Repeat Stuff!! Repeat Stuff!! Repeat Stuff!!

 

 

The NBEA is like a cancer, eating away at the moral fiber of New Bedford!!

The title of this post is a reference to Bo Burnham who managed to skillfully satirize the public's tendency to believe whatever version of the truth they hear most often.  At one point in this You Tube video he has the audience chanting "Repeat stuff.  Repeat Stuff.  Repeat stuff." while he stands up and does a couple of Heil Hitler salutes.

And so it goes with people who scapegoat labor unions.

Since graduating high school in 1978 I've had a total of 13 employers.  I spent a couple of months installing carpets (not recommended), a couple of years in the U.S. Army (ditto), and less than a year pretending to sell real estate.  Real Estate is a wonderful place to meet lots and lots of people who couldn't by lunch on credit but seem (It's the union!!) to have endless amounts of time looking at other people's homes.  With the exception of those three employers, the rest consisted of a variety of corporations, two of which were unionized.  In those two places we mostly just sat around drinking beer in our underwear (It's the union!!) and devised more efficient methods of snatching food from the mouths of hard working corporate executives.

I imagine school teachers do that a lot because...(It's those union thugs!!)

Say that over and over.  Repeat stuff and you'll start to believe it.

Having a large number of employers in a diverse collection of industries allowed me to learn a few things about human behavior that many (Union thugs!!!) people never get the chance to learn.  In every workplace there are people who've been there a very long time.  Some of them have never worked anywhere else.  It was very common for them to tell the new guy (that's me) some equivalent of "this place is screwed up."  Initially I tended to believe (It's the union!!  UUUUUnion!!) them because every workplace has at least a few (and sometimes many) highly visible flaws or procedural dysfunctions.

Then I began to notice...

Every place is "screwed up."

It's the union!  Repeat stuff!  Repeat stuff!  Repeat stuff!  It's the union!

Every place I've been employed exhibited employee behavior that could be displayed very neatly on a bell curve.  I eventually started referring to this as the "10% Dud Rate."  In every workplace about 10% of the employees will do a great job no matter how horribly they're treated, about 10% will intentionally do a lousy job (UNION THUGS!!!) no matter how well they're treated, and the other 80% are more or less evenly distributed between those two points.

In union shops, the 10% who are by any measurable standard, duds are usually protected by their union.  In non-union shops the duds are protected by the fact that few managers really want to fire people.  Some duds are (Damned liberals!!) friends of friends or drinking buddies of those who are supposed to be in charge, but most of the time, firing someone is just an unpleasant experience for the individual manager charged with the responsibility, so they avoid it.

The difference is simple.  In a non-union shop there's no (damned liberals or union thugs) union to blame for the presence of duds.  But in terms of employee performance, every workplace is about the same and employers dumb enough to believe they can fix the problem with more supervision or by churning the bodies are only fooling themselves.

Take notes Pia.  You'll be tested later.

For those of you who haven't noticed, Pia Durkin and her peanut gallery of toadying sycophants are blaming every problem that comes down the pike on "union thugs."  I don't believe either they or the dopier members of the public who listen to them are stuck in some kind of Terry Malloy time warp.  The New Bedford School System (Union Thugs!!!!!) is not the set of "On The Waterfront."  It's part of a massive public service system that nationwide is pretty "screwed up" for a long list of reasons, most of which have nothing to do with the teachers (THUGS!!!) union.

But...

As the Nazis learned, if you repeat stuff loud enough and often enough, the public will come to believe it.

As I wrote in the previous post, people don't think...they feel.