tieguy
Banned
I'm unsure if anyone here remembers working jobs that weren't union. I've been with UPS for only around a year now and worked nonunion crappy jobs for around 9 years (since I'm still a youngin many of the jobs were student jobs).
1. I recall being laid off from a comic book store (best job in the world by the way) because our manager goofed up and bit off more then he could chew. Someone with less seniority took over the job I had for less pay.
2. I worked janitorial duties at a radio shack (I don't know why radio shack needed a janitor, but what the hay!). Sales went down and I was out the door.
3. I worked security gigs for awhile and wasn't paid $5000 for two weeks work I did with one company and the government couldn't FORCE the company to pay me cash. Instead the company got a note saying, 'please give him his money' and that was all.
4. Working security at another spot I phoned in sick with food poisoning but was told to come in otherwise I wouldn't have a job the next day. Well, I was sick as a dog all night and was terminated the next day anyways for the standard nonunion reason of, 'not performing job expectations'.
Without a union all these lovely things happen on a regular basis. Yes, paying dues stinks but that dues is the only thing keeping us where we are. Think about it this way. In Canada our top wage is around $24 an hour. That's after 2.5 years. Why wouldn't the company terminate all their $24 an hour employees and give it to people for 2 years then terminate them after that for 'not performing job expectations'. I think it was our HR guy that told us it costs around $15 000 to train a new driver. If you do the math it's pretty easy to see how much they would save by doing this.
Good luck proving you were performing as required.
All thats good but realistically its more a reflection on lower paying menial jobs then on the overall job market in general.
Keep in mind approximately 85 percent of the country works non-union jobs.
Do a real estate search in my part of the country and at least 75 percent of the houses that pop up are more then 300 K. Theres a lot of somebodys out there making a lot of money in non-union jobs.