CABL Forum - Re: Is anyone still making good money contracting?

Hey, sorry about the link thing, first post here I believe. Will have to check how to do that.

But, as far as the union goes, they may stand to gain quite a lot.
Interesting as Texas is like the anti-christ as far as unions go, but amazingly, there is a lot of union labor here, particularly among electricians, etc.

I don't work in cable, but voice and data, and have found some benefits to go with the unions, education toward certifications basically for free vs. 1200-1500 per class, increased salaries, etc.

Added is the ability to leverage with legal negotiating via trained organizers vs taking what you can get. Also, once people wanting to go into the area of labor concerned learn that a union represents certain contracts, etc, they are more inclined to try to work via the union, as they know its better, real concerns about and training in safety and union evaluations of osha and safety practices in the workplace, etc.

I used to work in a little shmaltzy branch of bell atlantic in computer graphics, which because it was a small startup managed to avoid the requirements of the regulated side of bell where they were unionized by the cwa. Once the merger of Bell and GTE led to Verizon, headquarters, Dallas, we were automatically as part of the merger required to be allowed to vote union up or down. For my part, with my 7 or so years experience, my pay immediately increased like 5 bucks an hour.

Don't get me wrong, the company hated us for voting yes on the union and it immediately became their objective to close the place down, which they did after a number of years. Moving most operations to new locations, mostly in anti union areas, and I suppose bypassing the union since they were new operations. But I was only mentioning this relative to what someone earlier posted about cable workers organizing and suing the satellite companies, etc., to paraphrase them.

The issues of money are only part of the picture, though a big part. Things like health/injury concerns are every bit as important. I only recently found out that a company I was looking at was actively contributing to a pac concerned with making it legal or passing legislation, I guess there were already lawsuits out there about this, where companies could vastly limit their employees' ability to sue in case of injury on the job. I think this is largely the gray area mentioned above by others, and I see it in my "contractor" friends' position, where by taking on these supposed 1500 per week illusions/positions you are really in being a contractor divesting the companies of any chance for litigation.

Right?

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Re: Is anyone still making good money contracting?