Unions

[steelish]

Huh?

Back to Unions:
Unions are ruining America. Period.

Case in point - As a postal worker I cannot help a fellow worker out, even if I am finished with my own work and he/she is floundering and falling behind. (Union Rules). As a postal worker IF I do help out the floundering co-worker that same co-worker (and all other co-workers trained for that position) can file a grievance, thereby earning DOUBLE TIME for every moment I spent helping him/her catch up in their work. Postal workers cannot cross train.

The Union, in it's infinite wisdom, has made it so that the USPS has to spend an exorbitant amount of money just to maintain the flow of mail.

There are highly paid people on the payroll who simply drive from office to office, staying long enough to power up a laptop and enter a miniscule amount of information regarding what any one specific employee they were sent to report on is doing at that given moment.

Letters and flat envelopes run through machinery which counts and sorts it, yet people are paid to "take count" of mail at each office.

The Union decided it is unfair to have a pay based upon job position. Instead, the rate you get paid depends upon the volume of mail you handle. If you are a Distribution Clerk (which is typically a 50,000/year job), you are paid based upon the volume of mail through that specific post office. Know what a distribution clerk does? Matches numbers. That's it. 50k/year to match numbers. If you are a carrier...your pay is determined the same way. You might think that sounds great, but it hinders the amount of workers any given post office can have. Just because a post office has a higher volume of mail doesn't necessarily mean they have more workers. It just means that those workers get stressed more.

Know what else is crazy? If a clerk, for example, gets voted into a position as a Union Steward or Union Rep., his/her clerk job is saved (not replaced by a new worker) so that IF they ever decide to come back to clerk work, their job awaits them. The office I work in has FIVE clerks on the payroll who are not physically working there. One has been gone for over 10 years, yet the office cannot fill that position. In the meantime, the skeleton crew that works there stresses daily over the amount of work that needs to be done.

Yes, I think the Unions have outlived their usefulness.