Originally Posted by
gleff
Because government workers are a political constituency, unions are the means for funneling contributions and votes, and government unions serve to extract higher pay and benefits not as necessary to deliver work but as needed to deliver votes and cash to the politicians who reward them.
And this would apply to your local police officers and firefighters, as well as road crew workers and water department staff, too, would it not? Should their unions be eliminated? I really don't see why the TSA can't have the same representation that government employees at the local and state level have across the country.
Shift workers (recall I was one of those for 32 years) have unique needs--things like shift selection, vacation and days off. How often should shifts be selected? Yearly? Quarterly? Whenever a TSA manager feels like it? Who gets Saturday and Sunday off versus Tuesday and Wednesday on graveyard? Can you imagine buying airline tickets when you don't know what your days off are ahead of time? Those are the types of things that can be spelled out in a MOU with a union.
Add on smaller things like compensation for travel time to training classes, or even how much updated training will be provided each year, or the selection process for promotions. Seems like it's all negotiable to me, and I'd rather have a union looking out for my interests versus the acting head of the TSA telling me how it is.
If the TSA needs to be able to adjust employees around workload they can designate some of the shifts as floating shifts to fill special needs.
Originally Posted by
unLogical
. As far as I am concerned, the union`s job is to get a contract for wages, benefits, etc. The Union has nothing to do with operations.
That's pretty much how it worked in the two local police departments I worked for. The unions did not set policy as to how we answered calls or directed resources. The MOU covered things like shift selection, vacation, mandatory overtime and the like.