Thursday, May 22, 2008

Crummy Union Tactics

I live in an apartment near an office building in the Atlanta area. For about the past three weeks there have been picketers everyday at the office building. They are protesting, as best I can figure out, an attempt to not pay carpenters an increasing wage and something about lowering area standards. All well and good you say, that is their right. The problem with this group of protesters however is that I don't believe there is a single carpenter among them. They arrive on a carpenter union bus, carrying signs that look many years old, they walk in circles, yelling, whistling, banging on buckets and raising their signs in the air. There is no indication who they are picketing (kinda hard to influence decisionmakers if you have no idea who they are.) Looking at the group closely it looks like the union has rounded up a bunch of homeless people and have given them jobs picketing. I would wager they are not even members of the union, let alone bonafide carpenters.

Further down the street at an actual construction site is another protest. Two guys standing by a banner that says "Labor Protest. Shame on So and So". No union identification, no company identification, just a person's name. And the material they used, the banner, the PVC holder and even the wording is identical to another I saw about 20 miles away. BUT, that sign had a different person's name on it. I don't get what they are protesting, who they are protesting against or what they want.

So are either of these protests being successful? I don't see how. There is not enough information to raise the general public's interest or knowledge. If I were sympathetic how would I know who to pressure or influence? Instead they are a nosy nuisance. Their appearance does not say much for them. I certainly would not want any of them working on my place. So I don't understand what these operations are trying to gain. And I think it is pretty underhanded to have stand-ins.

Just a thought.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dude, It is not about you. It is about the illegal 1099 carpenters that a contractor is hiring through a local human trafficing ring. They are paying less than half the area standard wage rate to undocumented workers. You know the ones that your prez says he is gonna build a wall to keep them out? They are replacing skilled jobs for American citizens. No good American that I know is gonna stand around and just let shit like that happen with out a fight. Yes this does workzuitrv.

Anonymous said...

Every time I've seen the Carpenters on the street, they have flyers available which explain the whole problem. If you could stoop so low as to actually talk to the "homeless" people you so loathe, perhaps they would give you the flyer. You would think that a college professor would understand a little more about gathering information from primary sources rather than the in-depth Google search you performed. Can customers expect Omega HR Solutions to provide the same type of in-depth analysis to their problems? Is Google the Fortune 500 HR administration tools you bring to the small employers?

Unknown said...

I like the idea of outsourcing the strike. It reminds me of the South Park episode where the boys outsource their homework to a bunch of illegal aliens. They tell the Mexicans to write their essays, but it's misunderstood as a request for the illegal alients to write their esses (homies).

Hilarity ensues.

Good old South Park. They get it right.