It's Over

And we have a winner!…..the union. My facility voted yesterday on whether or not to unionize…and it passed overwhelmingly. My company – well, my particular facility has been in business for nearly 80 years. It was owned by the same family until about, oh I’d say 3 years ago, when they sold controlling interest to a large national corporation, who in turn sold us to an even larger international corporation. And until this last company bought us, we have pretty much been one big happy family…was everything perfect and peachy-keen? No, of course not. There were problems here and there with various things, but they always were resolved in-house. Our management team has always gone out of their way to try everything they could to keep us “fat and sassy”, if you will. Now because of the way the international company has done things since they took us over, people are upset. They haven’t given management a sporting chance at trying to fix the things they could, and not realized that some of the changes made are irreversible. I will admit, the new kids on the block took some perks from us - like the perfect attendace award (a big chunk of moolah), our employee golf tournament – and fired a bunch of people right out of the gate, neither of which exactly endeared them to our employees. None of those things will be reinstated just because we are now a union plant. As for the big “raises” the union pushers told everyone we’d get…not going to happen. If the company wanted to give us raises, they’d do it already. Our insurance costs are going to increase dramatically. The supervisors no longer will have the ability to work with an employee who, for example, is late due to bad weather or needs to trade a regularly scheduled day off for a non-work day….they will have to go strictly by the rule book. All the good things we can do and have done here will be negated by the union coming in. It stinks, I hate it and I am beyond upset about becoming a union plant. Unions reward bad behavior and punish the good. It goes against everything this country was founded on, believes in and stands for. Once upon a time, unions were a good thing; that day has long passed.