[VRM]

Jamo,
I recall that you indicated crappy union workmanship was the cause when that part of the tunnel in Boston fell and killed that woman. Later analysis showed that the problem was that the epoxy bonding agent could shift under sustained tension loading. Trying to BS your way through engineering school again?

I am generally no friend of unions, and have crossed picket lines, but I have also had enough experience with management and unions to know that it is usually not just a one sided problem. I landed in the thick of one of those battles when the company tried to blame the union for a massive outage (a union worker made a mistake after trying to follow a bunch of snaked cables). It would have taken us about 3-4 hours to fix everything, but some jackass company lawyer came down with cops to seal the area and prevent us from fixing the problem so that he could investigate the 'union malfeasance'. He was joined shortly afterwards by a jackass union lawyer, and the two of them argued for a few hours and took statements from each of us (2 union guys, one manager, and me (consultant)). We finally busied out all of our office phone lines so that the lawyers would have to go someplace else when they were calling people - we blamed it on the outage even though it happened 5-6 hours after the fact (I made up some story about cascading circuit failures or some such thing). 18 hours later (and lots of overtime for us) we finally had everything fixed. Because of the length and scope of the outage we had to go before the DPU and explain what happened. I also got to explain that the company had not instituted a 2-3 year old plan (proposed by a union guy and developed by me, that guy, and a woman I used to work with) to diversify all the data circuit routing so that outages like this would be significantly less likely. There was no union input or special training needed for that, just a signed work order.

You are paid to be biased, so, while I am sure that you are able to present your story very well (and I also have a number of instances where the union is the bad guy), it is only one side of the whole.