I feel like I should say somethiing about the UAW - I am actually working in Detroit until New Years-
When I first got here the Project Manager pointed to a building across the street and told me - " that was Jimmy Hoffas office ( Teamsters )-
I feel like Im in a time warp.  this city is a freakin mess-

Im a working on a $200 million project over budget and behind schedual because of all of the union labor-
I had to join - the first ime in my life -

First...why is the city a freakin mess?

Second....I was always led to believe that unions ran a tight ship. Always on schedule and hardly ever over budget due to bidding on jobs before hand. Union workers pride themselves and sell themselves and will try to convince everyone that they are the elite and the best workers as compared to non-unioin employees.

So what happened here?

Quoted from bumblethru

First...why is the city a freakin mess?

Second....I was always led to believe that unions ran a tight ship. Always on schedule and hardly ever over budget due to bidding on jobs before hand. Union workers pride themselves and sell themselves and will try to convince everyone that they are the elite and the best workers as compared to non-unioin employees.

So what happened here?

Half the poulationof Detroit  has left in the last 30 years. ( Just like Schenectady) If you are in a union- any union I think you can make a living and make ends meet. The rest cant and you wind up with  a large version of Schenectady.

The project is The Motor City Casino expansion and much of the design is on the fly so to speak so its hard to consistantly come up with hard numbers. Most of the trades I deal with - Carpenters, drywall-tapers- painters are OK but only just OK.  It appears  difficult for the tradesmen to excel individualy- the union sort of keeps everyone equal. But at the same time encourage craftsmen tolearn and  master thier trade-

I happen to have a special ability/skill ( I paint special effects ) whichI was able to develop because I have worked in an environment ( not Yates Village- where I grew up ) where - the smart and talented can move ahead-

I respect the union " brotherhood " for the etiquitte and the general order of aprenticship but there are Too many rules for me .  Sign in - sign out-double time- meetings for this and that- business agents checking on stuff all the time.

These are only  my perceptions- but I regularly follow Casino work all over the country and Im just comparingit to other projects I have worked on

ONE of the things I have against unions, is that it does, in deed, have a brotherhood! It protects the slackers as well as the good workers. There is no incentive to do a really good job and work as hard as you can, cause your job is protected by the union. One can sleep on the job all day and will still be guarenteed their job.

Just ask the old GE workers. They were major slackers. Some would punch in for work, stay about an hour and leave to go to the nearest gin mill, while the 'brotherhood' punched them out at the end of the day. This was common practice. Look at the teachers union. Some of them should not even be called educators. And they will continue to have their taxpayer paid salary. And then there are the cops. We won't go there.....

Bumble I've seen first hand many of the things that you described when I was in the union b4 I retired.

And sadly, it still goes on today shadow.

http://www.dailygazette.com

Quoted Text

CSEA members to vote on tentative contract
BY BOB CONNER Gazette Reporter

   The Civil Service Employees Association hopes its tentative contract with the state of New York will be ratified by Jan. 3.
   CSEA plans to mail out ballots to members on Dec. 7, and they are due back by Jan. 2. Votes will be counted Jan. 3, according to CSEA spokesman Steve Madarasz.
   Madarasz said he is not aware of any union faction campaigning against ratification. “We’ve had very strong positive feedback on the tentative agreement from our leaders and rank and file members,” he said.
   CSEA’s negotiating team has been holding informational sessions with members from around the state, and next week’s union newspaper will contain details about the proposed deal.
   The CSEA deal, which was announced by the union and state Oct. 29, includes a 3 percent raise retroactive to April, 3 percent raises in April 2008 and 2009, and a 4 percent raise in April 2010. The state Legislature will have to implement pay bills to enable the state to pay the raises, which it routinely does following contract agreements.
   Meanwhile, the Public Employees Federation is continuing to negotiate on its proposed contract. It released an update on its Web site Monday saying: “Negotiations … continue in a positive direction. We are near a meeting of the minds on health insurance. All other issues are being discussed in depth and progress is being made. At this writing no significant roadblock to achieving a fair deal has materialized. Having said this though there are several unresolved matters remaining where it is likely both teams of negotiators will have their skills challenged.”
   Don Feldstein, spokesman for United University Professions, which represents teachers and others in the state university system, was less specific about the status of talks with the state. “UUP has been meeting frequently with represen tatives from the Governor’s Offi ce of Employee Relations,” he said.
   The state is also in negotiations with unions representing state po lice troopers and supervisors, and correction officers.  

