Union Workers: Does your union have free and fair elections.

[ICRS]

I work in a union, and 1 thing I find very hypocritical about them is their election process for their representative. It is neither free nor fair. The only people who can run are those who current representatives support. The type of questions they ask people who want to run are "How did you vote in the XXXX election", "Did you vote for Proposition XX". If you don't vote how they want you to vote then you can't run as a union representative.

 

[BoomerD]

File a complaint with the NLRB.
(not that I think it will do any good)

My union doesn't elect our business agents. They're appointed and hired by the business manager.

In some ways, having elected reps is good, because the members get to choose who represents them, but you don't always get a knowledgeable rep, and that can cause more problems than it's worth.

I was an appointed business agent for my union. They approached me. When I accepted, they sent me to school after school to properly train me in labor relations, contract negotiations, contract interpretations, and of course, union business practices.

I hated the politics part of it. Not only the internal politics that any large organization has to deal with, but also involvement in local, state, and national political issues as well.

 

[Squisher]

Yeah. IAM. Anybody can run for office as long as you attend 6 of the 12 union meetings.

 

[RbSX]

Unions are as corrupt as the management they dislike.

 

[dartworth]

We have elections every three years. For quite sometime we didn't have any elections because no one choose to run against the incumbents.

Why no one choose to run against them is another topic.

Anyways, I would call them free and fair. Any member can run for a position as long as they are in good standing with the union.

 

[IGBT]

Originally posted by: dartworth
We have elections every three years. For quite sometime we didn't have any elections because no one choose to run against the incumbents.

Why no one choose to run against them is another topic.

Anyways, I would call them free and fair. Any member can run for a position as long as they are in good standing with the union.

..the people most worthy and able seldom run. It's a thankless job most members avoid.

 

[BoomerD]

Originally posted by: IGBT

Originally posted by: dartworth
We have elections every three years. For quite sometime we didn't have any elections because no one choose to run against the incumbents.

Why no one choose to run against them is another topic.

Anyways, I would call them free and fair. Any member can run for a position as long as they are in good standing with the union.

..the people most worthy and able seldom run. It's a thankless job most members avoid.

QFT. It doesn't matter what you do, you're wrong. Either the members are mad at you, or the employer(s) is mad at you, or both...as long as the union isn't mad at you though, you're ok...the rest get over being mad sooner or later.

 

[Whoozyerdaddy]

One more reason why unions suck. Really, I don't need to pay someone to protect my job. What a weird concept.

 

[kranky]

The union I was in was run like a baseball franchise - they would seek out young workers who had "potential" and they would talk them into running for union steward and work to "develop" them. If the worker agreed to run, the experienced union people would go around and tell everyone what a great steward the person would be. No one ever ran for a union position without being encouraged by someone higher up in the union. The worker's "potential" was based on how gullible and obedient they were.

Then they would continue to groom these people for bigger offices in the union, so they always had a hand-picked, subservient group of elected people who would do whatever they were told by the union executives. Once you were a union official, you almost didn't have to do any work at all. You could report any amount of your working time as being on union business, and the union would reimburse the company for the wages and benefits for those hours. I knew people who would report 100 hours a month on "union business". They were physically present somewhere, but not at their work assignment.

So were the elections free and fair? Yes, they were. But the candidates were hand-picked by the union leadership, and therefore we didn't have much in the way of choices.

These were the geniuses who had us out on strike for 8 months, then settled for the exact same contract we were offered before we went on strike. Eight months for nothing. Well, not nothing - they moved 1,000 jobs to another state after the strike was over. Great leadership there.

 

[boomerang]

I'm retired now, but we'd have elections where the winning candidate got more votes than there were people eligible to vote in that district. When one of our members starting pressing the issue, he was told to file a lawsuit and that perhaps he'd still be alive when the case got to court. No veiled threat there, just a threat.


When the candidate of "choice" looked like he might have a tough campaign, they would talk a third person into running to water down the vote. The last round of elections I was there for, the third candidate dropped out a month before the ballots were even printed, but his name still appeared on the ballot. He got about 15% of the vote too, IIRC.

We used to have a two party system, but that was deemed to be not presenting a united front to management. Now, if a candidate doesn't have the same mindset as the good-old-boys in power, the election will be rigged. An outsider has a snowballs chance in Hell of winning a union election.

We can't vote for the President of the Union. The winner is nominated by his peers.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

I jump in to defend the unions in a lot of union-bashing threads because I grow tired of the recently graduated business majors here that think they're shit doesn't stink. But the backward thinking, head in the sand, status quo and corruption has got to change if Unions expect to survive. By the way, survival for them means maintaining their lifestyle. They are living large in ways that would curl your hair. They'd like us all to think they're looking out for the members. That's the necessary evil to keep themselves living the high life.

 

[dug777]

:|

You've reminded me that for some reason that totally escapes me, our wage bargaining is done between the Government and the good-for-nothing-sh1t-for-brains public sector union.

I'm not a union member, I don't have to be, but I DO have to tolerate them fscking up our wage negotiations. It's almost six months since our last agreement expired, they knocked back the last offer that would have seen us get back-pay to the end of the last agreement, and I have no idea when they'll sort it out.

:|

 

[theknight571]

I can't say yet.... I've only been in my job for 2 months... and the first meeting I'll attend is coming up in the next week or so.

Some other members of my family work at the same company but are represented by a different union... and I know they, in general, don't have much nice to say about their reps.