My colleagues and I ran a IBEW union shop for about a dozen years up through the dot-com bust. We had over 150 union electricians building out data centers, running fiber optics along railroad tracks, installing low-voltage datacom, etc.
We had a few electricians from the local pool who:
1. Would not show up on time.
2. Did sloppy work.
3. Lied about their work hours on timesheets.
4. Refused to stay updated on building codes, technology changes, fire protection codes.
5. Were rude to customers.
And we would fire them for cause and they would show up in our shop a year later as it was their turn to be rotated through again.
That said, the union gave us flexibility to scale up or down our workforce as needed to meet project deadlines. And provided us with trained, skilled and motivated workers.
I can't get too worked up that there are some bad electricians (and I'm imagining that this is true for any field) who are also union members.
My brother in law's a solo residential electrician who occasionally does a little commercial work. Been doing this for 20+ years. He works hard to keep up with codes, always spends the time on the job to do the work to good standards, etc. His observation is probably 80% of the homes he's come into, whether done by the homeowner or by a previous electrician, the work is shoddy to the point of being dangerous.
I'm honestly not at all surprised if there are bad union electricians, it seems like there are a LOT of bad electricians out there.
Sucks that they're rotating through the union hiring pool, though. I'm sure that was super frustrating.
My wife's medical workers union won her 5 weeks of vacation, free health insurance, someone advocating for reasonable hours who she could report abuses to without fear of repercussion, healthy food in the cafeteria, oh and she got a stipend to buy whatever computing devices she wanted. No one locked away her monitor cable or prevented her from working for a week so they could plug in a power strip. No armed union rep came to her door to force her to sign the paperwork or hand over the fees. Her union fees were like a couple hundred bucks a year or something, but her pay in that position was also higher than it would have been at any other hospital in the region.
Please don't take HN threads further into generic ideological flamewar. That direction is predictable, nasty, and tedious, and therefore badly off topic here.
We should be in the mines like the REAL working class. Its only through forced self-oppression that we can throw off the shackles of our own oppression.
