Bureaucracy, Ch. 3, page 76-77

This particular subject, bureaucracy, hits home with me. When I first read this section, especially the characteristics of organizational bureaucracy on page 77, I thought of my first job with a company that had a union. With a union company there are distinct divisions of labor, with a hierarchy of offices and positions and a set of rules that govern employee performances. In a union company, there are hourly and salary employees with their job positions ranked with different salary levels. The employee’s salary is based on the position and salary level assigned to that position. The salary level has strict minimum and maximum salary an employee can achieve. Therefore, all employees holding the same position are paid about the same amount of money whether that one employee performs better than another, keeping the treatment for the most part equal at each level. For hourly employees, the only way to make more money is by working overtime, more than 40 hours a week. One of the problems with this system is that some employees take advantage of the rules that regulate the employee performances. From personal experience, I witnessed a fellow employee who clearly should have been fired for low performance, missed worked days and alcohol and drug abuse on the job. However, because of the strict union rules, his manager had to go through the process of writing him up for each instance to document that he gave this person every chance to turn himself around. In the long run, the employee did get help for his alcohol and drug problem which is a good thing but at the expense of other employees having to pick up the slack. This is partially why some people believe unions only protect the bad workers rather than the good.