Adumbration

As the news reports continued posturing to the effect of threatening a strike, I am reminded of the first disagreement I had with the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace, Boeing's engineering union, about how they go about presuming to represent me in contract negotiations.  There are other reasons (such as explained here), but the disagreement dates from my first contact with the union after joining the company in 1984, on the subject of non-wage compensation.

At the time I had become aware of compensation schemes that can be thought of as a benefits smorgasbord, in which one might get a defined non-wage benefits package worth a particular dollar amount, that could be allocated by each individual across all the benefit categories as the individual employee saw fit.  People with no children would be able to take greater compensation in vacation or retirement account contributions,  people who wanted to save for care for their elderly parents could exchange sick leave time for that, and all the other combinations of circumstances that we uniquely face could be best served by a combination of benefits targeted at those circumstances.

So I made that suggestion, that the union should negotiate a conversion from the one-size-fits-all approach into a system that could be tailored for each individual member.  To say the suggestion fell on deaf ears would be a compliment compared to what response I actually received, which was to say that they had decided this would not be good for me.

I knew then that the union did not represent me.

One size does not fit all.