This diary asks a simple question: how do you unionize your workplace so that the balance of power between management and workers is more balanced and just?
Let me begin by saying that I am 27 years old and college educated. Like many my age we grow up with "Reaganomics" and, to be quite honest, it is the only economic system that we have personal experience with. Sad, very sad.
For three years after college I worked for a large corporation, but my division was a small one. I started off as a temp worker and worked my way up to $12.00 an hour. I liked my co-workers and my boss, but my Vice President... well she was a different story. She worked maybe 30 hours a week and pulled in at least $125,000 a year. She "managed" by intimating others and she garnered all the success and rewards while everyone else busted their asses off. I had good relations with our clients and several of them did not like her either so she was incompetent both internally and externally. She maybe said five things to me throughout my three years there and none of them were pleasant. To me she was my "Bill Lumbergh."
In short, it was not a good place to work. The management took all the credit for the hard work that the workers did and I might add that it was pretty detailed and sophisticated work. Most of it involved taxes and you had to be intelligent to do the job. The power was entirely in the hands of management. The workers had ZERO rights and protections.
On slow days I would fantasize at my desk about forming a Union to guarantee right to the workers at the office I worked at. However, I never treated it seriously because it seemed as if that "Age of Unions" was something that belonged to the history books that I had read while in school. It just didn't seem possible. Recently, I began to entertain the idea again because of a whole range of factors (Obama getting elected being one of them). How do you form a union and do you have any legal protection against being fired by management? The more I think about this the more I realize that I am, and probably millions of others, are totally ignorant about this topic.
I know this is a broad question that covers a lot of ground, but I am really starting from "zero" in terms of knowledge about this subject.