Lowering flags is bargaining unit work
Blastfurnace Canada thinks union leaders are out of touch with Canadians because they want union workers to be the ones to lower the flags when Canadian soldiers are killed in Afghanistan, not because they support Stephen Harper’s efforts to low-bridge the fact that Canadians are dying in George W’s wild goose chase.
My moderate, thirty something Catholic, single and hating it, straight male friend, please understand:
- It’s not about whether the work gets done, it’s about who does it. The union wanted the work to be done. They just wanted to be the ones to do it. (That might make them more patriotic in some people’s eyes)
- If it’s truly important to have something done on the weekend (which apparently it wasn’t until the union made waves about it) the city should have staff on hand to do the work.
- There are relatively few things to know about raising and lowering flags (don’t let them touch the ground, fold them ‘just so’, where the keys are, and where they go, etc), but bargaining unit work rules are generally about keeping unqualified people from doing (sometimes dangerous) work they don’t know how to do. In general they’re worth defending.
- With contract language, you’re in for a pound if you’re in for a penny. You can’t expect management to take you or the rules seriously if you only stick up for them sometimes.
- Grievances aren’t injunctions. No grievance the union filed would have prevented the town councillor in question from coming in on weekends to lower the flag. He could have kept doing it until an arbitrator decided (two or three years down the road) that the city’s flag lowerer should get a bit of money for the work she or he was not assigned. And even then the said councillor could still come in on weekends to lower the flag. It would just cost the city a little more.
It is possible there are times when bargaining unit work rules outlive their usefulness (some office worker contracts still refer to whose work it is to use the Gestetner machine for example).
I’m not saying this was one of those times. Probably not. It looks like the union and management will work something out.
It’s just the Sun looking for another excuse to bash unions. Way to play along mister blast furnace.
