Ridiculous work situation of the day
I work in a building which was constructed about two and a half years ago. The bathrooms were installed with automatic flushing mechanisms and automatic sink faucets. At first these were nice features to have. But after about a year, half of them stopped working. The toilets wouldn’t flush even when you pressed the manual flush button, and no water came out of the sink faucet no matter how long you waved your hand under it.
As it turned out, the only thing wrong was that the batteries needed to be replaced. But union rules did not allow the custodians to replace them; that was a job for an electrician. For some reason, it’s impossible to get one of the company’s electricians to replace the battery on a toilet flusher, so the custodians covered them with plastic bags to keep people from using them, and they stayed that way for months. Eventually, the automatic flush valves (whose only fault was a dead battery) were replaced with the old-fashioned manual kind. (Apparently, the company’s plumbers weren’t as busy as the electricians.)
Now the batteries on the other half of the fixtures are dead, and half the toilets on my floor are again covered with plastic bags until the plumbers come around and do a couple hundred bucks worth of labor because of a dead battery. Gee, I just love working in a company with big labor unions.
Doesnt your company bear fault for agreeing to a contract that compromises company processes in such a manner?
Big Labor or not, it takes at least two parties to much something like this up.
I agree, the company is stupid for signing a contract with a union.
Yes, in theory management could push back on the unions to prevent this kind of thing, but whenever any substantial changes are proposed to the labor contracts, the unions threaten to strike. And if one union strikes, they all strike. Since my company is in a highly-regulated industry, it would take days to train non-union volunteers to replace the production workers, during which time important medicines and vaccines could run out.
Basically, the unions have the company over the barrel.
Management needs to do a better job and learn to live without labor union parasites as the rest of the economy is learning how to do it. Of course, government schools are chock full of the same non performing parasites by government edict. The consignment of a nation’s children to poverty does not bother unions either.
Pee on your local leader’s plant, then the union can come drag the dead weed away. Of course, the union will have to plant a new one. But it creates a new urinal.
China and India are useful antidotes for Union corruption and greed (not to mention stupidity). Indiana job losses are in the hundreds of thousands but the union leadership still does not get it, nor does your management.