Colleen27
DIS Legend
- Joined
- Mar 31, 2007
- Messages
- 24,190
\Presuming the guys (or ladies) you’re talking about aren’t red-sealed or formal apprentices, are they even eligible to join unions?
Probably not. That's a source of a LOT of hostility towards unions among construction guys around me (including, to a certain degree, DH). It doesn't matter how long you've been practicing your trade or how good you are - if you want to get into the union, you have to step back to $8/hr for their official internship program to start. So once someone gets started on the non-union residential "track", there's usually no switching over and tapping into the better wages and benefits of doing the same work in a union. And there are MASSIVE wage and benefit differences (often to the tune of twice the hourly wage and full benefits rather than none), but because of the narrow pathway into the union, it doesn't really work as competition for employees and as such has less spillover benefit than unionization in fields where becoming union is as simple as getting hired in a union shop.
I've found any pastor/priest/reverend/rabbi willing to inject politics into his sermon to be far more aggressive than a union notifying its members of who supports positions in line with their job.
Yeah, I've never had a union tell me my immortal soul was in danger if I didn't vote the way they told me to...
Definitely. Other Unions may do things differently, but mine just sends us a postcard about 2 weeks before election day with the candidates they endorse.
I used to get more than one post card, but not so much that I'd call it "aggressive". And I was UAW, which I think is usually considered one of the more politically active unions. If they were aggressive, so are the colleges trying to get my daughter's attention, the lawn services that would like us to sign up, and several local real estate agents. I get more junk mail from all of those than I ever did union election mailings.