My Thoughts on Unions

My first union job was in the Carpenters Union. It was back in 1988 and unions, at least mine were still an effective method of protecting employees pay and benefits from the greedy companies. Employee abuse was pretty much a non-issue. When you had a problem and your rights were being violated you could take your case down to the union hall and feel confident that the wrongs would be righted with no backlash. I felt like the union dues I was paying was deserving of the people getting it.
Fast forward to now. I belong to the United Steelworkers. My union is absolutely worthless. The union hierarchy are there so they can collect the extra pay given to union officers. From the bottom all the way up is corrupt. It starts with the Grievance people who’s job is to file your grievances and see them thru the grievance process until they ultimately succeed or fail. But if the grievance you filed is valid, and most of them are, then it is going to piss off the manager who violated the collective bargaining agreement. Normally this shouldn’t matter, but the unknown here is that all of management are ex-union employees who sucked up to the company so they could get offered a lucrative management/contractor job.
Right now I’m laid off. We have a “Lean Management” clause in our contract and there are 275 managers and 540 employees. I’ll do the math for you. That’s 1.96 employees for every manager. And only a handful of them know anything about their job. The rest are basically like ticks on a dog. Or leeches.
It’s one thing to pay someone to handle problems for you and not have them do it. It’s an entirely different matter when you pay someone to handle problems and they don’t handle them and in the process actually create more problems. And speak of the devil. My grievance person is calling me. I want to take this. I’ll finish tomorrow.