Always suspicious

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I'm fast approaching my 3 year anniversary of departing from that behemoth impersonal institution called TRIMET . And of course I have been watching from the outside since the day I left.

In the last 5 years of my employment there I saw a steady degradation of the work environment. Operators were getting less and less respect from the management and were expected to 'follow orders' and if you didn't you could expect threats to be made against you in the form of the unemployment line.


Union employees have seen a steady loss of benefits and have even lost the right to select their own work during signups (all with the consent of the union). They have lost the right to sign shifts that they could sign for 40 years because bureaucrats made some unilateral decision.  (turn backs, and the stats didn't prove that these were any more unsafe than a regular shift)

I know several people who continue to work at Trimet and have been there a long long time. Anything over 10 years is a long time. Every single one of these people is not particularly happy about having to continue to work at Trimet but $27/hour jobs are not that easy to find around here so they have to continue.

With all these facts in mind I am very suspicious of these little surveys that comes from the faceless bureaucrats.  I understand that they have to keep themselves busy in order to justify their existence, and that means the poor union employees are subjected to whatever fancy is going on in pencil neck land.

So here is yet another survey of the employees, notice how there is absolutely no mention about the goals or type of questions being asked. It's all very vague, with the 'promise' of trying to improve the working environment.

It seems to me a pretty simple task to make your employees happy. Decent work schedules with plenty of recovery time, as few splits as possible (split shifts are inhumane) and some sort of actual method for operators to express themselves without fear of retaliation. Too simple for the bureaucrats I suppose.

Whatever is going on with this 'survey', Unfortunately for union employees, what the managers say and what they do usually have nothing in common.