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Comment by wikiburner | Hacker News Reader

If anyone thinks that this sounds farfetched, it really just scratches the surface of the waste and corruption in Detroit. When I was working for a contractor installing and fixing servers at various plants and facilities, the only union workers who actively appeared to be doing their jobs were the union work rules compliance guys, who hovered over us to see if there was any possible way to file a grievance over violations of the "work rules". We were not allowed to "move" a system on our own - even just an inch in order to move a cable. Plugging in ethernet cables was okay, but if we dared to plug in a power cord on our own we were fucked. If we needed a system moved a couple of feet, or plugged in, we were lucky if it took less than a week for a worker to get around to it.

Just about everyone else seemed like they were on a picnic.

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I can't speak to anecdotes about Detroit unions, but by no means is this normal behavior in every industry union.

I worked in a UFCW union retail shop for two years' time during high school and saw nothing of the sort. To the contrary, everyone worked their arses off and earned minimum wage while performing every single job role in the facility except management and bookkeeping. If no customers were nearby, you were expected to clean, straighten, and develop photos. If business was especially good, you had no time to straighten shelves and got dinged for the store's good fortune by management. Turnover was rampant. You had to pay dues and yet got next to nothing for them.

Like all things, your mileage may vary.

That sounds like every retail job I've had although none were union.

Sounds a lot like the unions in Philly. In our experience, you either have a work rules guy shadowing you all day itching to fine you should you decide to plug anything into an electric socket, or you simply "pay them off" by hiring their shitty people at $40 and hour to sit and do nothing all day.

The last one we were forced to hire literally showed up with a laptop, said hello, and then sat down next to an electric outlet (which he didn't get union help to plug into!) and played video games all day. We ended up asking him to do exactly one thing on the final day of the show, and that was to carry a portable recorder over to where we were packing up all our gear. His response was an "Ehhh, yeah.. I don't think that's such a good idea." which prompted me to shout into the phone like a crazy person and go pick up the recorder myself.

It just blows my mind that some Unions have gotten to the point where, with no exaggeration, you will be fined if you plug something into an electric socket.

I had a similar experience. When I was reassigned to a new team in a building a few miles down the road, my computer was supposed to move with me for some reason. It took about a month and a half for that to actually happen.

I also recall some union workers trying to move a full rack of equipment. This was a full height rack with some DEC Alphaservers and storage arrays. Rather than pull the systems, they tried to move the rack as a whole. The whole kit and kaboodle came crashing down.

I worked at a unionized company once. Yes, we were told never to move a system or install a cable in our computer lab because the right union worker has to be involved in that. More specifically, I was told by my boss to never let anyone see us doing that. We just shut the door. Never really had a problem with it.

i worked for a company that wanted a new office in Chicago and it fell on me to handle the internet installation. You'd think it would be as easy as, run cable to office and be done. Nope. we had to get att to run it to the d-mark then had a union company run it from the d-mark to the office, but they wouldn't touch the office. i had to get another contractor to come up and finish the wiring of the office itself. that didn't include the actually company i used for internet, that had to have their own tech come in and "install" the box (this consisted of plugging it in and watching the green lights light up). What a mess.

Huh. First time I've seen it called a d-mark, usually a demarc

sorry. my slang trickled over into the internet. I learned what a demarcation point was after I had heard the word, so i always called it in my head, a d-mark. i know what it is now, but the term is stuck in my head. I'm sure I'm not the only one that's done that. I remember thinking euthanasia was about children living in Asia...

It's funny that I often have the exact opposite problem: I'll know a word because I've seen it used in print many times, but I'll have no idea of how to pronounce it.

The first time I tried to pronounce 'subpoena' while leafing through a series of Nixon-era political cartoons made my mom howl with laughter. Thanks, mom.

I remember reading Rendezvous with Rama when I was a kid, and the whole time in my head I was pronouncing rendezvous in completely phonetic English, which also happened to make my mom laugh hysterically when I first said it out loud.

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