Union Newsletter Article

I just read an article by a regular columnist in my state union newsletter. He spent his first paragraph describing how he was a regular Wal-Mart shopper. Yes, he knew that this went against a lot of union sentiment, since Wal-Mart is pretty strongly anti-union. But he shopped there anyway because of the prices. And he cited the present tough economic times as a mitigating reason. That’s fine with me. I buy stuff there, too. But where’s the writer going with this?

Next, the columnist related how shoppers are warned against direct contact with shopping carts in places like Wal-Mart (it could have been any other place as well, but Wal-Mart was used as an example) because of the enormous amount of germs on the handles, even including fecal matter. Okay, I’ve heard that, too. Now I know the columnist shops at Wal-Mart and that he’s hip to the dirty shopping carts. There’s got to be a point here somewhere.

And then he finally gets down to what he really wanted to say. You see, the postal service has, like many other organizations, lost quite a bit of money lately and are in a “downsizing” mode right now. Management has offered early retirement without any real incentives in order to reduce the total work force and save money. This has been unsuccessful, since those retiring early would be giving up benefits and a lot of retirement income if they did this. Next, management on the national level enacted a decision eventually ending the generally preferred “Tour II” daytime mail-processing shift that, incidentally, attracted a lot of the more senior clerks (many of whom management wants to retire early). The writer thinks that this decision was designed to pressure those senior clerks to go ahead and retire since many would otherwise be forced into graveyard shift positions with terrible days-off. And then it all came together: Management, according to this writer, was treating workers as if they were the fecal matter on Wal-Mart’s shopping carts!

Look, I belong to my union and believe that organized labor and collective bargaining is good for society in general. But it’s true that, in hard times, cutbacks have to be made. The only other alternative that postal management has would be either to drastically cut back their services (which would destroy their recovery from these hard times and accelerate their future losses) or to lay off the junior employees. They may end up doing a combination of these two anyway, but first they are looking for other options that don’t involve putting people in unemployment lines or cutting back service. And offering early retirement and shifting work hours around are legitimate, relatively benign actions, especially when considering the alternatives.

In a perfect world, everybody works as long as they want to, when they want to, and get all of their benefits whenever they freely choose to retire. But companies need to make hard decisions at times in order to stay afloat. For this union writer to compare how management treats its employees to how he regards fecal matter on shopping carts is not only shortsighted, but also tasteless and “grossly” unfair.