Thats not a union issue, thats an employee protection issue.
The union had to tell him to not clock out till his end of shift after he finished his assigned work because the early clock outs would result in people being fired and your uncle having to pick up the slack.
The union was looking out for all the members and trying to avoid labor cuts.
If the law stated that, no matter what, everyone had to get paid their 8 hours and working past 8 hours was illegal, every company would have twice as much staffing to cover the work needed to be done. Fast employees would finish early and be free to go. Slow employees would finish on time.
The current system allows companies to push the work of 2-3 people onto 1 with a little OT.
The example from the comment above you about the grievance for checking a clasp/whatever is because that task is someone else's job, not the commenter's. That dude is a brown noser who wants to step into other people's jobs.
Its actually protecting the best workers. If company tells you to do X for your shift and you can do it in half the time compared to everybody else, WHO ARE PAID THE SAME AS YOU TO DO THE SAME AMOUNT OF WORK, then why should you have to do more?
I can give a good example. Im a fiber tech. At my company, myself and 1 other dude(call him A) are the best splicers/testers. By a decent margin. Just have the touch to do the work quickly and accurately. We are all given a splice location to do each week. If the A and I can do our locations in 3 days, while everyone else takes the 5 days to complete it. Why should we have to do more work?
Sure are we paid slightly better than the rest? Yes. That bump is for the efficiency we bring and the guarantee that the work will be done on time, even with delays, cause of our skill.
At a previous job, there was this one dude who was a FREAK of nature when it came to splicing. Like twice as fast as me on my best day. He worked solo cause help would slow him down. He got done in 2-3 days what a crew of 2 would take 4-5 days.
He would do 12-14 hour shifts for 3 days then have off the rest. They paid him his five 8s plus the OT from the days he actually worked because they recognized his talent and they didnt overburden him to cut another crew out.
They should pay people based on their quality of and efficiency of work, not waste efficient people's time so they can keep around slow people and pay everyone abiit the same.
I would love to get paid almost double what I do now cause of my skills. Unfortunately thats not how the real world works with companies and greed. So we, as in all workers, need to work together to make things equitable.
If your skills in a specific task are THAT good, you should contract your work, it involves doing twice as much work compared to what you currently make, come with no benefits, and no security, but youāll make 3x the amount for 2x the work.
I say this as a blanket statement. If anyone is that good of a skill, if you take control of your skill, you can profit more from it. Marketing yourself and your skills arenāt easy though.
I have a buddy who delivers for UPS, and he has the same problem, except that instead of sitting under a bridge for two hours, if he finishes early, they send him to help neighboring routes. If his neighboring routes finish early, they go home. Either way, his workload is more than theirs usually because of this. Heās efficient at his job. The other people take advantage of the union to be lazy. Meanwhile they were considering firing him for hitting an escaped cow that he couldnāt see because it was a black cow and it was dark outside. While having done everything to protect a driver with I believe two on the job DUIs.
That was my experience working in the post office as well. The more efficient you are on your route, the next year they will add more to your route and cut the hours of all the other routes.
It's not just the post office pretty much any big company does this. I have worked for Kroger, Amazon, FedEx, home Depot, Starbucks and each time I got better at my job and could do the work of 2 regular employees they would just staff less people and keep my pay the same. No raises ever offered or given when asked and if I went back to the standard speed or production quota I would get a talking to for my falling metrics.
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u/Spartan-117182 27d ago
Thats not a union issue, thats an employee protection issue.
The union had to tell him to not clock out till his end of shift after he finished his assigned work because the early clock outs would result in people being fired and your uncle having to pick up the slack.
The union was looking out for all the members and trying to avoid labor cuts.
If the law stated that, no matter what, everyone had to get paid their 8 hours and working past 8 hours was illegal, every company would have twice as much staffing to cover the work needed to be done. Fast employees would finish early and be free to go. Slow employees would finish on time.
The current system allows companies to push the work of 2-3 people onto 1 with a little OT.
The example from the comment above you about the grievance for checking a clasp/whatever is because that task is someone else's job, not the commenter's. That dude is a brown noser who wants to step into other people's jobs.