Jamo,
Quite honestly you have no idea what my 'experience' is, and yet you assume that I have none when it comes to dealing with unions on a day to day basis.. Attempting to belittle my experience by putting it in quotes while trumpeting yours as the be-all-end-all is arrogant and stupid. My experience is what it is, as is yours, and I have formed my ideas and opinions based on mine, as you have based on yours. A lot of that experience I have would back up everything you said about unions - I have seen similar and I think it is pathetic. I've also seen managers sell out other managers, create fiefdoms of yes men for their own personal glorification, and kill projects because it was contrary to their own whims - and they are pathetic also. People are people whether they are union or not. Bad employees can hide in a union, or they can hide behind arrogance, personality cults, or indifferent upper management.
My personal experience is with every one of the original RBOCs, along with other smaller companies like Cincinati Bell. This includes their unions and managers, and my experience with them all has some good and some bad. I've also worked with dozens of phone companies internationally - some with trade unions, some without. And the majority of my time spent at different locations was not usually measured in hours or days, but weeks or months.
I'm not sure what about me or what I write you think is dishonest - I've been a lot of places and done a lot of stuff under a variety of conditions. Ron61 and I have shared some of those bizarre telco stories privately ranging from funny to tragic (union guy jumping on the hood of a managers car during an NET strike - she panics and floors it and kills the guy. He got what he deserved IMHO). The Dilbert strip was based on real world events at PacBell. Perhaps phone company unions are different that what you are used to dealing with - I would not expect that to be the case, but my personal experience with unions outside phone companies is very limited so it is certainly possible. Still, I've crossed my share of pickets, and had my share of grievances filed against me. I've also pissed off my share of managers when I have had to rewrite/scrap their plans because they forgot to take earthquake zoning into account, or their air conditioning or power calculations were wrong. I was a 'fixer' (my old boss' phrase for what I did - not mine) in switch/data services and 411/911 for the companies I worked for. I had to go onsite and co-ordinate installations and solve complex technical problems when the locals could not (something a lot of them resented, too). Ever try to co-ordinate fixing a data circuit spanning 4 different telcos and 4 different unions all with different rules about what they could and could not do? It is a huge PITA, and management does everything it can to bury it's head in the sand about its process failures.
Your comments regarding the tunnel ceiling collapse were not that the bolt(s) failed but that the union workers who installed them were at fault (an unreasonable assumption as we did not yet know why the bolts failed).
Big Dig Tunnel Thrill Ride
In fact, Powers Fasteners was indicted last year. The NTSB report (not sure what OSHA has to do with materials and failure analysis in this case, but please feel free to let me know) indicated that safety issues were:
* Insufficient understanding among designers and builders of the nature of adhesive anchoring systems;
* Lack of standards for the testing of adhesive anchors in sustained tensile-load applications;
* Inadequate regulatory requirements for tunnel inspections; and
* Lack of national standards for the design of tunnel finishes.
The unions, as far as I know, were not responsible for the design, load testing, inspection regulations, or national standards. I am not a lawyer, so if I am missing something in their contract that indicates that any of those areas falls into their area of responsibility please let me know. Regarding the builders, I suppose that could include the unions and management of the companies building the tunnel. So do the unions have engineers who verify specs provided by engineering groups, or are they just supposed to follow the work orders supplied to them? My experience with CWA and others has always been the latter. Perhaps the union foreman should have some level of responsibility for the lack of inspections after the first failure in a different location, but something like that usually indicates poor communication, and the NTSB cites the companies rather than the unions for not performing inspections after the first unexplained failure.
You made a call based on what you thought my experience was with unions. Clearly you have no clue about that because you don't know me well enough to even have that information. You also made a call regarding the bolts and the unions who put them in before you had enough information to make an informed decision. You know what they say about assuming - just please leave me out of it.
BTW, sorry it took so long to write this - I was also reloading a few servers and showing a noob how to read MIBs.
Oh, and I take nothing here personally (well, except once) - an old flame once said I reminded her of Spock with Steven Wrights sense of humour.
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