Equal Pay? Not in Kansas

[vorlon13]

When I worked for the defense contractor, the company had an unholy mix of union factory workers, outsourced vendors, salaried office, hourly office, independent contractors, reps from other companies we did business with (all with their own pay arrangements) and government employees whom I assume were all salaried, but may not have been.

I was hourly office and even declined a promotion to a salaried position as those people could work up to 44hrs/week and not get overtime, and there were other OT (negative) differences* if you worked during paid holidays. I did the math and realized the promotion would actually incur a pay cut and I'd still be doing the same work.

So, where I'm going with this, comparing pay rates there was futile as everybody was handled differently. The company also had a about 500 classifications for all the positions and I'd been hard pressed to find someone else with an equivalent classification and seniority. BTW, as an hourly office, seniority counted far less for me than if I'd been hourly office union (no one at our site was that, but the company had a facility in San Diego with union hourly office, and there were probably other sites too) but I think seniority counted more for me than it did the salaried office. AFAIK, everyone had the same vacation accrual rate and health insurance (executive level excluded on both of those categories) but the union had different options on their pension than the rest of us.

*as I recall for instance, I wound up working on Christmas day one year, and received 3x for that day (double time for 1 day + 1 day of holiday), salaried would have been time and a half, after the first 4 hours and those first 4 hours would have been 'free', + one paid vacation day. Additionally, any scheduled day I showed up, I was eligible for 4 hours pay if sent home prior to completing 4 hours due to weather, power failure, scheduling fuck up, etc. but the salaried office didn't get that. There were no hourly office supervisors or managers. I think there were (nonunion) hourly supervisors in the factory area.

I also worked factory floor during a union strike (but didn't make any products, instead I built new test equipment with some field reps that were called in) and received same pay rate for 6 weeks of that as I did before and after in the office. The union did get a raise, but lost a significant number of members, it was their choice, small raise, keep head count, big raise and take a reduction in force, They ALWAYS took the larger raise package with large headcount reductions in the 3 contract renegotiations that happened while I was there. I might not have been very gung ho for the union, but I never felt I was as anti-union as the union hierarchy was.