I was in the local Kroger store yesterday and saw a young lady cashier walking through the parking lot in her Kroger uniform. She had on a blue polo shirt and black pants, as required. Except her pants were about halfway down her butt and her shirt was tucked in so nothing showed. If her shirt hadn't been long enough her butt crack, or at least her underwear would have been showing.
I've seen this before in Kroger but usually it's the men who do it. I've also seen men with hair down their backs and long beards. The women are normally more tidy and neat but there are some... And Kroger management puts up with it.
In 2008, a year after I retired from the Bureau of Prisons, I got a part-time job working at the Publix Supermarket in Crystal River, Florida. Publix, the largest employee owned grocery store in the nation, has a strict dress code that employees must follow if they want to work there. Men's hair has to be kept clean and cut to certain specifications. They do not allow facial hair except for a mustache and that has to be kept within certain guidelines. No excessive jewelry, earrings, piercings, etc., are allowed and tattoos must be covered by the uniform. Women must keep their hair clean and neat. No excessive jewelry or makeup and no piercings or tattoos visible while in uniform. And the uniforms must be kept clean and neat and meet company requirements.
So why the big difference between the two? It's simple. Kroger employees belong to The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union. Kroger has no choice but to allow things that the union negotiates. Publix, on the other hand, has no union. They pay fair wages and full time employees benefit from profit sharing and stock options. And since the employees own the company through stock purchases, there's no real need for a union. Personally, I'd rather work for and buy my groceries from Publix. I wish they had stores in Texas.
Now before anyone gets all riled up about my opinion of unions, let me state my case. I believe there certainly was a time and place for unions. They helped organize workers for forced companies to pay employees fair wages and protected their jobs when they were being treated unfairly. For the most part I don't think unions do this anymore. And I think the majority of Americans agree with me since union participation is nearly at its lowest ever.
Over the years unions have gone from being a friend to the employees to being all about political power and money. Why else would they be trying to force people to join even when they have no desire to do so? And they're attempting to force unions into companies where the employees don't necessarily want them. It's not just the company owners/CEOs who don't want them but the majority of the employees as well. That's why they're trying to pass "card check", a way to bypass secret ballots for unions and discover who it is who isn't playing ball with them.
Now I can't blame employees for wanting to join a union to help "protect them from management." They make it sound impressive and necessary. But in the 22 years I worked for the government I never once joined a union. I never saw a need. I screwed up a few times during my career. I faced it head on, apologized for it and took my lumps - none of which were fatal.
However, I have seen people who were caught red-handed doing something wrong (and occasionally something criminal) whom the union tried to get absolved of responsibility and/or disciplinary action. How do you maintain good order and discipline in any company if people won't take responsibility for their actions and the unions assist them with that task?
Remember when having a job meant keeping yourself neat and clean, always dressed properly and expecting to be paid for what you accomplish instead of expecting to be paid whether or not you actually do the work properly? Remember having pride not only in the job you did but for having a job and earning money? Having worked civil service for 22 years I encountered numerous staff who were making well over $50,000 a year for doing as little work as possible.
I'm not trying to implicate that all federal employees are lazy. That's simply not true. The majority of federal workers work hard every day and many are paid far less than some members of Congress and/or the general public might think. Are there some high paid employees in the government? Certainly. But even CEOs aren't on a pay scale like the private sector CEOs are. There are no civil service employees making millions of dollars a year in salaries and bonuses.
I'm not knocking the private sector salaries of their CEO's either. In my humble opinion a successful company has the right to decide what they will pay their CEO. A non-successful company has that right as well, of course, but if they're failing and still paying their CEO millions of dollars there is something definitely wrong.
I guess my whole point here is that many Americans seem to have lost the work ethic that my generation, my parents' generation and my grandparents' generation had. And I believe unions had something to do with that, as well as ever increasing government entitlement programs. Welfare to Work should still be the program of choice by the federal government. Instead, for some welfare seems to have become a career.
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