For this week’s blog assignment, I chose to dive into option 1, researching the pros and cons of labor unions. I chose this topic mainly due to the fact that I am working in the construction industry where labor unions are very common. I have had the opportunity to discuss with a couple of employees how they feel about the union, and generally there is good things to say about it. The comments they had were that there are strict rules and that work is fairly constant, however the fact that there are downtimes at work is not good, and they can fire people fairly quickly when needed. They also mentioned the fact that they feel taken care with good benefits, lots of training and paid well for their work. There is a lot of fluctuation in an industry such as construction and people suffer when things get slow, and that was clearly one of the large issues that they had with the unions. From the project manager side there are plenty of pros and cons to working with union laborers. The main pro being that you know you are employing skilled laborers and people handy with their craft, however this comes at the cost of strict rules and usually a pay increase. It is very common for general contractors to work with these labor unions despite their higher pay due to the quality of work they output. I think generally unions are great. They help provide consistent work with the common strikes and promote growth and good pay and benefits for hard working jobs. I would likely be in one if I wasn’t in college as it provides a good income and benefits.
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