Dumb, dumb, dumb!

No pictures in this post.  Who cares to look at a bunch of outraged union members or smug politicians.

The Governor and Legislature of Wisconsin passed a new law that eliminates collective bargaining for government employees.  This was done by a combination of voting and parliamentary maneuvers.  Even though Democrat senators left the state to try stalling the legislation, it passed.

So why dumb?

First a little background on yours truly: I'm politically conservative.  I voted for John McCain.  I also vote for the man, not the party.  I was a member of management for most of my working life.  But after I retired and began writing, I joined the National Writer's Union... mostly for health benefits.

When I was working, I had several contacts with unions.  With one exception they were cordial and ended by helping the company and the workers.  I'll deal with the exception at the end of this essay.

I discovered that working with unions shortened and simplified discussions of pay and benefits for the people working for our company.  But in order for discussions to be productive, it was absolutely necessary for both sides to enter negotiations as members of a team, not as adversaries.  Both the business managers for the unions and the company team were conscious of two important facts:  1) without skilled work, the business could not continue; and 2) if the company went broke, everyone lost.

As managers, we approached negotiations with the desire to make sure our employees maintained a comfortable, sustainable standard of living.   Sometimes the economy or market dictated that raises could not be given, or had to be delayed.  We were luckily not working under the conditions of today.  Never-the-less, there was a year we had to not only not raise our worker's pay, but ask them to pay a larger percentage of their medical benefits.  We backed up our requests (notice, not demands) with audited balance sheets and profit/loss statements.  The business managers worked with us to both find a happy medium and to explain the problem to our unionized employees.

While I was in Japan, I was amazed to see a story reporting that at least one union had told their employing company that they would take a pay decrease for the year.  That was while the Japanese economy was still expanding, but the workers decided their employers need extra margin for operations.

Now let's get back to the one exception to my cordial relations with unions.  I was supervising a job in West Virginia.  The job market there was dismal.  Large numbers of miners and other workers were unemployed.  The task was to sandblast and line a large deionized water tank.  Chicago Bridge and Iron was doing the actual work.

Local rules indicated that at least two of the local union members should be employed on the job.  CB&I had no problem with this.  They hired three helpers at the rate that the national union had recently negotiated with most of the large painting contractors.  We assumed that there was no problem.

Alas, the local business manager showed up and informed us that his people would be paid a much higher hourly rate.  The CB&I foreman told him that was not an option.  The BM stalked off the job threatening both a strike and picket line.

I showed up early the next morning to do some paper work and make a couple of phone calls (this was long before cell phones and my motel was in a very small town.)  The BM was in the parking lot, unloading signs for the picket line.  As a I walked into the office, the workers began to arrive.  The CB&I painters stood aside.  The local guys walked up to the car, talked to the  BM for a couple of seconds, then grabbed the signs and started hitting the BM with them.  He got into his car and drove off while the local painter's helpers broke up the signs.

Not everyone is reasonable.  But breaking up organizations just because you can is not only wrong, it's stupid.