Michael brings out the best in union/non-union potential when he says:
"My comment about the Teamsters meeting and the inspiration that it was
came from their consistent and moving message that they saw their purpose
to be the "education, development, enlightenment of the workforce as well
as its safety and contribution to well being" and had very little to say
about this like wages and getting their share."
Having been a Teamster in my younger days (!?), I can vouch for what is
the ideal in such matters, that being the protection of those working
people who happen to be union members. I can point out examples of
incidents wherein workers would have been (and sometimes were)discarded by
those in management for reasons which were very much akin to "subjective
appraisals". Because THEY (the person in charge of the dock) thought that
there was no good reason for something happening, that was enough to
justify firing a worker. Though the dock foreman was not with the worker
at the time and could only surmise what was told to him as either being
satisfactory or not, the predisposition was to consider the worker's
efforts to have been unsatisfactory. (This was enhanced by upper
management's emphasis on selling, selling, selling.)
The result? The worker was told to get back in the truck and return to
the delivery site, whereupon he further complicated matters by more
severely crushing the one disc, and crushing an additional disc in his
spine. He was out of work for about three months, and could not return to
his "normal" work; he had his spine fused to "repair" the damage.
The lesson here is simply that we should perhaps uphold those principles
which are right and proper, even though the application of such principles
may not be perfect in this less than ideal world. While each "side" may
hold its ground at each end of the spectrum, all negative views about the
other will be maintained and even reinforced until such time as true
leadership arrives on the scene.
This is a sensitive issue for me; my father was a shop steward in the
Teamsters (in the butchers and meatpackers), and NEVER ONCE argued for a
strike, knowing as he did that no one benefits from the strike itself, and
NEVER ONCE missed work. He didn't need a college education to see the
effect on families of working and striking. He got his education from the
butcher store which took him in, taught him everything about cutting meat,
and gave him a bed in the back room.
My uncle was a fireman who belonged to a union; he was burned to death,
leaving two kids and a young wife. Without membership in the union, I dare
say the lives of the kids would have been one of abject poverty. As it
was, the funds from the union were used for their college education, which
their father never got.
Can LO work in a Unionized environment? I constantly argue that it can;
in fact, the existence of a union in an organization provides the
mechanism for the growth of the organization as a whole, as a learning
organization in the long-term. Most of all it provides the opportunity for
the leaders within the organization, including the union membership, to
reaffirm the principles which enhance the quality of the workplace, and
produce benefit to all, including the customer.
FWIW, I got through graduate school as what is known as a "beef lugger",
unloading railcars and over the road trucks of the sides of beef they
contained. I was lucky enough to be on the midnight shift, allowing me the
rest of the day for classes and research. I was a member of the Teamsters
Uniion. I was there, I know it can work, but requires enlightened
leadership and membership to fulfill the ideal.
--Regards, John Constantine rainbird@trail.com Rainbird Management Consulting PO Box 23554 Santa Fe, NM 87502 http://www.trail.com/~rainbird "Dealing in Essentials"
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>