Challenging Authority
I’m a union leader so I have had my share of arguing with stupid people and it’s not always the employer. Though I’ve had moments with the employer the most memorable are with my members. I have a couple of members that I like to refer to as having the “what if” personality.
When on their back foot they’ll ask you what if this happens or if that happens. Do they have a policy for this or what about this? It’s like you’re talking to an adult version of the two-year-old child who is constantly asking why.
They turn what could be a five-minute conversation into a two-week-long conversation. My best experience of this was with a guy who would constantly come up with an extremely unlikely scenario and wanted the employer to have a policy written up detailing how he should respond in each case.
I kinda just gave up arguing with him as each item turned into a multiple-hour session of me patiently trying to explain to him that the employer doesn’t have to tell you specifically how to do your job as a tradesmen.
That the earthquake has a 1 in a billion chance of happening here is not an OHS issue and that a generalized emergency response plan is an acceptable level of planning for that event.
You should know how to do your typical work tasks that are related to your trade safely. I informed him that if he’s concerned about it then he has to follow the OHS process. In Canada, we have a process for handling OHS concerns.
Essentially it starts with the supervisor, then it goes to a local OHS committee, and then it goes to the site manager, and then if there is still no resolution it goes to the federal/provincial level for their final say.
This guy pushed it all the way through, with each step denying his concerns, only for the federally-appointed safety officer to inform him that his employer was going above and beyond.
That my member’s concern wasn’t valid. He didn’t accept that as an answer but he couldn’t take it any further other than them to just keep rephrasing his question. The employer eventually found a way to lay him off because of lack of work. I wonder why they did that?
In Canada, you also have the right to refuse to do unsafe work but this guy wouldn’t refuse to do the work because he felt safe enough to do it. But would still push his concerns up the chain. Story credit: Reddit / lookadruid2020