An article from the Toronto Star. It probably explains a few of your coworkers (and a lot of management)…..

Madhavi Acharya-Tom Yew, Business Reporter

This will explain a lot.
It turns out that incompetent people are too incompetent to recognize their own incompetence.
Luckily, we don’t just have to take the incompetent people’s word for it – there’s years of rigorous study to back this up.
For more than a decade, David Dunning, a psychologist at Cornell University, has found in his research that it’s “intrinsically difficult to get a sense of what we don’t know.”
Dunning, working with Justin Kruger, a former colleague at Cornell now at New York University, told Life’s Little Mysteries, that in their studies, they give people a short test, tally their scores, then ask the subjects how they think they did.
People who didn’t do well on the test are only slightly less confident about their ability than those who performed well.
And everyone thinks they did better than average – even people who did very poorly on the test.
“People at the bottom still think they’re outperforming other people,” Dunning said.
It doesn’t matter what the test is about – logical reasoning, how to avoid sexually transmitted diseases, grammar, the funniness of jokes.
Even when Dunning and his colleagues offer a $100 reward to those who can rate themselves accurately, study participants just can’t do it.
This inherent inability to accurately gauge our own level of knowledge may be an underlying cause of many of society’s ills, including climate change denialism, Dunning said.
“Many people don’t have training in science, and so they may very well misunderstand the science. But because they don’t have the knowledge to evaluate it, they don’t realize how off their evaluations might be,” he said.
Stay tuned. There’s more to come. Dunning’s related interest: “how people bolster their sense of self-worth by carefully tailoring the judgments they make of others,” he writes on the Cornell faculty website.
“That is, people tend to make judgments of others that reflect favorably back on themselves, doing so even when the self is not under explicit scrutiny.”

Well 2012 is upon us, and the new Xstrata payroll system out of Montreal has already affected us locally. Retirees who were supposed to be paid a Bridge payment on January 1st will not receive it until January 12th, due to a “glitch” in the system. Well now, here’s hoping this is the only bump in the road with the new system, although local management has indicated to us it probably will not…….
Happy 2012 to one and all.

What exactly have Unions ever done for us? In a “what have you done for me lately” society, many would say nothing. To many non Union workers who take for granted many of our legislated rights, they may answer the same. Here’s a satirical video that reminds us of some of the things Unions fought for and won in the past (and a reminder of what we are fighting to keep)………
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iObqguaNDdA

You will have to copy and paste the above link in your web browser to watch (sorry)…….

By Carol Mulligan/The Sudbury Star

Updated 9 hours ago

Hundreds of employees at Xstrata Nickel’s Fraser and Nickel Rim South mines were sent home from the job Monday for what the company is calling a “short safety pause” after an increase in safety incidents at the two operations.

Mine Mill Local 598/CAW president Richard Paquin said about 300 workers at Fraser Mine have been told to think about safety for an “indefinite” period of time while the company devises a plan to make the mine safer.

About 250 employees at Nickel Rim South were sent home Monday after sitting through a four-hour safety talk, he said.

While Paquin said he has no problem with Xstrata wanting to draft a plan to make its workplaces safer, the question is whether members will be paid for the unexpected time off.

Union and Xstrata officials began talking Monday night and spent all day Tuesday discussing the issue, said Paquin.

He was waiting to hear from Xstrata on Wednesday about whether it intends to pay members or not. The union has sought legal advice on the matter.