Post College-getting a menial PT sales/retail job to meet people

[surfinillini]

lol iggy...what a doofus

[IggyWH]

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But anyway, these guys were always poor and always bitched about money, yet were too stupid to work on a day that they were getting paid double time. Then, if they really wanted a day off, take the next day off where you're just making straight time.

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i don't know if this occured to you, but you are not required to be at work on sunday. if you want to miss a monday, you have to use sick time or vacation time, and if you are in the habit of taking mondays off after working on sunday, your boss is going to notice and you're going to have a problem.

but these guys are too dumb to realize this, being union guys and all, so i'm sure they were just being lazy.

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As I have already said, we're in two different worlds here so what I said to you doesn't fit for you, and what you're saying to me doesn't fit for me.

There's no sick day or vacation time, just as there's no boss that will fire you for not coming to work. Either you show up and you get paid or you don't show up and you don't get paid. They're pretty much the true definition of a temp.

So when you need money to survive, as you're complaining about how much money you owe, how you can't pay your bills, how you lost your car, and then you don't show a day that you're making double time because you wanted to sit at home and drink beer all day, that constitutes as being stupid. If you want a 5 day work week, work Saturday through Thursday, that's just common sense.

I've worked with a lot of different labor unions in a lot of different areas and a lot of different states and you get the same thing no matter where you go. I'd say about 2 or 3 out of every 10 are good workers who are quite knowledgable and trying to better themselves, while the other 7 are just there to do the bare minimum they can possibly do to get paid so they have money to take to the bar.

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For the record, there's no way in hell I wanted to work that job. My company handled the construction monitoring of this project and I got stuck on it after one of our employees got booted off the site for hitting on an operator.

That project is actually what cracked me and led me to say screw this bullcrap and move to Cali.

[NT!]

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For the record, there's no way in hell I wanted to work that job. My company handled the construction monitoring of this project and I got stuck on it after one of our employees got booted off the site for hitting on an operator.

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explains a lot. you don't want to be there and i'm sure they don't want you there. no way that would color your comments.

i have never heard of a labor union that has no schedules, no sick time or vacation time, and no hiring or firing. what union is this? is it a state contract? in what universe do people collect unemployment for an unfinished job that needs workers? i suspect you are misinformed about how this contract works.

on the off chance you're correct, what exactly do you expect a low-wage worker to do when an employer is dumb enough to contract with a union that has no rules and pays people not to work? people respond to incentives and the incentives are pretty clear here. especially if it's a state contract which probably has a ton of kickbacks involved and overpays for sub-par work.

[KUJustin]

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...that constitutes as being stupid. If you want a 5 day work week, work Saturday through Thursday, that's just common sense.

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While I think you're getting overly hated on, this was really funny.

[IggyWH]

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For the record, there's no way in hell I wanted to work that job. My company handled the construction monitoring of this project and I got stuck on it after one of our employees got booted off the site for hitting on an operator.

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explains a lot. you don't want to be there and i'm sure they don't want you there. no way that would color your comments.

i have never heard of a labor union that has no schedules, no sick time or vacation time, and no hiring or firing. what union is this? is it a state contract? in what universe do people collect unemployment for an unfinished job that needs workers? i suspect you are misinformed about how this contract works.

on the off chance you're correct, what exactly do you expect a low-wage worker to do when an employer is dumb enough to contract with a union that has no rules and pays people not to work? people respond to incentives and the incentives are pretty clear here. especially if it's a state contract which probably has a ton of kickbacks involved and overpays for sub-par work.

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I'm not really sure how their contracts worked. I do know that they had to work at least 1041 hours (1/2 of a years worth of a normal 40 hour work week) in a year and then they could collect full wages while on unemployment. This also gave them their years worth of credit in the union. I believe they told me they had to put in 15 years before they got any paid time off. I know the one union I worked with out of Indiana, PA made a base of $14.75 per hour so they were making darn good money for Pittsburgh.

Once again though, what you're saying doesn't pertain to what I was dealing with. I think you're definition of construction is along the lines of craftman, dry wallers, painters, carpenters, masonary, wielding, etc. The type of construction I did was pure industrial. We were installing a landfill liner for a power plants ash disposal (fly ash has been proven to cause cancer so it couldn't get into the groundwater, hence the reason for the liner. The labor union guys job was to pull sheets of material off a rollbar. Some of the sheets were mesh, so to "bond" the sheets together, cable ties were used every 3 feet. They also did that. That was the extent of their work.

[NT!]

so you don't know what union this was or how the contracts worked? guys work half a year, collect unemployment the other half but don't get sick days for 15 years? lol now i am definitely sure you don't know what you are talking about.

and you are paying people 15 bucks an hour to do a job most contractors get ex-cons or teenagers to do for 8 or 10, and calling THEM stupid? i'd like to be stupid enough to find that job.

what i am saying pertains to any kind of work, union or not. if you pay people not to work, they're not going to work. if you overpay for mediocrity there is no incentive to excel.

[IggyWH]

I'm going by what they told me how things work for them. I have no reason to not believe them. Their proper name was Construction General Laborers Local.

I (my comapny) wasn't paying people anything. They were hired through the power plant. We couldn't even tell them what to do. We were inspectors so we had to tell them when they were doing something wrong and it was up to them to do it correctly then. Had they not, then it would have went to someone onsite at the power plant and then heads would have rolled. Other than that though, they had supervision through another constractor onsite, but he had no real authority over them either.

There's definitely incentive to excel. It means you have another job lined up after this one is done. Most of these guys told me at that time that it was their first job they worked all year and this happened in August. I'd say it's pretty clear why it was their first job, and the guys who actually worked had jobs before that I worked with them on and after in that same year.

[Josem]

OP,

The latest trend is called co-working

Of course, I don't know what job you're going to be doing, but if it is a solo/freelance thing (web design, online poker, whatever), you may find a group of similar people meeting up and renting an office space in your city.



(this is less likely to be a great way to meet a whole bundle of girls, and more likely to be a great way to socialise and have the "normal" interactions of an ordinary office)

[NT!]

basically none of what you are saying makes any sense in terms of how a union works or why they get hired. it's only possible on a bloated state contract that pays goons lucky enough to get into a bogus union not to work. it's a ridiculous circumstance that makes no sense whatsoever even if you have your facts straight (which i doubt). it has literally nothing to do with what we were discussing before and is a rare and extreme circumstance to begin with. so why are you bringing this up again, especially when you don't even have the facts straight? to whine about how much you hate unions?

blame it on state government that contracts with a bogus union like that, no actual business would set up something so dumb. paying people not to work - sounds like a government job for sure.

[IggyWH]

No, because phenom said something and you went at him saying construction workers aren't dumb just because they're not white colar, and your point is that they have other skills.

My point is, not everyone in the construction field has a trade and there's quite a few that are contempt with doing next to nothing and not trying to better themself. They ride on the coattails of the ones who actually do work. They're the ones that give a bad name, and there's a lot out there.

So while what phenom said was ignorant, it isn't without truth, which you made it out to be.