Thoughts?
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In France the majority of the workers are unionized, even the engineers and middle level management. They understand that everyone has a boss, except the CEO and the rest of directors, then everyone with a boss should be on the union.
Unions do nothing for employees other than take their money. They were once good for workers, but those days are long gone. Look at the benefits package within 3M alone. They get way less than non-union employees. Any positive changes that the site may want to do for their employees, they can't b/c the union and their contract is standing in the way. I've lived it on both sides. Not worth it.
Post from TheLayoff.com
Sure, but what have unions done for me lately? You don't really get to claim accomplishments from decades ago.
There is this regional reporters group JG 15-17. Not much responsibilities but just collating and taking credits of others. This group should be fired first with no payout.
Fire all legacy workers and relatives above jg 15
Do you enjoy weekends? Thank a union member.
Do you enjoy paid vacations? Thank a union member.
Do you enjoy workplace safety? Thank a union member.
Do you enjoy not having child labor? Thank a union member.
You should take the union talk and jump off a bridge
I believe 3M shifted from merit based promotions to using them as a way to stop all the moving around for the immediate future. Then, many positions (in corporate that didn’t want (nor merit) promotions), will be the first cuts. As usual, upper management can even promote honestly or consistently. They are creating haves and have nots as pawns for strategy and positioning and playing games with people’s lives. Yes, 3M is an example of management without rules, so unionize!
In the 80’s, good paying production jobs were scarce, so 3M was able to take advantage of the union situation and hold all those workers to about 2/3 of the benefits of office workers. Some workers wore baseball caps that said “2Mer” on the forehead. Saved 3M millions.
1st step: build an organizing committee. Organizing committee training begins immediately. Committee members must be prepared to work hard to educate themselves and their co-workers about the union and to warn and educate co-workers about the impending management anti-union campaign.
The only thing consistent in 3M promotions is hardcore nepotism and favoritism.
If you are in the good books of your immediate manager and VP, no force in the world can stop your promotion, whatever your credentials can be.
If for some reason your manager doesn't like or know you well or understand your area of work, you can k.i.s.s that promotion a long and hard goodbye.
Earlier, T6 and T7s had a say in technical merits of a promotion, for people working at the bench. That went away about 10 years back, and ever since the dark arts have taken over.
Promotion in 3M is anything but merit based. That is the hard truth.
Going off of 3M radar:
- less political career progression.
Why is it that every group/division has their own criteria for promotions that is kept secret and elusive from the worker bees? This is something that should be standardized across the company, that if you check xyz boxes, you are promoted. I have tried for years to get any sort of concrete information from my management about criteria for promotions to no avail. All criteria is subjective, and not set in stone.
That being said some other things I’d like to add to the list:
- Defined and standardized criteria for employee evals that are transparent and well known ahead of time to the worker bees. This is to completely eliminate personal bias from the situation.
- end quotas on “exceeds expectations” performance evals. Having quotas on this is a real morale ki-ler.
- defined and standardized criteria for promotions
- direct report input on management performance evals. Ive seen completely incompetent managers getting promoted and raises because they have painted an untrue picture to their upper management of how well they actually do their job. To be taken with a grain of salt, because I do understand that managers have to be the bad guy sometimes, but if a manager is receiving the same type of critiques/input from all their direct reports, then that should be a red flag to up above.
- all federal holidays as paid holidays.
Boeing has had unionized engineers for long, long time.
Many engineers (civilians) working for Army Corps of Engineers are unionized.
Airline pilots are mostly unionized in the US
Even some of the 'trades' are probably averaging 100k+ these days, steamfitting historically pays pretty high.
So, yes there are unions for highly compensated workers.
What I would want from a union:
Some measure of job security, or at least warning before layoffs.
Pay increases that at least match inflation, or better yet match the percentage increases the big wigs see.
Benefits that don't get worse every year
The ability to carry-over at least some vacation from year to year
An end to open-offices
Less political career progression
Are there many unions that serve organizations where the average employee has a six-figure salary?
It seems to me like if we truly expected that things were so bad at 3M, we could easily go find another job. A highly-skilled employee with experience at a multinational Fortune 500 seems like they wouldn't have too much trouble in the job market.
So what do you want from a union?
Would be good for production workers.
Not only should worker bees unionize, they should also have a seat at the highest table (it happens in German companies and not in China).
Enough of upper management BS.
Union were created when the actions of management were highly detrimental to employees. Management was focused solely on increasing profit for owners and shareholders. The goal of the union was improved employee safety and better overall working conditions. Employees wanted a voice in how they were treated. Does this sound like it fits the current 3M?
That would certainly stop the AIP adjustments. Lock it all in a contract, full transparency.
I’m in
It would not improve the senior management, however I think it would improve things for most employees.
A few more key plants organizing under strong unions could do wonders, and the labs unionizing could also do some really good things.
Not sure how that would make 3M an ethical company... Seems like that's the biggest problem. Spend more on lobbyists to stay out of court, more bang for the buck.