Lately my family's been watching – okay, binge-watching – the
BBC series Sherlock. These brilliant retellings of the classic Conan Doyle tales are set in modern-day England. Every one grabs me, even though I already know the basic plot. Benedict Cumberbatch was born to play the socially inept but brilliant “consulting detective” Holmes. Martin Freeman, who plays Holmes’ friend and sidekick John Watson, is every bit as good as Cumberbatch. They are a much more entertaining duo here than when they played
Bilbo and Smaug.
Watching Holmes make incredible deductions from evidence nobody else even sees never gets old. His detective skills are second to none. His people skills? Not so much. Holmes is the epitome of the high performing but totally unapproachable leader. His favorite pastime is showing off his amazing powers of deduction. Unfortunately, Holmes often does this by embarrassing those closest to him, especially his best (only) friend John Watson.
Many times Holmes seems oblivious to his rude and obnoxious behavior. But his reaction when he’s called on it – usually by his friend Watson – is the worst. He makes excuses for himself; dismisses the damage he’s done; blames the victim for being thin-skinned or unappreciative of his brilliant deductions; or worst of all, ignores that he’s done any damage at all.
Two episodes in particular really emphasize this difference between Holmes and Watson. In one, The Reichenbach Fall (a gripping reimagining of Doyle’s Reichenbach Falls story) the Sleuth’s unapproachable behavior becomes his undoing. Holmes must solve the “final puzzle” set in play by his arch-nemesis and master criminal Jim Moriarty. I won’t spoil it for those who don’t know how it ends, but Moriarty sets the puzzle in motion by destroying his rival’s reputation. It’s easy. He just relies on the fact that everyone who works with Holmes, especially the police and the media, think he’s a conceited jerk.
Contrast this with Watson, who spends most of his time repairing the damage caused by his best friend. John Watson is an approachable leader. He constantly asks Holmes to think about how he treats people and encourages him to use his immense talents to try to be more understanding. When Holmes commits some interpersonal mayhem Watson tries to coach him or at least show how his behavior is impacting his ability to be effective.
This all comes to a head in the most recent episode I watched, The Sign of Three. Here Holmes is put to his ultimate test: giving the best man speech at John Watson’s wedding. During this speech Holmes not only cleverly deduces who in the audience has been stabbed without knowing it, but also lays out perfectly these differences between himself and Watson.
In the speech Holmes manages to offend virtually everyone in the room. He notes, for example, that the bride always chooses ugly bridesmaids. He speculates that God was invented to provide employment for the family idiot. But then he says:
“The point I’m trying to make is that I am the most unpleasant, rude, ignorant and all-round obnoxious arsehole that anyone could possibly have the misfortune to meet. I am dismissive of the virtuous, unaware of the beautiful, and uncomprehending in the face of the happy. So if I didn’t understand I was being asked to be best man, it is because I never expected to be anybody’s best friend. Certainly not the best friend of the bravest and kindest and wisest human being I have ever had the good fortune of knowing. John, I am a ridiculous man redeemed only by the warmth and constancy of your friendship. But, as I’m apparently your best friend, I cannot congratulate you on your choice of companion. Actually, now I can. Mary, when I say you deserve this man, it is the highest compliment of which I am capable. John, you have endured war, and injury, and tragic loss so know this: today you sit between the woman you have made your wife and the man you have saved – in short, the two people who love you most in all this world. And I know I speak for Mary as well when I say we will never let you down, and we have a lifetime ahead to prove that.”
I wish I could report that John Watson’s approachability had finally worn off on his friend and that Holmes changed his ways. Unfortunately, that’s not in the cards (and an approachable Holmes isn’t nearly as fun to watch as the unapproachable one). But I do think there are important leadership lessons here. Lead by example. Don’t give up on others. Believe in the best versions of those you lead, and help them see that best version too.
John Watson is a
great example of an approachable leader. We can all learn from his example. And you don’t have to be the world’s greatest detective to deduce that.
