Part 3; another union anecdote

When I worked for the airline, living in Memphis, the teamsters made a big push to get voted in by the agents. That was when I worked for Fawlty Airways. Agents there worked upstairs as well as on the ramp, although we tended to keep some exclusively upstairs and others exclusively ramp. Everyone was cross trained, but I assure you, you do not want some people anywhere near an aircraft being pushed out of the gate, or involved in loading your bags on the plane. And you don't want people whose scowling face would scare children, and whose vocabulary consisted primarily of expletives, checking you in.

I was considered to be in management so I couldn't vote one way or the other. The agents most invested in promoting the union believed that they would be in heaven and never have any more difficulties if the teamsters prevailed. Reminds me of the woman who thought Obama would pay her mortgage and put gas her in car if he was elected. Somehow I doubt her hopes and dreams came to pass. Who knows, maybe he bought her house.

Fawlty, itself, was asking for it in my opinion. I forget most of the details but their management was awful. Other than the chief financial officer, I don't think any of them attained their positions based on ability and brains. Scum bags. The CFO, though was a person I considered brilliant. He also had a clever wit and sense of humor--something the others sorely lacked.

What many agents did not realize is that if the union won, many of the rules which now could be tempered by common sense would have to be followed by the letter. Since I was rather generous in giving benefit of the doubt, my group would have suffered a lot.

The good thing about this threat was that someone in corporate figured out that it was to their benefit to make some changes that any sane person would have put in place from day one. The union lost, changes were made, and Fawlty improved ever so slightly. Unfortunately the lying worms who permeated the managerial staff remained.

But, the moral of the story is that the agents were better off without the union, but because of the union, things got better. Why people are so steeped in the feudal mentality that they have to have a gun to their head to somewhat treat people in certain industries as possessing just a tad bit of value and humanity is beyond me. My way of dealing with it is to walk away. Because most people don't do that, the method of choice is to unionize.

I guess unions are the reason that everyone who has been in a job the same period of time gets paid the same. At least in many companies. Probably those that have government contracts in the closet. In the case of the airline I had about four agents worth X dollars per hour, ten worth X/4, and maybe seven worth X/3, the remainder were worth X/7. But they got paid the same, based on seniority. I'm being generous in the relative values. Some were only useful because you need to place a warm body in certain places at certain times. If we could have got by with a mannequin we'd have been better off, even if we paid it more.

Those worth X, were paid about half their worth. The others were paid more than their worth to the operation.

That is where the labor/management model we have falls way short. It wasn't that X/3 was doing his or her best. They were just devoid of that quality which causes some people to care if your bag makes the flight, if you make the flight, if your wheelchair gets destroyed, etc. The lack of empathy in the general workforce, both in Memphis and Greensboro, in that world, shocked me. At the same time, the inner drive of the A team to do a thing right, as long as they were going to do it, was impressive. Some people have pride in their work despite management's best efforts to kill it. And believe me, management in many companies does punish the responsible employees while rewarding the slackers by keeping them around.

So, I have cited an example in which a union was useful---even though they broke rule after rule in their efforts to cajole the employees to instate them.