Polishprince
Diamond Member
- Jun 8, 2016
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The choice for thousands of union workers at Royal Dutch Shellâs petrochemical plant in Beaver County was to either spend Tuesday standing in a giant hall waiting for President Donald Trump to speak, or to take the day off with no pay.
âYour attendance is not mandatory,â read the rules that Shell sent to union leaders a day ahead of the visit to the $6 billion construction site. But only those that showed up at 7 a.m., scanned their cards, and prepared to stand for hours â through lunch but without lunch â would be paid.
âNO SCAN, NO PAY,â the rules said.
Those that decided to sit out the event would have an excused absence, the company said, and would not qualify for overtime pay on Friday. The company has a 56-hour workweek with 16 hours of overtime. That means those workers who attended Mr. Trumpâs speech and showed up for work on Friday meeting the overtime threshold are being paid at a rate of time and a half, while those that didnât go to hear the president are being paid the regular rate, despite the fact that both groups did not do work on the site on Tuesday.
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âNo yelling, shouting, protesting or anything viewed as resistance will be tolerated at the event,â the paper read. âAn underlying theme of the event is to promote good will from the unions. Your building trades leaders and jobs stewards have agreed to this.â
Mr. Trump received a generally warm and at times cheerful welcome at Shell, where he talked about his political grievances and name-called opponents as much as he praised the natural gas extracted in Appalachia, which will be processed at the Shell plant into plastic pellets.
He also called out union leadership, which Shell had requested to be in attendance.
âIâm going to speak to some of your union leaders to say, âI hope youâre going to support Trump.â OK?â he said. âAnd if they donât, vote them the hell out of office because theyâre not doing their job.â
Trump's large union crowd at Shell was given the option of not showing up â and not getting paid
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Forced attendance if you want to get paid for overtime.
Sounds a lot easier than actual work.
If someone didn't want to do it, they should have provided alternative duty like scrubbing bathrooms or something else that's useful to get paid for the time.
Their space at the speech could be replaced by members of the general public, who would do it for nothing.