Hat tip to Ariane DeVere, who posted the transcript of the best man speech and loves Sherlock even more than I do.
Link & Comments
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Union Bailout Update
As we are awaiting a ruling on the joint employer issue, the NLRB is determined to hide behind a veil of generalities rather than provide any useful guidelines as to just what has created the “joint employer” status in the McDonalds case. On Aug. 14th, the board affirmed the decision of an Administrative Law Judge to
deny a motion by McDonalds for a bill of particulars. The decisions in the McDonalds and Browning Ferris cases will impact all businesses, not just franchisors.
In case you missed our breaking new post of moments ago, the Browning Ferris decision just came down from the NLRB.
The NLRB continually bends over backwards to extend the benefit of the doubt to employees who misbehave on the job. In this latest incident, although the employee apparently
lied about an injury, because the interview process with the employee did not include union representation, his dismissal was overturned. Make sure to cross your t’s and dot your i’s.
Confidentiality rules came under fire again, this time at a Maine T-Mobile facility. The company was baffled. According to Annie Garrigan, a spokeswoman for T-Mobile,
“We find the Administrative Law Judge’s decision puzzling since T-Mobile’s approach to confidentiality is
consistent with the National Labor Relations Board’s own investigation manual,” Garrigan said. “Best practices for maintaining the integrity of internal investigations include keeping the names of witnesses confidential and requiring witnesses to maintain confidentiality in order to ensure that information provided by subsequent witnesses is not tainted.”
Employer
communication during an organizing campaign took another hit when the board ruled that an employer who warned workers before an election that getting a union could hurt business was making an illegal “veiled threat.”
Here’s a new strategy the NLRB has invented to prohibit you from firing disgruntled employees: they can
file an FLSA claim, as a collective action, even though no other employee has asked them to do so. In this way, their action can be classified as Protected Concerted Activity and you cannot fire them.
As the 2016 election season looms, you are sure to hear more rhetoric from the Democrat candidates related to card check legislation, since unions are one of their key sources of campaign financial support.
Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders have already brought this tired suit out of the closet, but mostly in more “private” meetings with unions, as the American public is not (and never has been) behind card check.
On the Republican side, another attempt at legislation protecting worker freedoms to NOT have a union has been proposed again, as
the Employee Rights Act, by Orrin Hatch in the Senate and Tom Price in the House of Representatives. It is unlikely to gain enough traction to go very far, but it does give Republicans a rallying point if needed during the campaign.
If you’ve been looking for a nice testimonial related to the
problems of card check, check this one out.
And in an interesting twist, an appellate court invalidated the appointment of Lafe Solomon as acting NLRB General Counsel (his tenure was from about Jan 2011 through early Nov. 2013). However, the court ruled that ULPs issued by Solomon’s office are not automatically deemed invalid. Instead,
each company has to invoke the defense or it was considered waived. Thus, any employer with outstanding ULPs filed between Jan. 5th, 2011 and Nov. 4th, 2013 should review the status and determine whether they could still raise the issue.
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Growing Support for Unions
According to a recent Gallup poll,
support for labor unions is at its highest point in the last 7 years, and up 10 points from its all-time low in 2009 of 48% approval.
It also seems folks would like unions to have a bit more influence, although barely over a third of the population falls into this category.
Here’s how Gallup interprets the results:
"With the economy continuing to do better than it did during the recession and the 2008 government bailout of two of the Big Three American auto companies -- for which unions' image may have suffered -- fading further into history, Americans' views of unions are largely restored to what they were six years ago. The solid majority approve of unions, and most would like to see unions' power strengthened, or at least maintained."
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Another One Bites the Dust
By now the news is widespread – A&P Supermarkets, also known as Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co, is filing bankruptcy for the second time in their 156 years of business. The majority of media outlets are spewing competition and debt as the sole cause of the collapse of a company that at one point had 14,000 stores. That’s not the whole story.
