There are times when one's most cynical
suspicions are confirmed. Once again, we need look no further than
the late Marty Levitt's book, Confessions of a Union Buster, Pages 39-40:
Here is an example from the Shefferman school of subterfuge: Under
the real or even theoretical threat of a union, Shefferman advised
management to institute a device called an employee roundtable.
Purportedly designed to give workers a way to air their grievances and
influence company policy, in reality the roundtable becomes management’s
tap into the worker grapevine and its repressive thumb on the informal
worker power structure. The regular group meetings provided management
with a system for planting information, as well as for identifying and
controlling the leaders among the employees. Shefferman lays out the
blueprint for such roundtables in his book. Calling them “rotating
employee committees,” he presents the sessions as open forums, absent
any supervisors, opportunities for workers to gripe without fear of
reprisal. But the fact is, such committees serve management’s interest
more directly than the needs of the workers…
In his book Shefferman doesn’t spell out the reason for the rotating
participation in the employee committees. But his students-who later
became my teachers-learned it well and passed it along: by continually
changing the makeup of the employee committee, management could keep
abreast of complaints and rumors circulating in the various departments
without creating a bond among the participants or inadvertently
developing leaders. The goal was to foster cooperation between employees
and management, not among the employees themselves. In tandem with the
gripe sessions, Shefferman prescribed a very intricate supervisor
training course.
At MandalayBay, this management device is
when we had those meetings with a third party. Supposedly they were
on no one side, but during the meetings they were slightly siding
with management and now here we go again with another meeting.
It is clear that upper management is not going
to listen to us when they do not have to. To those who have issues which
have not been addressed we will have a genuine way to pursue those issues at our
workplace that have been ignored with a union. We need a Collective
Bargaining Voice!
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