One of the candidates running for President has based his candidacy on union breaking. During my career as a working locksmith I discovered the power of unions. A hotel in Chicago wanted to have their key-operated hotel room locks converted to card access. There were 400 rooms in the hotel. I contacted the hotel maintenance supervisor and asked if I could inspect the hotel room doors in order to make a bid on the job. The supervisor asked if I was a union member. Since I was not a union member the supervisor would not let me come into his building.
A solution to the problem might have been to make our locksmith business a unionized shop. The carpenter pay scale at the time would have required me to triple my normal hourly charge in order to both pay my employees hourly union wages and to contribute the required amounts to a union pension fund. While I may have won the hotel job, it would have been impossible to compete with other non-union locksmith businesses for routine daily jobs. Our shop never became unionized.
At an otherwise lackluster ALOA convention in Reno, it was easy to notice all of the locksmiths who were wearing orange sport shirts. While a majority of locksmiths decided not to spend money travelling to an out-of-the-way location like Reno, the franchise people in orange came en masse to ALOA. Maybe working together has its virtues. Tim O’Leary, our technical writer, discovered another new locksmith franchise group called Flying Locksmiths.
Think of almost any other service field and you will find small businesses which are connected to just one manufacturer. Whether its car dealers, plumbers or lawn equipment stores, they all usually specialize in sales and service for one product line.
While unionizing and big pensions may be out of the question, locksmiths working together on some level will guarantee the future growth of this industry. Somewhere out there should be a manufacturer or distributor willing to step up and organize a rugged group of individuals into a cohesive force.
