There is another side to this.... I think that there should be a higher standard for civil servants in conduct and work ethic. I feel that there are serious problems with the accountability and tools to get rid of bad civil servants. Some unions will defend the most shameful of people and they are maintained in the system making others look bad. Really liked my military days when we could throw a "blanket party" to deal with a bad apple.
Agreed! In our Union Local we always tried to 'police' ourselves to keep things from getting out of hand and making everyone look bad in the eyes of both management and the public. We'd almost always fight to give anyone a second chance, but beyond that we didn't play games with them. If they didn't seem to want to change their ways, we did whatever we could to make them want to quit.....short of out right torture or other illegal actions of course.
In fact about a year before I ER'd
we got one of our Union brothers 'axed'. He'd been an A #1 screw-up from the start (about 4 years), and we'd gone quite a bit out of our way to try to help him adjust to the way things had to be. He just didn't want to cooperate and his work was backing up on everyone else, plus all of us others were starting to draw heat from management for his continued screw-ups. So we just waited, gave him as much rope as he needed to hang himself, and then let him do it. He had a
very minor fender bender while driving a
very large truck through
very narrow streets. When he got back to the shop we informed him management would
probably require him to submit to a drug/alcohol test....just SOP. He said "like h*ll I will!" The superintendent heard him state that, and fired him on the spot.....expecting the Union to go to bat for him. The guy was too dumb to ask for our assistance, and so we didn't volunteer it. The guy never even showed up for his civil service hearing, where he could have asked for, and probably would have been granted, a 2nd chance.
He was sort of set up, in that the other work crew member was in the
much smaller service truck [-]purposely[/-] leading him through the narrowest streets he could find that had vehicles parked on both sides of the street.
Normally the service truck driver would try to find the least congested, wider streets so the other driver would have plenty of room to maneuver. That time he didn't.....Oops!