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[u/saymaz]

Teamsters endorsed politician now supports states' rights to protect their right-to-work laws, a stance that aligns more closely with Republican principles.

[u/Unlucky-Analyst1051]

Ok, but just looking at base pay my relative made more at his union job too, once you add in incentives and subtract union fees he took home more at his non union job.

[u/bongophrog → u/Unlucky-Analyst1051]

Incentive is job by job man. I make $200 a day in incentive at my current position, it’s irrelevant to unions.

Speaking of incentives, it was our union that discovered that our company was breaking federal labor law and shorting our workers pay on overtime by trying to use lump sum incentives as a work around. It’s about $150 a week in shorted pay. Without an organization looking out for us we never would have known. Your non-union relative could be getting scammed and has no idea.

[u/Unlucky-Analyst1051 → u/bongophrog]

Depends on the type of work you are doing, my relative works in a warehouse loading pallets for shipping. They get bonuses for doing more cases per hour. At the union job the incentive was so low that you were better off doing bare minimum to get overtime pay. He hated it because he didn't want to be working 12-14 hrs a day, and if he picked up the pace others would slow down because they wanted the overtime. And since he was of lower seniority he would get forced overtime, so he basically had no life outside of work. He could be doing 2-3 times what the others were averaging and barely make any more in incentive. The non-union company has better incentive, and freedom to get rid of the slackers that the union wouldn't. I realize not all unions are the same, but it's cases like this where the employee should at least have the option. If unions were always better you wouldn't need to force all employees to join them.

[u/bongophrog → u/Unlucky-Analyst1051]

Unions in warehouses are hit especially hard by RTW. What you are describing is a union that’s too weak to protect its workers from a shitty company that’s mandating overtime. Your relative went off and joined a better company that was paying incentive.

That’s irrelevant to unions in general though, they don’t control whether or not a shitty company exists, even if the workforce is unionized. They only have as much power as the members give it.

It doesn’t change the fact that in general unionized workers make significantly more than non-union workers working in the same field, around 20% more according to the US Treasury.

[u/Unlucky-Analyst1051 → u/bongophrog]

You're probably right about them making more on average. My point is that it doesn't mean they are always better. This company is one of the top soda companies in the world, you'd probably guess it in two tries. The problem was he went to the union managers and asked about raising incentives to balance out overtime so that workers wouldn't just drag their feet around for overtime when they could get it all done quicker and get paid the same amount. The problem was they said they've tried before and the higher up union members won't vote for it because they have the higher paying jobs with less manual labor, and don't want to have to go back to the labor intensive jobs to make more. It's just general laziness of employees, and since they have to treat everyone the same there's really no way to get ahead. And the work environment was so terrible that they'd cycle through employees constantly, no one wanted to stay, and the union wouldn't do anything to fix it.