No, they went away because we deep sixed organized labor.
Organized labor deep sixed itself. Quality fell dramatically on the products being produced at higher prices. See: GM. Even you drove a Toyota (that wasn’t made here - now many are) for decades. There was an economic reason. Detroit was in a death spiral of not being able to afford unions AND a high quality product for a long long time. Might still be.
There hasn’t been a single significant technological upgrade between my ‘04 Yukon (started in ‘02) and the one they’re making today. They only came out with a new powerplant and drive train last year.
And look who’s on strike again trying to kill the company... again. I suspect we won’t bail them out this time. It didn’t work last time.
I’m also amazed my transmission hasn’t grenaded at 179,000 miles. It’s going to. The problems have been well known with this transmission since about the time this one rolled off the line, new. GM hasn’t done anything about it. They can’t afford to make a 300,000 mile transmission nor make it in the U.S. anymore.
And as far as pensions and factory jobs go, be honest. How many of your “you’re all winners in life” students would happily walk into a factory and mount the same transmission to the same frame for thirty years to earn that pension? No way. They expect more than that sort of job.
Or I could mention how many trips I made to businesses who had Teamsters working their loading docks where I waited around for half a week to get a crate OPENED by a union guy or risk causing the company all sorts of heartache. This wasn’t helping their employer or even showing the slightest pride in the job. Delayed a million dollar project by a week, every time it happened.
Or the union UPS guys who stuffed a forklift tine right through the center of half a million bucks worth of Cisco gear and they still delivered it with the delivery guy literally running away after getting the front desk girl to sign for it without looking at the giant splintered wood and electronic parts mess he dropped in the hallway near the elevators at our startup company?
Yeah. Sorry. Unions killed themselves with crap like the above. I was told if I touched those crates in multiple states at multiple companies that my rental car tires would be slashed. I damn near got tackled by a 300 lb VP of Technology at a Bank in Cincinnati when I was poking at one of the crates wondering if I could just pop it open and get to WORK. Never seen a 300 lb guy move so fast outside of the NFL. LOL.
I spent four days in a hotel room in Cincinnati waiting on some jackass I never did meet or see, to pop open a crate with a crowbar and walk off.
And NYNEX. Don’t even get me started on working with Bell System Union people. I literally called the desk phone at the site where I KNEW one of them had plugged into the wrong jack field and knocked down thousands of my customers in telecom, and the guy literally told me (after he yelled across the room at someone telling them they screwed up) that they’d check it after their half hour union coffee break. Direct words. Then he sat the phone on the desk and proceeded to leave for exactly a half an hour. This is an outage he or the other guy on site CAUSED to circuits that cost us five figures a month to keep operational.
And then there were the AT&T guys who went against the engineering approval we got for tie-wraps in our cabinets and cut every single one of them out and laced every cable with wax string which added four days to twelve site projects which all were worth $3M each for the build and made massive daily revenue. Even the VP who fought for four months for the approval when he toured the first site in NJ and saw what they were doing and the look on my face, just sighed and pulled me aside and said “They’re going to do whatever they want to do, you know it and I know it, so just work around them as best you can.”
Yeah. I’d love to have had ONE major telecom, networking, or building build-out that wasn’t delayed, screwed up completely, or just plain sabotaged by the union people. I did that work for over a decade in telecom and another six years in data center buildouts in networking and NOT ONCE did a union worker bust ass to help their company keep a schedule for their customers.
I even had one guy at that NJ site (granted it was NJ) refuse to get up from his desk and open a door when I had to go outside for tools. He decided the only person who could let me in was the national Subject Matter Expert who was juggling five projects on his cell that week and I was the top of his list so he came in person. That’s how important the project was to the company. And jackass on site literally heard me knock on the secured door, looked at me over the top of his newspaper from five feet away, and made a show of putting the newspaper back up.
Now not to put too fine a point on it, but this was in the era of MCI/Worldcom handing AT&T their butts on a plate, which is basically still where they’re at today. They’re Verizon now, and the name change happened during my time in telecom, but these folks didn’t care at all about the companies they worked for. Not in the slightest. As long distance became a commodity that rides essentially for free on top of fiber data networks, they got left behind. And now they’re still behind.
AT&T did get crushed and had to let the worst and most backward RBOC on the planet buy them and take their name or they’d be a distant memory. Only the marketing people wanted the name.
I loved working with the management and the senior staff out of Middletown. They still had pride in the company and damn near killed themselves constantly to keep that company going. The front line, simply didn’t care at all. The Union would back every bit of their bad behavior that hurt the company.
Sure, they were making a staffing point, but not opening a door for a contractor and leaving him in the hall for half an hour, or refusing to open a crate for four days, is going too far. Businesses can’t afford that. They didn’t care.
And yes NOW there’s no pensions. But EVERY one of those techs that did that crap when I was in that biz had one AND lifetime medical coming in retirement. THEY killed the golden goose for the new kids that came up behind them.
I could see it happening. But again, I had people tell me to just back off or the crate would NEVER be opened. Or that six guys getting paid overtime to wax string Ethernet cables was just how it had to be.
At least in telecom, the union employees cut off their noses in spite of their faces. And then wondered why they were replaced with cheap contractors. You can’t take a week delay on every project or more and expect the company to survive it. Not when the competitor has people who will actually work a full eight.
There was a time I was jealous of those guys. Work maybe four real hours a day and screw off doing paperwork and pretending to work on tickets and get a pension and medical for life. But realistically, they harmed everyone they came into contact with. We figured it out early enough that we put a daily rate on field engineers being on site and unable to work for just that reason. So we got paid whether I was sitting in a hotel room waiting on the Teamster with a crowbar, or actually working.
And yeah, I worked in the hotel room those days either writing lessons for the classes I taught when in Denver or doing phone support for the other field engineers when they hit problems in my specialties. Over a damn modem or 2-3G cellular data card.
Unions sound great on the surface until the reality kicks in at the work level. If you’ve never had to work a project where they were in the way, you just don’t know this.
And I would LOVE to say it was the much touted higher quality work when they did get to work, but it was about the same as contractors. Same number of people can’t read a wiring diagram and wire things up correctly the first time. Or test it. I truly wish it weren’t the case, but humans are humans. We always scheduled an extra two days and if needed a weekend day up against however many days we thought a project turn up should take. All it took was attention to detail and a multimeter to find the inevitable mistakes before powering anything up. The union techs wouldn’t fix their mistakes on a weekend was about the only difference.
That crap would kill you and hurt the whole time you were dying.
