I had seen the Union fighting in Wisconsin and I was wondering something....my husband is in a union in Los Angeles and I am concerned about not having unions in some regards.

If my husband were not in a Union, they would keep furloughing, laying off, making the employees contribute more to retirement....they do crazy stuff.   They tried to pay the employees at the normal rate at overtime instead of times and a half!    Then they nixed the overtime and when the bell rings for them to leave, his boss tries to get him to do an extra job for free because the boss has a quota to make.   And if they don't make their quota the whole operation could be shut down and a new bid could be sent out to another operation.  

However if you see what is going on at the state or local levels, you see all kinds of City Councils giving themselves raises!     I wish that the people of Wisconsin would say that all the government offices in the state need to be audited before they give up their union protection first.   Then they need to have a right to work which says that the employer cannot just fire or lay you off.   So many employers look at their profit and loss statement and then forecast it out.  If it looks like they are going to be in the hole the next month, they lay off.   If the employer could not afford you in the first place, they shouldn't have hired you only in extreme circumstances like the loss of a huge client or an act of God.   But I have seen employers do a back end bonus accrual for themselves to get a fat paycheck for the end of the year and they say they are going into a loss to the Board of Directors and then it constitutes a layoff.   This should be illegal.   And there needs to be laws for executives on their paychecks, raises, and perks.   Too many companies I have worked for the management definitely won't give up their gas card, Visa card, leased vehicle, training classes, hotel stays, eating out, golf tournaments and they want it all posted to advertising expenses.   Hmm, let's see the posts going into these general ledger codes!    Let's be real, auditors don't dig very deep.   They LOVE summary reports.  

And also I get really angry because the gross spending in the states and local levels.   In most corporations they don't have a very sophisticated purchasing system and employee resource leveling software.  They operate like in the stone ages instead of moving people around to different areas or departments based on their skills and they can cross train.   In construction we did this with crews so that if say the framing schedule was behind and the concrete slab pour crew was not doing anything, then if they were cross trained they could keep working by working on a framing job.   I would just get a report and reclass the payroll time in the job costing so that the concrete division did not get charged for the framing labor....My husband always talks about how the hard copy of the purchase order is viewed 5 times by different people and then it goes to the accounts payable department, inventory is always hand counted and crazy adjustments are made....I suspect that even in the local and state governments they are spending without any form of real control.   I think there should be an audit of all government offices to see what kinds of processes they have for purchasing and employee work loads.   What do these people do?   And why is it that the people actually performing the manual labor are getting the short end of the stick while the higher up office workers give themselves a raise for taking a trip and $500 a night hotels like the Housing Authority here in Los Angeles?  



http://www.katc.com/news/housing-authority-scandal-where-s-hud-exec-gets-55-000-raise-amid-dhap-height/