I posted this over on Liam's site, but I figured I'd cut and paste and plonk it down here. It's with regards to the silliness he's having with his union and trying to get de-unionized at work and the situation we had at our work.

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There was a union vote in Peterborough for our organization a few weeks ago. While on the one hand the pay rate would go up, the programs would suffer as less people would be able to work, the quality of care would decrease and eventually we'd just work our way out of a job.

In Ottawa another organization actually went unionized, and while they had buckets of cash for the short term, there was no food in the house and no repairs being done. SOOOOO.... The ministry shut them down.

I'm all for improving the workplace, but if a union is actively NOT working in your interests, why be a part of it? And like you said, sure, your pay went up, but services suffer.

There's also that stupidity where you can't just cover for someone because that would be doing a union worker's job and then you get into all that rigamarole rather than just going and helping out and getting the job done.

In a few places, like industrial factories and such, unions make sense. In a lot of other places, especially places like our's that have 90% of the funding come directly from the government, you only have a pie so big.

Either you can be non-union and have a smaller piece of pie, but share it with more people and do more with the pie, or you can go union, have a honkin' huge piece of pie, but then your house falls apart because there wasn't enough pie to repair the hole in the wall.

So there.