Immoral to be a member of a union?

[DArcMatter]

I work for an actuarial consulting company that values employee benefits, and many of our clients are Union funds, including a few UFCW-sponsored funds. It is a very political environment and I am now very attuned to what stores are unionized, and which ones I am 'encouraged' to shop with. I also know how much of the employers have to fork over each hour in order to pay for the pension and health plans, and hence how much of each grocery item goes to pay for this. It's not pretty.

As far as client politics go, in dealing with the union clients, we have to use union-printed paper, choose UPS over Federal Express, choose Hilton hotels over Mariott, and one of the consultants spent an afternoon of non-billable time looking for union-made clothing.

"Wal*Mart" is a dirty word at work. In fact, any non-union shop is a dirty word. But it is the non-union stores that are out-competing the unionized stores. Wegman's, which made Fortune Magazine's #1 spot for being the best company to work for in America is not a union shop. I miss the days of driving less than 10 minutes for getting good and cheap groceries at Super-Wal*Mart at 3 in the morning when I was in Missouri, as compared with what I have in the DC-area--a lot of gridlock driving to a pricy union-run shop during normal business hours.