Airing of Grievances and Feats of Strengths

This recent govexec article is fascinating.  Not only for the content of the article, but also for the comments.  It is pretty easy to recognize who is bargaining unit and who is not within a few seconds.  Especially the guy who says "unions have no place in public service."  I'm just guessing he isn't the local president.  He also probably doesn't spend a lot of time with the guy saying "it has everything to do with poor management."  So how did public service unions and managers get to the point of a Seinfeld inspired Festivus-styled airing of grievances in a comment section of an article?  

I do not know either poster I mentioned above, but I can probably safely assume they do not have the same perspective on union-management relations.  However, that does not mean they cannot work together and actually accomplish things.  Sometimes, management and the union may have different motives for their opinions but the opinions might actually be the same.  Take this article about the TSA for example.  AFGE wants to add 6,000 TSA screeners.  If I were a manager in an airport with 2-hour lines at the check-point, I'd probably appreciate a few more screeners too.  Of course, management will accuse the union of just trying to get more dues-paying members.

How does this tie into "don't manage like this" examples? I've worked with managers that will spend more time composing an email to the local union rep sitting five feet away than actually talking to the person.  Call me old fashioned, but I think everybody can agree that context can be misinterpreted when reading an email.  Especially an email to/from somebody when you're already questioning that person's motivation for even sending the email in the first place.  I had a co-worker email back-and-forth with a union rep for over 15 minutes about the arrival time of an employee that was a few minutes late for work.  And each email got more and more argumentative.  Email is not only impersonal it also makes it easier for the sender to be a jerk.  Unless you're a total sociopath, it should be difficult to be rude to somebody in person.  That's why it is so easy to hang up on a telemarketer but so difficult to try to explain to the Salvation Army bell ringer why you don't have change for him.  

I know there is a manager out there reading this saying "Hey, why not point out what the union rep is doing wrong?"  Well this blog isn't called "How to be a better union rep".  It's call Don't Manage Like This!  Besides manager out there reading this, if you weren't so defensive maybe you would have a better relationship with your union representatives.  I would love to think that managers are always correct but based on my experiences, I am not actually myopic enough to believe that.