I'm writing this as the Royal Mail union have announced yet another national strike. This is on top of several regional Royal Mail strikes that are currently taking place. Not that anybody had noticed any drop in the level of service anyway :-)
Apparently, this time, they're striking because they want "job security". In the middle of the worst recession since the great depression, they're blaming a lack of job security on company management. This is a blatant kick in the teeth to everyone else who's lost their job recently, everyone else that paid attention at school and got a job worth having.
I think it's funny that there's a certain class of job that is unionised, rather than a certain rank. It's not the people ranked at the bottom of the hierarchy that are unionised, it's usually just the people with jobs that require very little education and very few skills. There are many highly skilled and highly educated people working at the bottom of their company's hierarchy because that's the type of people that company needs. But they don't have a union. Does that mean that only poorly educated and poorly skilled workers can be persecuted by management?
Of course not. I've worked for other people and frequently felt overworked, overlooked and underpaid. Yet there was no union for my industry or my company. If I had any problems with management decisions, my only recourse was to resign. Which on several occasions I did. I didn't feel the need to join a union and go on strike. I just took up my grievances with management personally and if the matter couldn't be resolved, I moved to a different company, and sometimes a different career altogether.
None of my colleagues ever considered forming or joining a union either.
So what is the difference? Why the different mindset? Or why the different need?
Well, since starting employment, I've never really been able to work it out. 100 or 200 years ago, I'd definitely understand the need for unions. Maybe even 50 years ago. We lived in a different society then. But society has changed. In todays society, if you don't like your job, you change it. You don't sit there and winge. 50 to 200 hundred years ago, that wasn't necessarily an option. And 50 to 200 years ago there weren't the health and safety laws and the employment laws to protect staff from unscrupulous management.
So what about today? Let's say you go on strike. You get what you want and you go back to work. What a brilliant working atmosphere you've created. And your employer is really going to want to keep you happy now. Now that you've threatened the very survival of the business. No, what you've actually done is tell your boss, and no doubt the whole country, that you don't like your job. So, who's going to be first out when the push comes.... You don't have to be an expert in winning friends and influencing people to realise that.
So what do all the unionised workers and unionised jobs have in common?
One word. Losers.
It has nothing to do with your rank, because there are plenty of jobs where the bottom rung of the ladder is highly educated and highly skilled (ie. winners) and not unionised. The people in these jobs are the sort that made a decision about a direction that they wanted their lives to go in and took the responsibility to get it there. They decided to pay attention at school or work hard at a training program. But union members are generally life's losers. Those that are poorly educated and don't really understand how business (and the world) works. Those that don't really have any ambition to improve their lot. Those that moan when things go wrong in their life instead of doing something about it. Those that think that because they cannot find a job in their local area it's OK to live off benefits instead of moving hundreds of miles away from the town they grew up in like most highly educated people have to do and somehow manage to take it in their stride.
You may be thinking that there is a very big exception to this rule; teachers. But, you would also be forgetting that the vast majority of teachers became teachers because couldn't hack a real job, or couldn't get a real job. They are the educated losers. Of course not all of them. Some of them grew up wanting to be inspirational teachers and worked hard to get there. But this is a generalisation and almost all of the teachers that I know became teachers because they couldn't cope with a real job, couldn't get a real job or just couldn't tear themselves away from the education institution they've been used to all their lives.
Now I don't mean to be offensive by this terminology. I am trying to say that if you are unionised, you are unlikely to be ambitious. You are more interested in protecting your current position, than in improving it. You are not really a risk taker, which is a key requirement for ambition. And crucially, you think you need protecting. You do not believe in your own ability to look after your own interests. You cannot take responsibility for your life and you need to feel secure as part of a group. You cannot act alone or against the flow.
Being in a unionised job does not make you a loser. Many highly ambitious and highly successful started out at the very very bottom. But it is in joining a union that you own up to the world that you are a loser. You are owning up that you are unable to take responsibility for your own life.
If you are already in a union, you need to make a decision in your life. Do you want your life to be the same as everyone else in the union? Or do you want a better life than everyone else in the union? If you choose that latter option, you have got some huge changes to make in your life and in your personality in order to make your life better. It's not just a case of leaving the union, you have to start taking responsibility for your life, as an individual.
