Don't ostracize unions and 40-hour week will be back.
However I worked for UPS for a few years, and teamsters is the worst organization. You can't advance by merit, only seniority, and job performance is not required to be promoted. You can't get fired except for very specific offenses like sexual harassment. No call no show.or regularly being 20 minutes late weren't cause. Made work a nightmare, with no incentive to work hard and advance. When I became a supervisor and was no longer in the union, it made running your section of the building impossible, unless you managed to trade your poor performers for others.
Yet with unions, so many people think "Unions sometimes do bad, therefore it's just better not to have unions, and all the downsides of not having unions we'll just have to live with".
They're gonna hang a noose and GM is still too scared/unable to fire them? Am I misreading this?
But also can easily also see how merit based promotion at a production plant would be used to work workers to the bone. Gotta be some kind of balance.
I worked a job in NYC once installing a custom stage/set that we had built in Phoenix. It was full of arduinos, custom lighting controllers that i built, custom blinkenlights panels that I had built, custom robotics elements. Just all sorts of completely custom one-off elements.
It was a BATTLE with the union labor that even get it installed on time. They had absolutely no idea what any of the stuff we were doing was, they worked at a snails pace, they took breaks seemingly every 30 minutes, they were expensive, and we HAD to use them even though our fabricators were on site for the install.
It was one of the most infuriating experiences I have ever had. It was like some sort of bizarre nightmare. Worst of all, they used stupid duct tape on all of our cables and gummed them up!
I wouldn’t paint them all like that. Some of their members are brilliant and taught me a lot. Others were negligent cokeheads... but most of them got the job done.
Sounds like a bad crew more than anything.
Edit: can confirm the gaffer/duct tape thing, though. I once worked fixing up high voltage/amperage cabling and distro equipment. They always taped that gear to hell and it was terrible to clean and fix up.