We are not supposed to understand.
I’m a couple days late with this, but I wanted to get the straight dope before commenting on the Teamsters I work with finally settling on their contract and the ending of the possibility of a strike that could have screwed up my week off last week.
First off, this contract is only good for four years, not the six that is traditional.
Secondly, the guys will be getting raises equivalent to $6 an hour at the end of that four years. Last time around they got $6 an hour in raises over six years.
Lastly, The maximum any of them will pay for medical benefits is now $30 a month. I pay twice that and still think I’m gettign a pretty good deal.
Most everything else stayed the same.
But here is the part I don’t understand; when the final vote of approval/denial came down, only 62% of the union members voted FOR this contract.
Excuse me, but their take home pay will be going up by $250 a month immediately and by April 1st, 2010, they’ll be making almost $12K more a year than they are now, and 38% of the union members still weren’t satisfied?
That is the 38% I spoke of in the past that were pledged to voting for a strike, no matter what. From what I’ve been able to gather from some of my guys is that they wanted a guarantee of no more than a 40hr work week unless they volunteered for the overtime.
Basically, the Teamster version of the German Labor Model.
Unfortunately for them, they don’t work in an office, they drive trucks. No one can control how long the drivers stay out on their respective routes, not the drivers and not the companies.
Here is how most of these guys get up into 50 – 55 hour territory per week: 1. A truck breaks down, and because a new truck needs to be driven out to the driver, sometimes taking 2-3 hours, that route is now behind and all the other drivers in the area have to help catch that driver up, or 2. Someone isn’t moving at a decent pace and at the end of the day the other drivers in that area have to help that driver, or 3. Someone decides that the weather on that Monday/Friday is too nice to be having to spend it packing cans.
Two of those three examples are out of the company’s hands once the drivers leave the base and the third is a random act of vehicle breakage, also out of the company’s hands once the PM is done.
And since one of these three things will happen at least once a week, each and every driver knows that these things happen from their very first week ont he job. It’s not this is some big secret that all the other drivers or the company keep from the newbie. The 38% want to hire on, get past their probation and then change the terms of the job.
What the 38% are basically asking for is for a driver to come in and do nothing around the base or ride along with another driver, JUST IN CASE.
A long standing part of the Teamster contracts is that if a guy shows up to work and punches in on the time clock and then gets told that there isn’t enough work and gets sent home, he still gets paid for four hours of work. It doesn’t matter if he has been waiting around for 2 hours or two minutes for something to do, he still gets his four paid hours. The leaders of that 38% came up with the number of the extra drivers needed to make this plan work as 10-12.
10-12 extra employees that will, in all likelyhood, only be needed once a week or twice on a bad week. Hourly wages, medical benefits, pension contributions for a guy who may only work 10 solid hours a week and with possibly 25 hours of doing little to nothing.
They were smoking drugs, I tell ya. At least there were a majority who could see that this was as good as it was going to get this time around.
When I first started working there, I used to laugh at the Keystone Cops routine between the drivers and the supervisors during the slow months of winter, with the supervisors trying to keep the drivers away from the time clock until there was confirmed work to be done and the drivers trying to sneak through so they could punch in and get their free four hours.
When I was finally given charge of a certain hauling division (a job I have sice gladly handed back to what is now a long line of suckers) I effectively ended my entertainment, by finding stuff for the successfully sneaky driver something to do for that four hours.
If you don’t know people who drive for a living, the majority like the feeling of not being tied down to a desk or a table or even a building. I’d give them stacks of boxes to shuffle between Points A and B (and then from B back to A the next day) or send them out to wash trucks in the rain or, if I didn’t have of that available, I’d assign them the dreaded routine data entry stuff that anyone with two fingers could do.
It took just a day over two weeks and the guys would stop by the supervisors office to ask if there was work available before attempting to punch in.
I think that my getting the maintenance guys to put the time clock across from the open door to my office where I could see it was a key part in that little scheme.
I don’t get it. If you have a job where you are guaranteed 40 paid hours a week, and you then get paid OT for anything over that, why do you punch in at all?
You come in on a schedule that the mgmt sets, and when you’re done, you clock out, and if there’s OT involved, you fill out an OT slip and turn it in, then you go home.
I don’t get the reason for waiting to clock in. If you work on a time clock, it seems to me it’s to your advantage to start your scheduled day ASAP, because if you then get to drive a route, and that route runs into OT, you get more OT, but you still get finished sooner and go home to mama/tavern sooner. If you don’t get to drive, your four hours starts sooner and ends sooner, by the real clock anyway.
The issue of actually working during the four hours or goofing off is a separate issue.
Union rolls, with the notable exception of government employees, have been declining for years. In your area, things like automated trucks (the ones with the robot arms) are reducing the number of employees (and thus Teamsters union members) that are required.
I think the real reason for wanting those extra 10-12 guys on your payroll is to have those 10-12 extra dues paying guys on their union rolls.
Now, here’s a question: is it possible to work for your company, as a hourly employee, without being in the union? If not, why not?
It is not possible to work for my company, or the other trash company in town, and not be a union member. However, myself, management and the rest of the paper pushers are non-union.
It is not possible to be a non-union driver because A. Washington is not (and unfortunately will never be) a Right to Work state, and B. The city od Seattle will never give a contract to a non-union company (the county, on the other hand, finally gave a single contract to a non-union company after no union companies wanted the job).