I'd be interested in hearing your experiences. Are we talking mob association? Arm-breaking thugs?

What is this, the 1970s?

No, far more basic negligence and corruption. Negotiating deliberately bad contracts and collecting bribes. Diverting hours and cushy roles to union reps and their personal friends. Overwhelmingly siding with management against employees (which is what you think they're going to be there NOT to do). The kind of day to day petty shit that over time makes your job intolerable.

Oh and that one time in the retail baker's union (BCTGM) when they defended and successfully reinstated an employee who was terminated for _literally urinating in the cake batter every day for months and feeding it to people_ because it wasn't explicitly stated in the contract that they could use video evidence to terminate people.

If your union is protecting people who commit literal fucking crimes and dangers to public health, no, just fuck you and your union.

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seabass-labrax 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Your example is exactly the same problem as "admissible evidence" in a court of law. In the USA, it's very common for evidence to be rejected because the collection of that evidence was itself illegal - this is intended to protect the integrity of the system in general, no matter how heinous the alleged crime in a specific case.

So I'm sceptical: was the union really defending that specific employee, or were they trying to prevent a precedent from being set that could be used against other, more upright employees?

	▲	busterarm 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Termination for criminal activity is covered in the CBA's "just cause" clause. The union could have let the termination slide without setting any kind of precedent. Instead the union defended the employee as a flex. The union knew that they had sympathetic arbitration and it was the early years of retail store surveillance being used against employees rather than common criminals (this was decades ago). I doubt a similar case would go the same way today.