March 12, 2011

• Why I’m Pro- Union- Even With Their Problems…

  My Dad spent his entire working career in small non-union shops, trying to scrape enough money together each month to pay the mortgage and put food on the table. He worked long hours under verbally abusive bosses who took advantage of his need to survive and take care of his family. Sometimes, his bosses would cheat him on pay day and laugh at his inability to make them pay him what they owed him. Mostly, they just underpaid and overworked him in unsafe environments.  Vacations were unheard of. If he took a day off, it was without pay, and I never remember him staying home sick once. He couldn’t afford it. There was no dental coverage for his kids, much less health care. We didn’t go to the doctors unless it was a life or death emergency. Extra for overtime? Are you kidding? If he didn’t like the hours, he could quit. Dangerous conditions? Don’t like it? Quit! And he would take the grief, the frustration, the abuse until he couldn’t stand it anymore and he’d move to another small non-union shop where the abuse was the same- even if the boss was different. We were poor, dirt poor, growing up in a drafty house with cars that barely ran. Our clothes were hand-me-down hand-me-downs or my mom sewed them from remnants she found at the Goodwill. I can count on one hand the number of times I got new shoes, and the first time my brother had new shoes that fit his feet was for our mother’s funeral.  I worked at one of my father’s non-union shops the summer before I left for college and left each day slightly sick to my stomach, wondering how my father put up with it day after day after day with no end in sight.

  A friend of mine’s father was in the same line of work at a union shop. He worked regular hours at decent wages. If the press broke, they brought in a mechanic and didn’t expect the printers to risk their fingers fixing it. He got medical benefits and sick days and vacation days. They drove a fairly new car on their week long annual vacations.  When he retired, there was a pension waiting for him. But mostly, he didn’t complain about the nasty verbal abuse my father took daily because that wasn’t allowed in a union shop. There were ways to deal with employees and trashing and belittling them wasn’t one of them. My friend’s family lived in a nice home, ate out after church on Sundays, wore new clothes, and was a solid working middle class family.

  The first school I taught at was a small private school, run by a board of directors whose children attended our school. There was no negotiation of wages or raises. You got whatever they felt like giving you and they tried to make it fair- but making sure the kids had everything came before providing teachers with a living wage and benefits. If you had a board members’ child in your class, you had it made- the best equipment, assistants, and therapists. If a board member liked you, you had your pick of the classes, and while they tried to make sure things were distributed fairly, they weren’t really.  There was no one to complain to when others were given undeserving plum positions because they “partied” with the board members at the private golf course. If the Principal had a complaint about how you ran your classroom, you changed your teaching practices or left. There was no other choice. You were required to donate time to the school, to fundraise, and to participate in after school events- without pay, of course.  It was part of working at this underpaid position. You had no voice and little say in how to improve things, and I tried- for seven years I tried at that school. The year after I left, they finally offered a small retirement package that you could pay into- in place of a raise, if I remember correctly.

  The Principal at the public school I went to after my seven years at the private non-profit school was a tyrant. Verbally abusive and scary, he targeted one or two teachers a year to make their lives miserable. But they never had to face him alone- they always had a union rep besides them at every formal confrontation, documenting his behavior and holding him responsible for his words and actions. I was lucky- he liked me and my class of Downs Syndrome babies. But even his liking me wasn’t enough to get the supplies and materials I needed to teach and it took a long time before I had appropriately sized tables and chairs. But I was being paid more than twice what I made at the private school, and I had reasonable hours and demands made on me. I had to pay union dues, but even with those dues subtracted from my check, I was still making a lot more money- with benefits. My kid could go to the dentist and it didn’t cost me a paycheck. I could buy prescription drugs at reasonable rates and his ear infections didn’t take all our spare money anymore.

  Unions have their problems and issues, but give me a union shop setting any time over a privately owned and managed one. As states get tired of paying for their public workers, they are doing everything they can to break the unions. People forget what it’s like to work in unfair, unsafe non-union shops and they blame the public workers for the financial issues in the state. They don’t remember the time when it was cheaper to give benefits to teachers, firemen, and police officers than it was to pay them so now that benefits are a major expense, they want to strip them away. 

  Public workers are easy targets because your tax dollars pay for their salaries and benefits. We can point at the bus driver making 100K because of overtime, but forget to look at why he/she has so much overtime. We talk about what teachers make for working nine months a year, but forget that most teachers work eleven or eleven and half months (some of that without pay). We point fingers at the bad teachers and surly state employees but forget that every work place has bad or surly employees. The real question is what is left after you strip collective bargaining away from people. I’m all for smaller government, for doing more with less, with paying your real share of benefits, but to take away the right to have a voice and a say in your workplace isn’t good. It leads to unfair, abusive work patterns without protection for the little guy who just wants to go to work, do his job, and get paid a fair wage at the end of the week without groveling for it. The true cost of the atmosphere of blaming public workers for the mess our current government is in is yet to seen, but I’m sure that the real problem remains hidden and unsolved. Strip away collective bargaining, destroy the unions, blame, belittle and abuse the public servant, and when that’s done and the problem remains… then maybe, we’ll start focusing on solving the real problems causing our shortfalls… maybe… but we’ll be a sadder, uglier nation irregardless.

  • 1:15 pm
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