Following the trajectory of Detroit’s auto industry and Pittsburgh’s steel companies,
unions had a role to play in their demise. The increased expense associated with collective bargaining contracts and legacy costs makes it difficult, often impossible, for the company to make ends meet. Of A&P’s remaining 30,000 workers, 15,000 will be lucky to keep their jobs.
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Fight for $15
Momentum has increased a degree or two over the last month. The
Service Employees took the “fight” global, – shelling out some serious change to bring foreign legislators and union leaders to Brazil to protest McDonalds.
San Antonio proposed to raise the minimum wage for city employees to $13. The
University of California stated their intention to raise the minimum to $15 for all employees and contract workers. And last but not least, New York City passed a minimum of
$15 for fast food workers. Let’s take a moment to point something out here – “fast food workers” – not all minimum wage workers (to include those in retail, custodial, clerical and landscaping industries). Nope, just fast food workers.
The interesting thing is that even those that support an increase in the minimum wage are having to make concessions with the reality of it. Harry Holzer, economist and professor at Georgetown, believes in a higher wage but says $15 takes it too far:
"But I have much more serious worries about a $15 an hour minimum wage, which constitutes a wage increase of 50% to 100% in most places..(.)..In a city like Washington D.C. where unemployment among those with a high school education or less is at a worrisome 15%,
jobless rates will almost certainly rise. Many employers will be very reluctant to pay high wages to workers whose skills – including the ability to speak English, in the case of many immigrants – are so modest. A likely result would be not only increases in unemployment but also drops in formal labor force activity (where workers work or search for legal jobs) and perhaps some growth in undocumented work among immigrants."
Tia Koonse, a researcher at the UCLA Labor Center, agrees saying “there is no question that some employers doing things legally now might be tempted to start breaking the rules.” So many of them already do. The Bureau of Labor Statistics found that in 2014, roughly 1.7 million U.S. workers were illegally paid less than the federal minimum wage. The Department of Labor simply can’t keep up. One recent DOL study estimated that in New York and California alone there are
560,000 violations of the minimum wage law every week, $33 million in lost income.
According to a Congressional Budget Office report filed last year, even a $10 minimum wage would do more harm than good. Policy analysts predicted that raising the minimum wage to $10 an hour would “raise wages for 16 to 14 million people while eliminating half a million jobs.”
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Desperate Ploy
The Michigan Education Association, desperate not to lose union dues as a result of Michigan’s recent implementation of right-to-work, found a way to
stymie teachers attempting to opt out of paying dues.
First, the union has set up a tight window as to when teachers must notify the union of the desire to opt out, although there is no such restriction in the legislation. It is a very narrow window.
Then, the union quietly changed the address to which the request to opt out was to be mailed to be “officially received.” The notice of this change was at the very bottom of a members-only page of their website. Thus, many teachers who dutifully mailed their letters to the “wrong” address found themselves still owning dues for another year. The union response: “pay up or we’ll report you to credit agencies for non-payment!”
Unions are nothing if not shrewd.
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SCORE BOARD
Who are the winners (and losers) of the labor movement? Don't guess, just check the LRI Scoreboard
View this month's scoreboard (archives also located here).
http://www.lrionline.com/current-scoreboard
Download a PDF of this month's scoreboard
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Clear As Mud
Not only has the Michigan Education Association been shady with their handling of right-to-work opt out procedures, they have been less than transparent on their financial disclosures to the federal government.
The LM-2 form that unions must file has multiple sections with various categories to report all receipts and expenditures. One such category is “All Other Receipts.” This is for income that was received in quantities less than $5,000 and don’t fit into any other category on the form. Most unions report less than one percent of their income on this line – most unions except the MEA.
On their 2014 report, MEA categorized $30 million, 30% of their income, under “All Other Receipts.” In order for this to make sense legally, the union would have had to receive, for example, 7,667 payments of $4,999 in a year’s time.
Where did this money really come from?
When MEA Executive Director Gretchen Dziadosz was posed this same question his response was, “I do not have personal knowledge of that.”
Of course not.
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SEIU Watch
Perhaps SEIU should pay more careful attention to whom they send to organize more highly educated workforces.
