Currently working 35 hours a week, in a unionized job with banked time starting at 36h (1:1), (2:1 at 40+ hrs), 4 weeks vacation & unlimited sick days up to a point(6 per year I hear...), meaning I can take a day off whenever I'm too tired/sick. Due to the negotiated conditions, it's also really not advantageous for the employer to force us to be on call or have us do any amount of OT. Thus the workload is really stable. In a way I now have too much free time.
It's been a bliss overall on my work/life balance. I've never been that healthy and my stress level has never been so low in my life. I know I'll live longer and once I am more stable financially, I'll be able to have time to contribute to my community.
The salaries are also quite good. I highly encourage people to unionize, it is the only way to get proper leverage in this highly inequitable period we live in.
The union we have is small and consists exclusively of people with at minimum university degrees. Most of them have some form of life accomplishments due to the hiring process also. Due to the conditions negotiated, the well provisioned pension fund and general job advantages, most people coming in are experienced (5+ years) except for some amount of diversity/equity hires (which the company kinda needed since everyone stays there until retirement...).
Thus, the union is well organized to have leverage, well structured and reasonable with whom they should defend when there is abuse on the side of the employer. People are mostly diligent in their work obligations.
There is some rare exceptions, some employees with too much mastery of transferring issues to others. Frankly, I've seen the same or worst in Big Corpo, mostly in middle management, the only difference here is some employees do it instead of the managers...
A couple of years ago I worked on an avionics suite upgrade for a "state of the art" Lear flight deck destined for training (aka Full Flight Simulator in the trade).
The thing had a Frankenstein setup that dated way back from an older Lear and was a under-invested mess. At the time, Bombardier was throwing away all it's cash on the C-Series certification (Now known as Airbus A220). Lear85 ended up being getting cancelled so they could concentrate on C-Series.
Given the small(er) range of the 75 compared to alternatives, it's sky-roof high maintenance cost (as with any Lear) I wasn't surprised when I saw it getting canned. The only thing really going for it was high manoeuvrability and, I guess(only a guess) perhaps runway minimal length.
Nothing was left to keep the 75 competitive and with no replacement in sight... It is time to say bye bye Lear!
I lived in KSA for about 2 months doing post delivery services on a project at the client's office. As I started befriending some of the personnel, I found one of them had a daughter from his first wife. He was very angry at her and blamed her for the child, basically saying that she had become pregnant on purpose so that he would have to cancel his trip to Europe where he was planning on finding his fourth wife. He was the fairer and kinder man of the bunch over there. Most of them were mostly busy making stunts to have some time off at work and look good, not caring at all about work or worst, create problems so as to gain leverage against our company for negociation. They separated the immigrants workers in poor shared offices from the KSA citizens. Offices were also missing drinkable water even thought it was in a capital city (I could see skyscrapers...)...
Ever since that trip, while I hope they'll see some positive change for women's right, I fear the opposite might happen to our countries due to low demographics. I don't believe we are benefiting from a relationship with that country at all, there is not point in even taking time to deal with them.
