A-CAP, you've yet to tell us whether you informed your employer that you were unwilling to participate in the union or not. You say you were aware that your employer was a union house before you started working there and that you were also aware of the law (and, I think, implicit to this is that you planned to fight the issue if it came to a head). So did you make your employer aware of this? Did you refuse to sign any work-related paper work agreeing to abide by their policy? Or did you allow them to hire you, train you and pay you unaware of the fact you would likely become useless to them when the shit hit the fan? I like your Tony Soprano analogy, and if I were to go to that pork shop he used as a front, and applied for a job there, knowing full well that the pork shop was a front for Tony Soprano 1) it would be pretty silly to put myself into this situation when there are pork shops around that I know aren't run by Tony Soprano, and 2) it would be a blatant failure to disclose pertinant information to take a job at said porkshop with out telling the guy hiring me that I was about to start a war. If you believe unionization is so morally reprehensible, and you took a job at a place that's entrenched with the union, then why did you get in bed with them in the first place? It's like blaming the hooker that gave you syphilis. Yeah she's a dirty whore, but you knew when you fucked her that it might come back to haunt you.
I have mixed feelings about unions. I certainly know folks who have had positive experiences with union membership - people who had their back covered when they got injured on the job and stuff like that. In the arts, the actors union is, in my opinion, a bad thing. I've yet to see any value to it except for the most successful actors - and this is a tiny, tiny handful of people. There's barely enough work to go around to begin with, and the union designates that a certain portion of roles in professional productions must be unionized - then we've got artists paying dues when they could literally go years between gigs. I lost a well-paying role last year because I was unwilling to join. I mean, I've got a friend who's around 300 pounds and has one eye who was force to join the union - do you think she gets cast much? Recently a good friend joined the union, and was suddenly unable to do most of his non-stage voice-over work because the unions set impossibly high rates for this kind of work... He had asked the union rep who signed him up if he's still be able to do this work, and she said yes. She didn't bother to tell him about the impossibly high wages and that non of the stations or companies that hired him in the past could afford to hire him as a union actor. So he eventually had to leave the union because the voice over stuff was his bread a butter (and also he didn't particularly like having someone else tell him what a "reasonable" wage was - he was doing just fine financially before they stepped in and made it impossible for him to work). Now he's black listed - he is not allowed to act on stage ever again unless he rejoins the union and repays any accumulated dues and fees for the time he's out of the union. There's lot of other shit that goes on that is total garbage. I mean, I could go on and on.
A-CAP, I don't know how you originally got in cahoots with a union. From all that I've heard plenty of people get trapped before they're well informed about what it means to work in union house. Thankfully I did a lot of research the first time the union tried to grab me, otherwise I can say without a shadow of a doubt that my career would be over. So I'm really sorry if you got in this mess before you knew better - the union that ensnares my fellow artists is very, very eager to sign people up who are ill-informed about what they're getting into, so if you were in the same boat, I can really sympathize. It seems to me though, that when it comes to your current job, you did know better? To paraphrase Maya Angelou, "When you know better, you do better." If you don't fuck whores, you wont get that rash, you know?
Your spirit of protest is great, but it also kind of belies your age. I mean, pick your battles a little more carefully. If you felt this way, if you were taking this job on for the fight, why didn't you interview, get the job offer, tell them you were unwilling to join the union, have them take back their job offer, then sue the ##### off them? I mean, there's a straitforward case for you. (I'm sorry, I'm again assuming you didn't inform your employer, but I'm guessing you didn't - I think you would have mentioned it by now.) Instead, it's really looking to me like you either lied to your employer or omitted important information at the time you were hired. It's very optimistic of you to want to take on this fight, but seriously guy - you put yourself in a bad place. I'm not saying it's right, I'm not saying it's legal, but you tell us several times that you fully anticipated that it would come to this, and you still threw yourself into it. You could have easily oppose the union at a much earlier stage here, but now you're looking like you treaded into murky waters. It looks like you were willing to work in a union house, no objections, until they wanted your money. And that doesn't sound like ethics, that sounds like you wanting to hold on to your money. I'm not saying it isn't the otherway around - you've argued the otherside of it pretty clearly - but from the outside, it looks like you came up with a moral issue after the fact. I mean, if you'd raise your concerns at the moment you were hired, you'd have a nice case for yourself, and maybe some sexy little anti-union microbrewery would have hired you right off the hop because they supported you and they wanted your madd skilz. You're making yourself look like a whiny, money grubbing turd even though you have a fairly reasonable argument, based on when and why you were willing to raise a stink. No matter what you do about your current work situation, next time, take the lesson, raise your voice before they come for your wallet, or you make yourself look like a douche no matter how right you are. Don't work for an employer you don't morally agree with. Make sure you tell them they are losing out on a high value employee due to their support of things you don't agree with. I've done this over and over again, and a couple times I've even had people agree and make changes. Have some dignity, take pride in what you believe, be upfront about it. That's how you earn respect.
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