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Comment by dbsmith83 | Hacker News Reader

> Even in a non-union workplace, the bosses' friends are likely to be protected from termination despite bad performance

Maybe one or two, but not a large proportion of an aging workforce riding purely on the protection of the union

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I think the federal government is a good example of what happens when you have a union that protects bad employees. It’s very hard to get fired from the government, because the union protects the bad with the good. A great example are the rubber rooms where they have to put bad teachers because the union forbids them from being fired.

Unions had their day, now they are just slush funds and protections for bad people.

> A great example are the rubber rooms where they have to put bad teachers because the union forbids them from being fired.

Actually teachers in those were those who had been accused of misconduct and then either they were awaiting arbitration, mostly because the state wasn't paying their agreed proportion of arbitration fees, or arbitration had cleared them and the state wasn't returning them to their jobs as agreed. Some may have been bad teachers but most were just people the admins had taken a dislike to. Blaming the unions for that is pure propaganda.

At what age specifically do you believe an aging tradesman should be stripped of worker protections? 30? 42? 60?

How long specifically should you pay a worker who is not productive at their job and is killing the business? 5 years? 10 years? 20 years? Until the business dies?

I don't think you really interpreted my statement fairly. Perhaps I should have chosen another word instead of aging, but I was thinking in the traditional factory sense where there is a correlation with age and performance doing manual labor. Age should not be the indicator, performance should.

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