A Free Idea for Labor Unions

[mishalak]

If you are going to make your payrolls so darn complex maybe you ought to get into the business of offering payroll services to small companies. Maybe you could even make some money for yourselves in addition to keeping better track of all these different categories of work and union dues you seem intent on having. Either that or simplify the darn payrate structure. It is ridiculous that I have to enter in three different work types and two different deductions for every hour a union employee works.

Comments

[orangemike.livejournal.com]

Most such systems are completely automated; it is grossly unfair to the accountants to have to do this kind of thing manually! (Of course, our State accountants are Union themselves and understand why the system is the way it is.) I honestly do feel your pain; but there are ways of simplifying things like that, and the company ought to know that. It's not that complicated to program.

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

Part of it is that I am using MAS 90 rather than some other accounting program. Really if my boss were sensible, given the amount of trouble vs. income that doing the payroll and taxes for this convention services company generates, he would send them to a larger accounting firm. But part of it is that the union will not let us do this in a sensible way, which would be to combine down the earnings types into just three codes, regular, OT, and DblOT. But nooo, they want each one accounted for separately on every paystub. Bleh.

[orangemike.livejournal.com]

I'm not familiar with MAS 90, so I can't contribute anything useful here, other than to observe that unions are often conservative with practices like this because the rank-and-file members suspect that any "rationalization" of past practice is just a trick to conceal the fact that they're being swindled. I can't say they're always wrong in such suspicions.

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

Every union employee for this particular union gets paid three times for his hours worked. One for the time (or overtime, or double overtime as the case may be), once for his vacation/holiday (equal to the total hours he worked), and then he gets an adjustment for experience or some such (also equal to the hours he worked, but I have never seen anyone who did not get it, but each of these is a separate rate for Reg, OT, or DblOT), then based upon his hours worked, but not all these additional phantom hours, he contributes five cents an hour to the union promotion fund, and then they take 2% of his gross as administrative dues.

My question to the union would be why can't it just be one rate for regular, overtime, double overtime? The two deductions would be no trouble to calculate at that point.

[orangemike.livejournal.com]

Based on my experience in negotiating this kind of thing, I suspect there are historical reasons behind it (Teamsters' contract, right?) being done this way. Probably during past contract negotiations, somebody on one side has proposed rationalizing it, and it's been rejected by someone on the other side who feared it would mean more cost to them. Still sounds like it wouldn't be that much trouble to set up as a spreadsheet that automatically calculates all this stuff.

[cindy-reddeer.livejournal.com]

*ACK!!* Thank god I only have 9 employees and no union.

[mishalak.livejournal.com]

And that you do not work for a small accounting firm that does payroll for 60 different small businesses, where each one is different?

[cindy-reddeer.livejournal.com]

No kidding, only our little agency (although I am the accounting dept.& IT Services/Admin Support) and a chairity event I am treasurer of (no payroll). Happy me! And everything is computerized. :-)