Workplace Issues

Un día en el trabajo Susana Myers se le acerca y comenta que está siendo disciplinada por la gerencia por sus publicaciones en Facebook. Los publicó durante horas de no-trabajo usando su propio equipo, por ejemplo, su teléfono celular. Específicamente, publicó el siguiente mensaje en su página de Facebook:

“Michelle Willis, una compañera de trabajo, siente que no estamos ayudando a nuestros clientes lo suficiente en [la compañía]. ¡Ya casi estoy harta! Compañeros, ¿cómo se sienten?”

While at work one day, Susan Myers comes up to you and says that she is being disciplined by management because of her Facebook posts made while she was on non-work time using her own equipment, i.e., her smartphone.

Protecting Your Members From Phony Job Evaluation Schemes

Management loves power. The ability to threaten workers with punishment for being insubordinate is a tool that many managers use to enforce their power.

For many union folks, the whole idea of workers being punished for being "insubordinate" to bosses is insulting and discriminatory. This is one topic where the class bias of labor law becomes clear. Management is considered better than workers and workers are considered inferior to management. It is degrading and openly biased against the working class, but we have to deal with it.

Workers at a UE represented factory noticed a crew of outside electricians doing a lot of work in the plant. They were installing an extraordinary amount of new electric exit signs and refurbishing old ones. At first no one thought anything about it, but then someone noticed that instead of regular electric cable running into the signs there was 3/4 inch coaxial cables.

Workplaces keep changing, not always for the better and very rarely is the well-being of the workers the key reason for the change. Consider these everyday situations:

Situation 1:

The boss at Cyborg Inc. calls for a meeting of the union committee.

It's not necessary — and coming from employers who routinely demand mandatory overtime and that fewer and fewer employees handle ever-increasing workloads — drug and alcohol testing is nothing more than out-and-out hypocrisy.

At the opening session of negotiations between UE Local 1917 and Amalgamated Putz Corporation, the company made a serious pitch for establishing a two-tier payment system. "We need to lower costs. The parent corporation is demanding every unit reduce costs by 15%. Our competitors are paying operators $1.75 less per hour and they have to pay 30% of their insurance premium.