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Why Unions are Bad

Updated on May 4, 2009

People who have never had the “pleasure” of working for a unionized company probably don’t know much about them. Well I have had the pleasure of working for two union based companies, Kroger and UPS. Thank God I worked for them while I was young so that I would never do it again. Now I was young and naïve when I worked for King Soopers so I’m going to talk about my experience at UPS. I started UPS in April of 2007 and got a job as a loader. My job consisted of packages coming down a belt that the sorters would push down the appropriate chutes. Now… this was definitely some physically demanding work. You had to read the packages to make sure that they were in the correct trailer then build a wall with a small backfill for the smaller packages. Now I worked my ass off the entire time I was at that job and my supervisor knew it. I was paid, initially, $8.50 per hour and got a 50 cent after a month then a dollar more after a year. I was on a one month probationary period before I was FORCED to join the union. Then I had to pay $50 per week up to $350 which was automatically deducted from my paycheck as my “initiation fee.” Keep in mind I worked about 4-5 hours per day Monday through Friday as a part time job while I was going to school so my paychecks were about $120 to $160. Now, because I was working so hard and could handle more work, I would get the most difficult trailers. By difficult I mean difficult I was running trailer to trailer stacking packages as fast and sturdy as possible.

Now you’d think since you are working harder and more efficiently than the other employees you’d get paid more right? Wrong. Quite a few people, but one in particular, would be lazy about their work and get the easy trailers because of it. In any other job, they wouldn’t get any hours or they’d be fired, but thanks to the good old union, that’s impossible. UPS can’t fire an employee based on work ethic. They can only be fired if they screw up royally… at least 3 times, and even then it’s a huge hassle to get rid of them because the union is “legal representation” so they won’t let them get fired. The Teamsters Union screwed over me “the genuinely hard worker” and UPS. No matter how hard I worked, there wasn’t a chance of me getting a promotion or raise over anyone else because it’s all based on seniority, not work ethic. Now where’s the incentive in that? I paid $20 per month for union dues which is just BS in my opinion because I didn’t need the union to protect me from anything. As long as you’re a hard worker, UPS isn’t going to fire you over nothing. Now little to my knowledge about those “union dues” was that a portion of it was going to Hilary Clinton for President. They were lobbying for her and not that it’s a huge amount but $2.00 out of the union dues were going to her every month… My hard earned money. Back during World War 1 and 2, Unions had a purpose. We now have laws about how many hours you can work and stuff like that. Unions aren’t needed anymore. They protect the lazy worker and prevent the hard worker from moving up and getting what they deserve. I’m sick of it.

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