I Hate Unions

I really really really hate unions, and it's a real shame. Unions were created with the best of intentions - to protect basic employee rights. Now, it seems to me that they are nothing but a nuisance, especially when it involves public servants. It seems to me that nowadays, all they do is complain to no end, and disrupt our daily lives with their stupid annoying strikes. It seems to me that these people love to complain about getting more money, better pensions, more benefits, etc. Well, guess what? NO SYMPATHY FROM ME. We all wish we made more money. And shut your piehole about your pension, because you're damned lucky to even get a pension. Most employers don't give you one.

I'm tired of these people going on strike because they don't get their way, and leaving innocent bystanders - the public - to pay the price for their whining.

When teachers go on strike, the only people who lose are the students. They might be grateful at first because they don't have to go to school, but they're being deprived of an education, which hurts them in the long-run.

Transit strikes are just bloody annoying. The people hurt the most are those without cars, who may have to miss days of work because they have no way of getting to/from work without public transit. And of course it hurts our environment as well, with both long-term and short-term repercussions. We end up with more cars on the road during transit strikes. In the short-term, this decreases the air quality, which can be awful in the summer, especially for asthmatic people. In the long-term, more cars on the road during that short period of time puts more greenhouse cases in the atmosphere, therefore contributing to a crappy future for our children.

Garbage strikes just plain piss me off. Garbage collectors make more $$$ than I did on my first job right out of university. WTF???

Unrelated to strikes, but related to unions, I remember once being at an office where we had a bunch of developers in one room. We were doing a bit of re-arranging in the room, and needed to move a table and a plain old laser printer from one end of the room to the other. A couple of guys on the dev team went and moved the table and printer, and that was that...until our office manager walked into the room. According to her, those guys should NOT have moved that table and printer because that was a union job. Yes, that's right. Moving a table and printer is considered unionized work. So they had to move the table and printer back, and we had to wait for two guys from the union to come and move it again. Yeah...

So in conclusion:

1. Most unions (99%) are stupid and useless and are really annoying


2. My advice - next time a union threatens to strike, just fire their asses and hire a non-union person who won't bitch on the job.

Happy New Year!!!