All that being said, the Reading Station Market rocks. Food was an instant, and effective, antidote to the social distress. Just don’t step back outside after a bowl of snapper soup without re-securing your headgear! It was like HG Wells’ Time Machine — in the market you could observe the Eloi evolving, but outside the Morlock’s reigned. Very scary.

Perchance you had fallen under the spell of seeing what you were told you would see? Did you know the Marriot was a non-union hotel? And that’s where most of the logistics challenges were encountered. Don’t blame the union, blame the event planners or somebody else. Don’t think they are unionized?

Anyway, we all know that an organization gets the workforce it deserves. Organizations take years to carefully cultivate a culture of boredom, resentment, entitlement, and applied apathy. When the crop is ready for harvest the union steps in to take it to market. No, don’t blame the union. That’s way too convenient.

For shame, in the month of May, to decry the unions for your first big city experience in a while. You’ve been out west a long time now haven’t you?

Workers of the World Unite. Come the Revolution baby! I think you lost your religion a long time ago.

h

p.s. My flight arrived back home 40 minutes early!

I worked in a needle factory once (quit after one day) and found it mind-numbing and depressing. But it did give me a better appreciation for the work lives of others.

Like most mature organizations, many unions have lost their way – but the need for collective bargaining still exists.

Today I started a list of things I was free to do as an office worker (program assistant in a business school at age 23) that I was not free to do as an assembly line and dock worker (unionized summer jobs in college). It was a long list, including things like go to the bathroom, take a phone call, sit down while working, leave work to vote in public elections, and say no to overtime without automatically losing my job. So different from how I relate to work now… it’s hard to empathize even 8-10 years later.

The Big Squeeze by Steven Greenhouse.

He’s such a unique and knowledgeable (and good) writer, and the book is being hailed as a crucial piece of historiography of our era. Great research, both broad and personal, pro-business and able to take workers’ POV.

Here’s Robert Frank’s review in the NYT last Sunday.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/books/review/Frank-t.html?_r=1&ref=business&oref=slogin

I don’t think the bored worker sydrome is caused by anything unique to unionization. It comes from limitations imposed upon individuals, whether by their own doing or by environmental factors, like family or ethnic culture or whatever. Maybe unions exacerbate problems by keeping workers stagnant in defined roles but that pigeonholing happens in non-unionized corporate environments too. People that don’t get to do what they think they should do, and who opt to perform some kind of non-ideal job so that they can earn a living, ultimately will get bored with the job. Personal sacrifice to expediency only gets a person so far in this world.

I know my perspective is very limited. Any reading suggestions?

For what it is worth, the two main organizational changes that have most alienated hotel workers recently– first, the establishment of two tier benefit systems by which newer workers (who are more recent, less “white” arrivals–Italians and Irish were not seen as white during the Industrial era, but became whitened through the union-helped process of middle class growth, same way Latinos are not QUITE seen as white now) get fewer benes, and second the increase in work demands without increase in paid hours to do them–have been corporate led. These are demands corporations have inserted in to new contracts across the board in the past 5 years. What do you do? Work-process slowdown–the weapon of the weak–is a centuries-old response.