Ensuring that people know how to use Excel is not a problem that the union should be spending money on.
At my office we can work at any hours of the day that we prefer, as long as we check with our coworkers and do our agreed 40 hours / week. When the union heard about this they told my employer that we must do all our work during daytime.
Their reasoning was that our liberal hours give us the opportunity to take on more obligations in our personal life at daytime (such as taking kids to soccer practice) which means we have to work in evenings to make up for lost time. And this, in turn, means we don’t get enough rest. So basically they don’t trust the employees to take responsibility for how much rest they need and want to stop them from doing personal chores during the day.
We (the employees) finally won against the union in this, but what I kept thinking during this ordeal was “jeez, don’t they have more important issues to address?” If they did, why would they be meddling with this.
I think you don’t understand unions or what they are fighting for. Your presumed freedom in working hours is exactly what the unison stated. If you need freetime to fix chores you should reduce your working hours and not work throughout the night.
Yes, but then that’s my choice to reduce my working hours, not something my union should force on me. It’s patronizing. All ~100 employees disagreed with the union on this. IMO that’s a sign that they are overreaching and forget who they are working for. They need to realize when they are done and just sit back and enjoy what they’ve accomplished, instead of mindlessly optimizing for the wrong target. At any rate, if this is the kind of stuff they pull I won’t want to support them, because to my mind they are making things worse, not better.
*or forgot about them.
Ensuring that people know how to use Excel is not a problem that the union should be spending money on.
At my office we can work at any hours of the day that we prefer, as long as we check with our coworkers and do our agreed 40 hours / week. When the union heard about this they told my employer that we must do all our work during daytime.
Their reasoning was that our liberal hours give us the opportunity to take on more obligations in our personal life at daytime (such as taking kids to soccer practice) which means we have to work in evenings to make up for lost time. And this, in turn, means we don’t get enough rest. So basically they don’t trust the employees to take responsibility for how much rest they need and want to stop them from doing personal chores during the day.
We (the employees) finally won against the union in this, but what I kept thinking during this ordeal was “jeez, don’t they have more important issues to address?” If they did, why would they be meddling with this.
I think you don’t understand unions or what they are fighting for. Your presumed freedom in working hours is exactly what the unison stated. If you need freetime to fix chores you should reduce your working hours and not work throughout the night.
Yes, but then that’s my choice to reduce my working hours, not something my union should force on me. It’s patronizing. All ~100 employees disagreed with the union on this. IMO that’s a sign that they are overreaching and forget who they are working for. They need to realize when they are done and just sit back and enjoy what they’ve accomplished, instead of mindlessly optimizing for the wrong target. At any rate, if this is the kind of stuff they pull I won’t want to support them, because to my mind they are making things worse, not better.