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> I would get threatened with grievances for trivial acts like carrying a single lightbulb myself without a union worker. That whole thing about requiring unio
by ziml77 6y ago
> I would get threatened with grievances for trivial acts like carrying a single lightbulb myself without a union worker.
That whole thing about requiring union workers to do tasks is stupid. One year I was attending a fan convention and decided to check out the rules for vendors. The convention center used unionized labor so one of the rules was that the vendors were limited to carrying like one case of stuff over to their spot. All other moving and setting up had to be done by the union workers. I get what the protection here is, it prevents loopholes for getting around using union workers at all (which, if it was possible to do, would make a union ineffective). But hell, why can't they pay the union workers as if they would have to do all the work but then let people decide if they want the union workers to actually do something or not?
- bena 6y agoThe problem always comes down to bad actors. If I, as a vendor, could have my people do the work of moving and set up and elect not to use the convention center staff, then there's a way to circumvent the convention center staff and fire them all. You just hire a "vendor" with their own crew to do all the stuff. With no actual work to do, it's justifiable to fire the convention center staff. If people weren't bastards, we wouldn't need such weird rules. But then again, if people weren't bastards, we wouldn't need unions either.
- bluGill 6y agoWhy does a convention center have enough staff to do that setup? That seems wasteful in itself. Sure they need a few janitors to sweep up afterwords, and someone needs to know how to flip a tripped breaker, so they can't be staff free. However the needs of each event are different enough that staff for vendor setup doesn't really make sense.
- botverse 6y agoBecause the convention center might be one of the only source of jobs around