Re: More UAW Horror Stories


<scott.me.usenet@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:b0af07e8-3357-4e35-8f4f-8b42e8f36b44@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.regularfolksunited.com/index.php?tab=article_view&article_id=561

Second, as a former supervisor of UAW workers at a GM facility, I will
say that poor management and union malpractice made the Detroit Three
uncompetitive long before the government sent in their arsonists.



To put it bluntly, the UAW takes the hard earned money of the
best workers and spends it defending the very worst workers while
tying up the industry with thousands of pages of work rules that make
it impossible to be competitive. And the spineless management often
makes short sighted decisions to satisfy the union and maximize
immediate benefits over long term sustainability.



The strength of the union and the weakness of management made it
impossible to conduct business properly at any level. For instance, I
had an employee who punched in his time card and then disappeared.
The rules were such that I had to spend hours documenting that this
man was not in his three foot by three foot work area. I needed
witnesses, timed reports, calls over the intercom and a plant wide
search all documented in detail. After this absurdity I decided to go
my own route; I called the corner bar and paged him and he came to the
phone. I gave him a 30 day unpaid disciplinary lay off because he
was a “repeat offender”. When he returned he thanked me for the PAID
vacation. I scoffed, until he explained: (1) He had tried to get the
lay off because it was fishing season; (2) The UAW negotiated with GM
Labor Relations Department to give him the time WITH PAY.



I supervised a loading dock and 21 UAW workers who worked
approximately five hours per day for eight hours pay. They could
easily load one third more rail cars and still maintain their union
negotiated break times, but when I tried to make them increase
production ever so slightly they sabotaged my ability to make even the
current production levels by hiding stock, calling in sick, feigning
equipment problems, and even once, as a show of force, used a fork
lift truck and pallets and racks to create a car part prison where
they trapped me while I was conducting inventory. The reaction of
upper management to my request to boost production was that I should
“not be naïve”.



One afternoon I was helping oversee the plant while upper
management was off site. The workers brought an RV into the loading
yard with a female “entertainer” who danced for them and then
“entertained” them in the RV. With no other management around, I went
to Labor Relations for assistance. As a twenty five year old woman, I
was not about to try to break up a crowd of fifty rowdy men. The
Labor Relations Rep pulled out the work rules and asked me which of
the rules the men were breaking. I read through the rules and none
applied directly of course. Who wrote work rules to cover prostitutes
at lunch? The only “legal” cause I had was an unauthorized vehicle
and person and that blame did not fall on the union workers who were
being “entertained” but on the security guards at the gate. Not one
person suffered any consequence.



Another employee in the plant urinated on the feet of his
supervisor as a protest to discipline. He was, of course, fired…that
is until the union negotiated and got his job back.

<many more at the link above>

Scott

"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want,
and deserve to get it good and hard." H. L. Mencken
http://tinyurl.com/6qkhjb

.

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