Fishy business. The Social Impact of SST.pdf - Act Now!

that kind of feedback…But he [the employee]can go outside and complain, and you read allsorts of things in the paper, but it needs to be brought to management’s attention. Everybodygoes to their immediate team leader or supervisor, and if they don’t get satisfaction they can,and some do, walk into my office…Of course some people don’t always like what they hear.Some people are disgruntled and you cant please everybody all the time.”N: “What happened at the recent mini-strike?”IB: “No we didn’t raise pays, we changed ther way we were calculating pay, which, um,because of the high absenteeism, it was, you know, it wasn’t working out, but we have onlychanged , we had the Labour Department involved with everything were doing, I think there area lot of misunderstandings, a lot of people don’t understand if you’re absent you don’t get paid.So I think things have settled down now…I mean, the mini strike, we were blindsided by thewhole thiung. We’re up here they’re down there, nobody came to talk to us, the only peoplewho came to talk to us were all outsiders. Two weeks ago, whenever it was, they were alloutsiders…they came down and first thing I told them was if you’re in any way involved in thisstrike, firstly, its illegal and you should tell them to come back to work, if they’ve got issues, totalk to us about them..We asked them to come down and we thought hopefully somebody’sgoing to show up here, and we’re going to sit here for how long? And finally a group of about12 outsiders, and one, one employee who worked for the company for three weeks was amongstthem, and she barely knew why she was there, shed only worked for the company for threeweeks…”N: “Were they arfraid of being fired?”IB: “I don’t know what the workers were afraid of, but I mean they should’ve been afraid oflosing a day’s pay because that’s what they did.”K: “What about unions?—they’re legal.” .IB: “Absolutely, they can have any union they want. As long as its affiliated, as long as itsrecognized, and as long as we’re informed. …Have a union, I mean a union means nothing tous—you see, either way, with a union, without a union, it doesn’t worry us, they’rewelcome,.there’s nothing we can do to stop it anyway. But people were collecting money offour employees, we understand it, that had no business, that were not of any affiliated orrecognized union, and I infomed the group, I believe some of our employees paid people whowere saying they’d represent them in a union. And as I told our employees, there are norecognized unions that Ive been informed of, so if they paid money to any of these people theyshould get it back because what they’ve done is illegal, those people, collecting the money.Now we know who at least one of the people are, but he’s come to the gate claiming torepresent the people. In fact this group that came down, that was my comment to them, I said Ihave no idea why youre here, you don’t represent our people. We don’t have to discuss anythingwith you---because they were ill informed. ‘Why does this person earn only this much money?’Well, the only way they can earn that much mioney is uf they don’t come to work every day.We had to listen to them and they were ill-informed. [If there were a union] it would be betterbecause people would be better informed. About issues. They can have people represernt themand come to management meetings.”K: “It would be easy to register a union.”92