  
  
  

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Quoted Text

Unions return to organizing roots In bid to check decline, organizers eye working conditions, labor violations
BY ELLEN SIMON The Associated Press

    NEW YORK — Laura Tapia is the union movement’s equivalent of a beat cop.
    A tiny, fast-talking woman from Puebla, Mexico, she’s spent two years walking the 99-cent stores, fruit stands and sneaker shops of Brooklyn’s immigrant Knickerbocker Ave. She made her rounds recently, hugging the woman selling tamales from a cart, pointing to the car wash, which she says is usually staffed by underage kids, and clucking that the combination laundromat-Post Office was robbed in the middle of the day.
    “When you are on the street all day, you know everything that happens,” she said, shivering in her down parka. “Everything.”
    Tapia is an organizer for the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. Only two of the roughly 170 stores on Knickerbocker are unionized, but organizing workers is her secondary goal. Her immediate task is investigating working conditions, injuries and wage and hour violations involving the stores’ shelf stockers, cashiers and salespeople.
    She’s one of seven organizers working a neighborhood for the union. Their efforts, part of a small but growing push by organized labor to battle for workers who may never join a union, are as much social engineering as organizing.
    Union membership has declined for 25 years in part because unions have “lost connections to communities,” said Jonathan Tasini, executive director of the labor-funded Labor Research Association. Union halls, once the community centers of the urban working class, the place to find a job, a card game or a date, have all but disappeared.
    “One way of thinking about how we connect to communities is thinking about doing so at the street, block and neighborhood level, as opposed to just in the workplace,” said Tasini.
    Work on Knickerbocker, where half the stores were union in the 1950s, “harkens back to the old days when labor unions were the centers of community vibrance,” he said.
    But some union advocates say small-scale community efforts aren’t worth the effort; after all, unions would have to organize hundreds of thousands of workers to return to the membership numbers of the 1980s.
    “In the current climate, the labor movement cannot afford to be extending resources for one or two workers at a time,” said Kate Bronfenbrenner, a labor studies professor at Cornell University.
    Still, unions around the country, often working in partnership with community groups, are reaching out to nonunion workers.
    A new national organization, the Partnership for Working Families, pairs union research departments with community groups trying to win jobs for neighborhood workers affected by urban redevelopment projects. California unions, working with clergy, have pushed for better wages for the working poor. New York unions have assisted a campaign for better pay for nonunion restaurant delivery men.
    The groups have had victories. Working with a community group in Brooklyn called Make the Road, the retail workers union has helped with civil cases and settlements resulting in more than $600,000 in back wages for workers on Knickerbocker.
    The fastest-growing union in the country, the Service Employees International Union, has grown by championing the rights of underpaid janitors, security guards and hotel housekeepers. SEIU gained more than 200,000 members in two years, growing to 1.9 million as it negotiated contracts that, in some cases, doubled workers’ wages. One of the union’s biggest successes in 2007 was when 22,000 home care workers paid through Massachusetts’ Medicaid program voted to organize. In other recent organizing drives, more than 8,000 home-based day-care workers in New York joined the American Federation of Teachers.
    Jeff Eichler, coordinator of the 100,000-worker retail union’s organizing project, said most union efforts are about increasing membership and then fighting for a contract for the members. The union’s work on Knickerbocker is instead about identifying the union with a community.
    “Only a small group of folks fight for contracts,” he said. “A much greater group is highly exploited. We have to be seen as a participant with the needs and desires of the entire work force. That leads to contract fights.”
    The union came to Knickerbocker after Make the Road began its back wages effort and a friend of Eichler’s introduced him to the director of Make the Road.
    Tapia, 38, got her start as an organizer seven years ago, after she led the union drive at the garment factory where she worked because she felt the owners were treating the elderly seamstresses poorly. She was assigned to Knickerbocker, which she walks daily from Make the Road’s offices, asking every worker who will talk to her about wages and injuries.

The unions weren't able to secure union manufacturing jobs in this country, So the only frontier left is retail.

The unions who used to represent manufacturing jobs have had to move into the fields of service providers, grocery, retail, hospital, airlines, and any other group that they can get to join their ranks. Most of the money that the unions raise goes to fund salaries of the international union officers and to pay for donations to political campaigns. They are just another big business that takes care of the officials at the members expense.

Quoted from Shadow

The unions who used to represent manufacturing jobs have had to move into the fields of service providers, grocery, retail, hospital, airlines, and any other group that they can get to join their ranks. Most of the money that the unions raise goes to fund salaries of the international union officers and to pay for donations to political campaigns. They are just another big business that takes care of the officials at the members expense.

