J. J. v. SD43 & CUPE 561
I'm a woman who's pro-worker.
That means I believe that every human being has a right to work.
I also believe that every human being should have the right to help form, or join, a union.
And I believe that unions were originally created to ensure fairness for all workers, and to protect the rights of all workers.
As well, I believe that unions should honour their promises to the worker. And that if unions don't honour their promises to the worker, then the worker should be allowed to call the union on it.
In another thread (The Rand Formula) Unionist said " 'No partial' payments", in regards to union dues.
Unfortunately, some bargaining unit members, in some unions, very often have no rights, in relation to other bargaining unit members, and yet they still have to pay the same full dues as the members with the full rights.
Again, unions were supposedly developed in order to ensure fairness, and to protect the rights, of workers.
But that's not what's been happening in some unions for a very long time now. So, what happened.
Some unions, like society in general, have a tendency to classify people into certain categories, which has nothing to do with a person's skills, experience, training, education, or any other credible reasons.
In unions with two-tiered systems, as in seniority systems, there are the haves, and the have-nots. Very often the have-nots are forced to stay in have-not purgatory for many years, often decades. Some workers, in some unionized workplaces, will never be allowed to have the same chances for advancement as other workers.
Why is that.
And though the have-nots don't have the same rights as the haves, they still have to pay the same amount of union dues as the haves.
That is not fair.
What happened to real unions, where every worker should be treated fairly, and where every worker's rights were protected. Isn't that why unions were created in the first place?
In the same Rand Formula thread Munroe said "I know that some unions cannot obtain full recognition and settle for Rand, but most workers join anyways".
The workers join anyways because they have the honest belief, like I naively had, that they would be treated fairly and decently in a unionized workplace, especially if you're told that 'we're an equal opportunity employer', as I was told.
Silly me. That last line really gave me hope that I would be treated in a fair manner. And for years I was under the honest belief, as assured by others, that we workers all had the same rights.
Of course, since then I've found out that my employer was not an equal opportunity employer, and my union was rife with cronyism, favourtism, and discrimination - things you don't know when you first join the unionized workplace. Sometimes it takes years to find these things out, which is what happened with me. In the end I was told that I had 'no rights' under the Collective Agreement. And it took them 10 years to tell me that? If that were actually true, why wasn't I told that on my very first day on the job. Why was I lead to believe otherwise during all those years?
Sometimes the union and the employer are so closely connected that you don't know who's who. Some unions are not what they pretend to be.
Munroe said "I also know any union must fully represent all workers regardless of actual membership".
Too bad many unions can get around that, and too bad that many legal jurisdictions allow the unions to get around that. And there are too many bogus excuses as to why legal jurisdictions allow unions to get away with not fully representing all workers in a bargaining unit.
My particular union did not fully represent all workers, and I believe it still doesn't. My local union president, and his friends, were very picky about whom they fully represented, which is why I've been in all kinds of legal jurisdictions, and still going to more, trying to straighten things out.
In a union context, I've very often discovered the following -
- words and promises, that some union leaders speak and make, often mean nothing.
- actions mean everything.
- often, there's no resemblance between words and actions.
Many unions, as well as the accompanying respective Collective Agreements, need to undergo serious reformations, in order to honour what the original promises of unions were - that ALL members be treated fairly and decently, and that ALL members have the same rights and opportunities.
If you leave even one person out of the promise of fairness you screw the whole bargaining unit up.
The Rand Formula means nothing in the context of modern unions which allow unfairness to thrive in the workplace.
For a good example of what happens to a supposed have-not, in a supposedly unionized workplace, my story is being told here -
http://forums.uncharted.ca/about1120.html
The Rand Formula thread, which I quoted from earlier, is here -
http://www.rabble.ca/babble/labour-and-consumption/rand-formula
The Rand Formula has also been discussed on this forum -
