Part 5 – How CURT would destroy the Building Trades – Blog Labor-Management working for who? Labor-Management has a place to be sure with union contractors and labor. But when we get together make no mistake about it, it is labor selling to itself. So who has benefited from this relationship? • Meetings - never ending meetings. We talk about market share and organizing, but because we are in never ending meetings, we do very little of what we talk about. We spend a fortune on this! • Reporting and researching – old and outdated for the times we live in. Most agents/organizers do not have basic command of excel, outlook, 1 note and the rest of Office Suites. Office 365 is available for $99 a year for up to 5 computers. We spend a fortune on “custom” systems that can’t do what these products can do. Between meetings and reporting – when do we have time to develop market share/organize? • No “firewalls” of who we collaborate with! We deal with associations made up of gate keeping executive directors or company department heads and liaisons. They see our senior agents and officers’ strategy directly and act upon that first-hand information. If time is money then the senior officers of companies are out making money and advancing their businesses while our senior officers are talking to surrogates. Get a book on business conduct from any top business consultant and read what it has to say about the above scenario. In street parlance it means we are being played. It also means that to get something done, you have to meet with your counterpart of the same level that can actually make a decision. The same is true with politicians, you will know exactly what they think of your power/money or lack thereof, by who you meet with to advance your unions interest. • Recognitional Intent – a legal term which means once you start to talk to contractors/end-users, especially on an ongoing basics, labor waives all secondary activity that it may otherwise have available as strategies to get a CBA. Also with many contractors now double breasted, we are literally collaborating with our own demise. Union contractors forming non-union construction companies, and then sending surrogates out to keep us close and know our strategies and/or lack of strategies is only good for the contractor’s/end-users! • Numbers – only ego and arrogance can ignore our long standing decline in market share. Developing any strategy in good faith is absolutely right, but letting it go on when it has so clearly failed and even worse, spinning the massive declines as if we are winning. All the BS about we are winning can be shown in the numbers. It was cited at the DC Building Trades conference that the building trades are up 95,000 members, while true – it does not show what that number historically has been with the increasing amount of work and dollars spent. The definition of insanity is …..
Posted on: Fri, 21 Mar 2014 11:53:16 +0000
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