize different racial groups into a union and get them (management) fired for letting the workers organize. Worst, around that time they learned I used to BE management and could fuck them with the insider game.
I still call that my “I am Spartacus” moment. My sister (HR) told me that I played a dangerous game with management and if I had faced off with competent management that I would have been fired.
I knew it too, but if they were competent then they wouldn’t have promoted dipshit fuckwit racists as supervisors. Sadly weak/ineffectual isn’t the only racist shithead working as management.
Good management is so damn hard to come by. And when you find it some corporate asshole will ruin it. I have a close friend who an engineer at BASF. He got along great with the guys on the floor. So they did their best for him. The rest of management resented the hell out of him for it and the first chance they got they laid him off. Productivity plunged, accidents went up, it was a mess. They wanted him back but he had moved on by then and laughed in their face.