Originally Posted by
WhIteSidE
I want to highlight this briefly. My brother was forced to join a "graduate student union" for his job as a TA. Despite the fact that he's been asking for years, they refuse to send him back a penny, claiming that they "only spend money on permissible activities". When I lent him a lawyer to write the school / union demanding an accounting of this fact, he was called into a meeting with a school administrator and a union rep (but they didn't bother to call his lawyer) and told that he was being "disruptive" and that the school was an "academic community" with no place for lawyers.
So yeah, try to stand up to a union for your rights some time.
As an employer I'd like the opportunity to have a bare knuckle boxing match against any union promoter before a union vote -- it would give me a chance to show that I'm willing to fight for my employees against the vampires that want to latch onto their necks.
Both sides play hardball. Plenty of union organizers / pro-union employees get fired for being 2 minutes late to work in the run-up to a union vote. Of the two, I think management generally has the better end of it, and I think the statistics on the vast decrease in union membership in the country bears that out.
All of this is not to say I'm rabidly pro-union. I'm not a member of one, and I don't think one would be useful at my workplace. But they have a place in labor-management relations, and I think the decision should really be left up to the employees as to how they would like to work with management.