Dr. John Wust does not come off as a labor agitator. A longtime obstetrician-gynecologist from Louisiana with a penchant for bow ties, Dr. Wust spent the first 15 years of his career as a partner in a small business — that is, running his own practice with colleagues.
Long after he took a position at Allina Health, a large nonprofit health care system based in Minnesota, in 2009, he did not see himself as the kind of employee who might benefit from collective bargaining.
But that changed in the months leading up to March, when his group of more than 100 doctors at an Allina hospital near Minneapolis voted to unionize. Dr. Wust, who has spoken with colleagues about the potential benefits of a union, said doctors were at a loss on how to ease their unsustainable workload because they had less input at the hospital than ever before.
“The way the system is going, I didn’t see any other solution legally available to us,” Dr. Wust said.
So the thing that stands out to me is I had a summer job for 2 weeks in a grocery store. We all had to join the union (I forget what union it was). I had to pay union dues on a temporary minimum wage job. The great union actually caused me to be paid less than minimum wage. I don’t know what they were bargaining for, but they suck if their negotiations leads to less pay than just working literally anywhere else without a union. I left after the 2 weeks because I got a non-union job paying 1.50 more an hour back in the early aughts.
My dad always told me stories about the union construction or maintenance people where he worked. Carpenters would come in, look at the storage area for raw materials and walk out saying, we can’t get to the wood because the electricians put in wire spools in front of it when filling the room, and we can’t touch the wire spool, we can’t move it, we can’t set up a ladder and climb over it. So they’d get paid for a day for sitting there, till the electricians came and moved the spools. And vice versa.
In my current job the facilities people are all union, which is fine, but it takes them forever to get to stuff, and because we have some areas that are scientific in nature and have radiation in them, they won’t enter. We get some sort of pass to have non-union people who can do the work and will enter the areas and they show up much faster and do the job. The Union regularly complains about this until they’re reminded that they refuse to enter the areas, or commit to the SLA that is required to run the facility.
I think all of this is bad for unions. I would want unions to be the best people and the most willing to do a good job within treating the employees like humans. But that’s too often not what happens. The best things I’ve ever seen unions do is basically show up like a psudo lawyer or pay for a lawyer when my dad or mom (both were in a union) were being unfairly fired (both were allowed to retire with full benefits instead, but still didn’t get to keep their jobs).
I’m not saying I don’t think unions can be good - they got us the current work week. I’m saying they’re earning some of their reputation, which lets the propaganda from the right wing work much better.