> 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.
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, ...