My company had a Union for 45 years, and my staff recently voted to decertify. In our industry, unionized companies were closing one after another. Mergers have become a necessity for survival and non-union shops simply won't have anything to do with mergers with union shops. Generally wages and benefits are about the same. The main differences, I found, are things like layoff protection for more senior staff, and rules governing overtime and so on.
Since our guys decertified, we are in a much better position to compete, albeit they have given up some perks, reluctantly.
For many years, we used to negotiate with an employees committee, but in more recent times, the Union would send in paid staff to negotiate, frequently without even consulting with our staff. When the Union doubled the dues, the guys really started to get pissed.
When the decertification process started (by the guys in the shop..) the Union fought it hard, lied, denied agreements had happened, tried to bribe 'undecided' employees etc. We were within 24 hours of a full-blown OLB hearing, when the Union's lawyer finally told them to drop it. At that point, the Union's position was that since one of our staff members had used the office fax machine, "Management" (me!) was behind the whole thing, which is illegal. Bear in mind that all of this occured after the guys had voted 86% in favour of decertification.
Two years later, the guys have given up a little bit of overtime (more a theoretical problem than actual...), we laid off one guy who had seniority (but whom all the guys agreed was the supreme 'seducer of the hound'...) and we are doing well.
IMHO, Unions served a purpose years ago, but they of little use now. Over hear in Hammertown, the union at Stelco may well succeed in putting that Company out of business (not singlr-handedly, I should add...) and those guys will never find work in this area at similar pay... Unfortunately that attitude is seen as "typical" in this community which is one of the reasons we have trouble attracting new business...
As a footnote, our guys know that they could have the Union back in here in 24 hours with one phonce call, and there's nothing we could do about it... it has never even been suggested as far as I know... The younger staff is getting all of the extra time they want and I think everyone feels much better about their jobs now too...