SEIU is supposedly “helping” Professors at Webster and Washington University, who have been trying to organize for quite some time. The problem, according to one adjunct professor, is:
“
SEIU practices the lowest forms of union behavior….They do not understand the relative independence of thought and self-direction that most adjuncts at Wash. U. (and Webster) bring to their jobs at a university. They certainly do not understand, or care to understand or appreciate, the mostly collaborative and collegial environment that we want and work to create and maintain…It is in the nature and function of the SEIU to create discord between adjuncts and unrepresented faculty and staff, and even between adjuncts who wish to join the SEIU as members and those who do not.”
Furthermore, their communication with these employees has been far from professional – “disdainful” in fact. E-mails are apparently so full of typos, poor word choice, and misspellings, that is is hard for any educated person, much less collegiate professors, to take them seriously. And apparently, the SEIU organizers in charge of this campaign assumed Webster and Wash U. to be catholic institutions – they are not!
This is the organization that claims
they can do a better job of communicating
your issues with
your working environment to
your managers. They can’t. It’s the reason 880 government workers in Fresno County, California
decertified SEIU this month.
Those in leadership positions with the Service Employees organization are more interested in power and wealth than in helping those who payroll them. This is made perfectly clear by looking at how they spend their members dues money. Here’s one clue – it’s not on representation.
Last month,
SEIU spent $2 million on a signature-gathering initiative to get a cigarette tax hike initiative on the California 2016 ballot. They then spent
$500,000 on an ad thanking New York Governor Andrew Cuomo for getting a $15 minimum wage for fast food workers. Here’s one interesting factoid: none of those people that will benefit from the $15 fast food minimum wage are SEIU members. Check out
this article if you're interested in deeper insight into SEIU’s relationship with the state of New York.
We’ve known that SEIU uses its members money to gain political clout. It’s nice to see though that sometimes it doesn’t pay off. Over the past year, SEIU spent $35 million of its members money on a
special deal with the California Hospital Association. Among other things, SEIU promised to utilize their political position to get $6 billion a year in new Medicaid revenues for California hospital corporations. In exchange, CHA was going to let SEIU organize their employees without a fight. Well, the deal seems to have blown up in SEIU’s face. An internal recording revealed Duane Dauner, CHA’s CEO, reporting that SEIU is struggling to pull through on their half of the deal.
So what it looks like is
SEIU spent $35 million dollars and likely won’t gain one new member from it.
Last but not least,
SEIU is getting sued by the Freedom Foundation. The suit states that based on the Supreme Court decision last year, SEIU should repay all the dues money that was taken from the home health care workers who did not want to be a part of the union.
Here is a quick chart from
WorkerCenterWatch on the money SEIU poured into the Fight for 15 campaign recently:
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Labor Around the World
Labor is pretty out of control in Australia right now. Over the past few months, the depth of union corruption in Canberra has become beyond apparent.
Unions have utilized extortion, blackmail and improper use of power to rob the ACT, its citizens and Australian taxpayers out of hundreds of millions of dollars. The ACT is Canberra, Australia’s labor governing body (similar to our DOL) and much of the blame for all of this corruption is falling on them. For many, it has more to do with incompetence than guilt.
Expect some changes to be made. Many Australians are pushing for an Independent Commission Against Corruption division. Additionally, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has
issued a warning to all corporate executives involved with unions. The message? We’re watching you.
In other news, transportation strikes remain prevalent across the globe. Earlier this month,
Aegean, a Greek airline, cancelled 19 flights due to a four-hour work stoppage; 4 unions
shut down the London Underground; and a
Jerusalem light rail service was held up due to worker strikes.
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Sticky Fingers
Current charges or sentences of embezzling union officials:
- William Magee - BCTGM: $71,908
- Glenn Robert Smith - UBC: $499,087
- Juanita Phillips - AFSCME: Unspecified
- Howard Royal - UGSOA: $66,989
http://www.nlpc.org/union-corruption-update
