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When I was discharged from the USAF in 1969, at the mature age of 24 {grin], I returned to my rural home town in California to figure out my next step. I visited the unemployment office in the county seat, not to get unemployment, but to find a job. Aside from their surprise that I was not seeking unemployment, the office sent me that same day to the offices of the Southern Counties Gas Company, which had a clerical opening. I was hired within the week to be the mail clerk. Now, I didn't think of this job as something permanent, but it was a job, and let me move right away from my parent's home into my own place.
The company's employees had a union. For one reason or another, I didn't join the union, but was perfectly happy to pay the non-member fee to support their collective bargaining efforts. I'm not sure why I wasn't interested in joining the union, but there it is.
What happened over the next six months was fascinating, and I believe was due to my non-membership in the union. I started the work as the mail clerk, which I found to be a pretty boring job, but I did it competently, and took it upon myself to write a manual for the job when I wasn't busy, since there was nothing to help me learn the job when I got there. After two months, I was moved to another job, that of a secretary/assistant for one of the mid-level management people there, where I learned a lot about field operations at the gas company, mapping, and other stuff. While in that job, I reorganized the work order filing system to make my life easier. After a month in that job, I was moved to the warehouse operation, where I learned a bunch more stuff about how the company operated, and helped create a new inventory system that helped keep the parts stock more current. Two months later, I was called into the office of the head of that regional operation.
As it happened, I was just at the point of getting ready to return to college, to continue my education. The interview with the executive was interesting. Essentially, he told me that they had been moving me around the various department because they were planning to promote me to a junior level management position and had been exposing me to all the departments as an educational thing. I told the man that I was planning to leave shortly to return to college, and he offered me a leave of absence to do that. I said OK, but really had no plans to return.
Later, when I had left the job to go back to school, I realized something. Despite the fact that I'm a fast learner, reasonably clever, and am always looking for ways to make things run better, the primary reason I had been put on that track at the gas company was tied, at least in part, to my not joining the union when I was hired. This was my first corporate job, so I was pretty naive, I guess, but it taught me an important lesson: Management takes a different view of union members and non-members.
I only worked one more job before embarking on my self-employment path, which I've followed since 1974. In that job, I worked for the county as a mechanic. I joined the union immediately on getting that job, realizing that there was a difference between labor and management. It was an interesting lesson.
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