Can confirm on the USPS story. I worked there during the summers in college. The union employees were the laziest people I've ever met. They got paid twice as much to do 1/8th of the work.
Not that I blame them. I'd do the same.
The best stories my bros had at Canada Post (looks like posties on both sides of the border acted the same) was when the posties would read everyone's magazines for a days passing it around and then finally send it off to the destination. Or they'd be stolen. Porn mags were the most abused.
Other hilarious stories would be people doing nothing all day and smoking in the bathroom, and workers at their bell going home at the drop of a dime. I don't know what mail sorting is like now, but back then my bros would be amazed how the vets would have a bin that can be cleared out as it's almost done, but since it's home time, they leave it. So mail takes an extra day to deliver because someone didn't want to finish off a bin.
For all you magazines subbers (at least the remaining ones left), now you know why mags in the 90s started getting shrinkwrapped or sent in opaque packaging. Mags in the 80s were sent loose so anyone could flip through it.
At my first job involving union workers (university summer job) I made shitty little tools on a machine. One person per machine. The automated setting churned out product about once every 50-60 seconds. Just keep it going till break time or you manually shut it off to refill the plastic hatch. Or you could do the manual way of constantly pressing on after every cycle which would be a pain in the ass.
I made more product than all unionized vets. I was making around $6/hr. They were getting around $20+. It literally took me a few days to learn the machine from loading material to using it. The only thing I couldnt do is fix it if it overheated, which some of these old ass machines did. So when that happened, I turned off the machine and one of the technicians would do whatever he did to fix it over the next hour as I sat outside waiting.
The reason they were making less is because at the end of our shift (we worked the 4 to 12:30am evening shift), I worked straight through till 12:15. Last 15 min to clean up and log my count into the master binder. The machine has a counter on it.
They would quit at 11:30 pm and did nothing for the final hour. No supervisor in the evening shift. The vets were the supervisors. They would be sitting at a table in street clothes chilling. They had to stick around till 12:30 am as it was old school Fred Flintstone punch clocks.
It was the easiest job in the world. The most amazing thing was when one of the vets told me to stop early. lol. Fuck em. I worked till 12:15. My daily count was around 2,500. They'd do about 2,000-2,200 yet got paid way more.
And then the second time I encountered union workers was when I had an office job and the union guys were downstairs in the shipping bays. We were on the fence to make the month or quarter so the VP of our division told us to go downstairs and help out with wrapping skids. The warehouse crew were falling behind and many of us have some warehouse experience. I even know how to drive a forklift. And many of the office workers started out in the warehouse. The union guys didn't let us touch the stuff overriding the VP. They complained to the warehouse manager. I was expecting the floor to be some frantic action where were asked to help out because it's a pressure cooker down there. About 6-7 get down there and everyone is moving at a turtles pace like nobody cared. Assholes. Maybe if you guys picked up the slack we'd hit our numbers.