Image provided by: SEIU Local 503; Salem, OR
About The Oregon state employee. (Salem, Oregon.) 1944-195? | View Entire Issue (July 1, 1951)
19 ficiency by requiring the promotion, or retention, of employees who are not best suited for the jobs involved. They maintain that the difficulty of mea suring merit can be overcome by such devices as careful job analysis and merit rating, trial periods for em ployees on new jobs,'¡and resort to the plant grievance procedure in case of disputes over merit. ' Over three-fourths of the 930 agree ments analyzed required that varying degrees of consideration be given to seniority in establishing ’ the order of lay-off. About 60 per cent of the agreements made seniority the gov erning factor in establishing the order of lay-off. Almost half of these added a qualifying statement to the effect that the senior employees must be competent to perform available work. Another group of agreements (12 per cent of the total) made seniority a secondary consideration, i. e., senior ity governed the selection of employ ees for lay-off only if the employees involved were approximately equal in ability, Seniority was given most weight in lay-offs in the mass - production in dustries, possibly because a large pro portion of employees have approxi mately the same degree of skill and ability- In rehiring, seniority usually was given the same weight as in lay-offs, because agreements commonly provid ed for rehiring in reverse order of lay off. Application of seniority in rehir- ing may decrease the mobility of la bor reserves. Almost 60 per cent of the agree ments required some consideratioh of seniority ip promotions. Most of them specified that seniority would govern only if the. employees were competent to perform the work or only if the employees involved were of »equal ability. An example of the latter type of provision Breads: “In making pro a 12 N ew A lleys motions, seniority shall prevail only where other qualifications are equal. The ‘qualifications’ as used in this paragraph shall include süch matters as experience, physical fitnpss$ skill, knowledge, adaptability, efficiency, responsibility, integrity, and the j like.” Particularly interesting — especial ly in light of widespread popular con ceptions that unions almost universal ly seek to base promotions on seniority — was the finding that 136 contracts covering almost half (46 per cent) of all the workers made no reference to seniority. In general,, employers hold I that ef ficiency is impaired and individual employee incentive is stifled if senior ity, rather than abilitygoverns pro motions. Unions, in contrast, often take the position that seniority should be the primary factor in making promo tions. They-contend that other factors; are too difficult to measure objective ly ^ - particularly if no joint machine ry is set up to review these factors. Approximately a fifth of the work ers weré covered by contracts which called for transfers from one job to another according to seniority, A fourth of the agreements, cover ing about the same proportion of the workers, provided that senior em ployees were entitled to first choice of shifts. Owing to the general prefer ence of workers for the day shift, the effect is to give older x employees first (Continued on Page 22) Dr. E. Boring Dr. Sam Hughes OPTOMETRISTS at Boring Optical 1194 Center Street Salem, Oregon Phone 3-6506 "Bowl for Your Health" 7 Billiard Tables UNIVERSITY BOWL Phone 2-0631 O pen 11 A .M .-12 P.M. 1340 State St.
