I worked in a public university office for a while in college. Without involving the unions, we couldn't

- move furniture that didn't have wheels (so no moving of desks, side-tables, or even some of the larger waiting-room-style chairs). We were allowed to install wheels on furniture ourselves and then move it however :)

- hang pictures or anything on the wall (except when using that blue tacky stuff; you'd be surprised what you can hang with massive quantities of tacky)

- plug in a new power-strip, surge-protector, or extension-cord (we quickly learned to get the big 20-outlet strips)

- set up any kind of networking equipment, even if it was air-gapped from the university's network (we violated this all the time)

- plug in anything that drew more than a certain number of amps (an amperage level that was quite close to what many tower desktop computers were drawing at the time; we always just risked that)

Union workers were always prompt and polite when we'd ask them to do these things and they always had a "ya we know it's dumb" attitude about these requests. One time I saw the bill for the services: around $50 to plug in a surge-protector (that we provided) and $100 to nail a framed picture into the wall. The fine for not getting the union to do these jobs was something like 10x the cost of the labor iirc.

I'm curious how some unions devolve into this sort of behavior. The incentive is obvious, but I wonder if there's an organizational solution that would counter these outcomes.

On the bright side, at least you know your electricians weren't being exploited :)

> I'm curious how some unions devolve into this sort of behavior.

Well, actually there's a logical reason why only the union workers were allowed to do the mentioned things (tl;dr: company/university wants to shield themselves from liability):

- move furniture: shield the university from injury claims in case something goes wrong. For example, consider you moving a yuge chair around wearing flip-flops and you accidentally crush your toe during lifting. The university can now deny your claim as you were not supposed to have done this. In the crazy US system with its even crazier damage payouts, I wonder why this isn't commonplace.

- hang stuff on walls: the older the building, the bigger the chance that you'll hit some live wire, a water pipe or whatever is buried in the wall. Plus, again, personal injury claim risk.

- set up networking equipment: all it takes to bring the network to a grinding halt is accidentally connecting that router you planned to use for playing Counterstrike to the university network and whoops, where's that extra DHCP daemon coming from?

- amperage limit for devices: older circuit breakers tend to get a bit... trigger happy with age. Which means what will work fine now may be too much (especially surge) load in a couple of years and these issues are tricky to debug. In addition, I have seen a wild variation of power cables and extension cords when it comes to their current capacity (e.g. there exist power cords with 3x 0.75mm2 wire, these are rated for 2.5A tops aka something around 550W - but what if the component uses 800W?). Having someone trained look at all involved components before plugging them in can and will prevent fires. Not only to check if they're safe from an amperage limit, but also to check if their isolation is broken, there are scarred areas from arcing, ...

Ya it's all exactly this. The rationale for all these things seemed somewhat sane, but in practice they ended up being irrational when applied in the extreme. It's totally CYA stuff that's typical in public/government settings.

RE the wall they also said that nails and tape were also damaging to the paint (and repainting the walls was another union's thing), so the wall-hanging guy would have to log the "damage" to the wall caused by the hung item, presumably for cost/accounting purposes when it came time to repaint the wall.

> It's totally CYA stuff that's typical in public/government settings.

That CYA stuff is actually typical for any company that ever gets hit with a personal injury or other expensive lawsuit. It's pervasive in government/bigco's because they had to deal with decades of every imaginable stuff happening.

If you want to get rid of it, you gotta limit personal injury liability (which would border on being inhumane) or develop a decent social safety net with proper insurances...

> It's pervasive in government/bigco's because they had to deal with decades of every imaginable stuff happening.

This is important: big orgs—government and private—not only have more chance of having an incident (because they deal with more events because of their scale), they are often bigger litigation targets when an event occurs, because they are giant bags of money.

Those make sense... except the hanging stuff on walls is a stretch. You'd have to use a 6" nail to manage to hit a wire or pipe behind the wall. Most likely, they just don't want lots of little holes in the walls.

A person without knowledge of what is inside of a wall or why it could be a problem may indeed try to use a 6" nail to hang their picture.

There are plenty of people that don't understand(and probably don't want to understand) how things are connected. I doubt they think that the light switch magically turns on the light, or that the water magically comes from the valve attached to the wall, but the method, or desire to know the method, in which those things happen is just not in their world.

> You'd have to use a 6" nail to manage to hit a wire or pipe behind the wall

Nope. There's a type of wire called "Stegleitung", essentially a flat cable. Often enough it's simply nailed into the wall, then a thin coat of mortar is applied on the wall, and then paint.

Source: zapped myself once by hitting such a cable.

In addition, the usual injury liability is a problem.

> I'm curious how some unions devolve into this sort of behavior.

Distrust—usually well earned—of management is the main way. The incidental items that are mocked are not the issue, the issue is that without an inflexible blanket rule, management will bend any other rule to use people in nominally different job duties to replace union labor.

Also, sometimes, the rules are negotiated in part by unions other than those doing the work, to prevent their covered staff from being compelled to do other kinds of work (and selected against for inability to do so: if lifting heavy items is part of the job duties of, say, someone in a clerical union, then inability to do that well can be used as a hiring, promotional, or termination consideration for such an employee.)

Even in places (as sometimes happens) where orgabized labor and management have good day-to-day relations, there usually is a feeling—with good historical reasons behind it—that the foundation of that good relationship is a “good fences make good neighbors” style solid set of baseline rules around which, where it is important (and the little stuff that is fun to mock isn't that) negotiated exceptions can be made.

I'd wager that somewhere in their organizational past is a burned down building and an appliance connected to the mains with a wire hanger, at which point they decided that nothing is so fool-proof that a sufficient fool cannot be found.

That's not been my experience (in a previous life I did 5-6 shows a year, and was yelled at by union reps more than once for hand-carrying my own materials in). At the shows I did (which included venues like the Cobo Center, various downtown hotels, and other union-heavy shops), the union electrician would wire up an outlet for you, but you were then free to plug in what you wanted (as long as it was UL-listed).

In my country, it's required by law for every employee to have a certificate even for plugging in a toaster. The training is easy though and serves mostly to prevent injuries.

What does the training cover?

"Do not rest your tongue on the plug as you insert it into the wall."

I get that electricity is dangerous, but are there really functioning adults hired by a company that can't be trusted to plug in a simple appliance without a safety briefing first? It seems insulting to their intelligence. Or do they make everybody do this so the one or two absolute morons don't feel bad about being forced to take the "completely basic life skills" course before they're allowed to function at even a very low adult level?

What do they teach you not to do?

Question ever-expanding bureaucracy?

I hope you are not suggesting that that is in any way reasonable.