Well said Shadow!

Quoted from Shadow

The unions who used to represent manufacturing jobs have had to move into the fields of service providers, grocery, retail, hospital, airlines, and any other group that they can get to join their ranks. Most of the money that the unions raise goes to fund salaries of the international union officers and to pay for donations to political campaigns. They are just another big business that takes care of the officials at the members expense.

Kind of like taxes????

http://www.dailygazette.com

Quoted Text

Union members charged with extortion
BY CAROLYN THOMPSON The Associated Press

    BUFFALO — Construction union thugs used the state Department of Motor Vehicles database to target nonmember workers and their families for violence, property damage and threats of sexual assault, federal officials said Tuesday as they announced the arrests of 12 union leaders and members.
    The president of Operating Engineers Local 17, Mark Kirsch, and several other high-ranking officials and members were charged with extortion and racketeering in an eight-count indictment detailing a 10-year reign authorities said stunted economic growth in a struggling part of the state.
    “At the end of the day, it cost the job sites and the developers and the workers millions of dollars in property damage, millions of dollars in lost jobs,” U.S. Attorney Terrance Flynn said.
    At job sites big and small where non-Local 17 members were hired, union members caused more than $1 million in damage to more than 40 pieces of heavy machinery by pouring sand and grinding compound into the oil systems, breaking windows, destroying tires and cutting fuel lines, investigators said.
    Particularly unnerving to investigators was the union’s ability to run potential victims’ license plates through the DMV database to obtain personal information, including their wives’ names and addresses.
    “It was astounding to us,” Flynn said.
    The union had an account with DMV that was meant to allow it to ensure its own vehicles were properly registered and inspected, but the account was abused on several occasions, Flynn said.
    “They would check license plates as people would come to the job site, take down the license plate, go on the database, look up who they are, get their wife’s name, get their address and they would use that information to threaten the men and women who were trying to work at the job site. But this was information freely given by the DMV to the union.”
    A DMV spokesman had not heard about the allegations Tuesday and said he would look into them.
    On one occasion, defendant James Minter III, a union organizer, told a worker entering a work site in July 2005, “Tell Tara you’re going to be a little late tonight,” referring to the worker’s wife, the indictment said. In 2006, a Local 17 picketer allegedly yelled to a Uniland Development Co. representative that he was going to sexually assault his wife, naming the street.
    The practice of accessing names abruptly stopped after investigators required the DMV to conduct an audit in 2006, Flynn said.
    The president of one business reluctant to sign a collective bargaining agreement with Local 17 was stabbed in the neck and had his tires slashed in December 2002, according to the indictment. A little more than a month later, defendant Carl Larson, a union organizer, tried to persuade the businessman to sign the agreement. The conversation is recounted in court documents:
    “What are the positives? You guys slash my tires, stab me in the neck, try to beat me up in a bar. What are the positives to signing? There are only negatives,” the victim said.
    “The positives are that the negatives you are complaining about would go away,” Larson responded.
    The U.S. Department of Labor, state police and FBI have been investigating the local since 2003, and traced the criminal activity from 1997 to the present day. The threats and violence happened everywhere from the smallest house demolition to major or publicly funded projects at high-profile sites such as Ralph Wilson Stadium and Roswell Park Cancer Institute.
    The investigation did not target the union as a whole, which according to its Web site has 2,100 members in six western New York counties.
    A woman who answered two calls at the union’s headquarters in the Buffalo suburb of Lakeview on Tuesday declined to comment and said no one else was available. She did not know if a lawyer had been retained to represent union members.
    “Labor racketeering strikes at the heart of western New York,” said Buffalo FBI Special Agent-in-Charge Laurie Bennett, who said the bureau has made labor corruption a priority. The arrests at Operating Engineers Local 17 mark the third high-profile union crackdown in the area in recent years.
    “It has caused losses in the millions economically … and ultimately it has deprived western New York of vibrant economic growth,” Bennett said.
    The indicted union members were taken into custody during a 5:30 a.m sweep of their homes. They include Gerald Franz Jr., who is listed on the union Web site as treasurer; Jeffery Peterson, listed as financial secretary, and Thomas Freedenberg, recording secretary. All are scheduled to appear in federal court Thursday. If convicted, they face up to 20 years in prison, $250,000 in fines or both.

I thought that this type of behavior died out a long time ago and now the unions were conducting themselves properly but I guess not all the unions are civil yet.

Oh, there are many that are 'thugs'. They just do it under a different name. I think they are called 'strong armed lobbyists'.