Trader Joe Store Unionizes

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storewanderer
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Re: Trader Joe Store Unionizes

Post by storewanderer »

TW-Upstate NY wrote: August 6th, 2022, 7:13 am One of the most overlooked benefits of Union membership (at least from my point of view) is protection against arbitrary dismissal/termination. In most workplaces, they can just let you go for no reason. You get a new boss and they don't like you they can show you the door and there isn't a thing you can do about it. Can't do that in a Unionized work environment. Now before anyone makes the argument that protects even the lousy employees let me say that yes you take the bad with the good but overall it helps everybody and lets them speak their minds. And I ought to know because I benefited from this myself when a supervisor was absolutely verbally pummeling a co-worker and I not so politely told her to knock it off. Just because of that, she wanted my head on a platter and made absolutely wild unfounded accusations to further her case against me. I had several co-workers who came forward to back up my story. None of that would've happened if not for the Union having my back and the backs of my co-workers who weren't afraid to speak up. This supervisor had a long history of being verbally abusive and because of this incident the Union was able to put the pressure on upper management to remove her from our office; she never supervised City Letter Carriers again. I kept my job and eventually retired from there a little over four years ago. Upon retirement, we're also allowed to retain our Union membership which I did so these days just call me a damned proud retired member of the NALC.
Proper management wouldn't have promoted the individual who was hassling you into a position of supervisory power in the first place. And this is yet another problem: that verbally abusive individual, should not have been in power long enough to gain a widely known reputation for being verbally abusive. Was the verbally abusive supervisor unionized as well, or not unionized? Seems like the union may have been protecting that person's job too... should they have? Seems to me they should have been shown the door, not only unable to supervise letter carriers but not able to work there in any capacity. But I get what you are saying; due to the union documentation process, a trail was able to be built against this supervisor over time. But that should happen with a typical HR operation as well (of course the argument will be presented that it isn't the case and only in a Union environment could that process possibly work).
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