I may be a bit more to the left than some members but here are two examples of management stupidity from my firefighter days.
Firefighter D (his initial) with 15 years on the job takes the test for lieutenant along with several other applicants, it is a small dept. He places first on the written test, and after the oral examination (3 fire officers from other fire depts) he is still first. Then comes the chief's evaluation (30% of the total) and firefighter D drops to 2nd place. among other things he sees that he has been graded a 2 (out of 3 possible ) for his attendance record. He ahd take ONE sick day in 15 years. (this was back in the early 80s) When he questioned the chief on this the Chief told him that he was saving the score of 3 for someone with a perfect attendance record (no one taking that test had a better record than D). Sure the chief should have some say in who he promotes to be his officers but this reason was just stupid. What message did it send to all the younger, newer firefighters? Don't bother trying to have a good attendance record because the chief will appoint who he wants anyway? At this point that was about all a good attendance record counted for.
The number of sick days we got was pretty generous and you could accumulate from year to year. Some idiots (just like anywhere) used them like extra vacation days but the idea of accumulating them was that if you were injured or got sick long term you had months before your pay stopped. You can't go to work as firefighter with a broken leg for instance like you can with at a desk job.
This bring us the 2nd (maybe 3rd) examples of management stupidity. At some point in contract negotiations the town offered a 500 dollar bonus (almost weeks pay at the time) to anybody who took no sick days for a year (our staffing was such that if more than two or three men were off on a given day they had to fill in with over time, you can't run fire trucks and ambulances short of people). However there were two conditions, 1, it was all or nothing, no 250 dollar payment if you only took one day for example. 2, you had to have the full amount of accumulated sick days possible (which was 120 days) as of Jan 1 of that year. Now this means that no new guy has a chance at this bonus until he had been there 7 years so there was actually little incentive for them. Then there was the case of Captain N (who was a friend of firefighter D) who also had the old school work ethic of his friend and took something like 3-4 days in nearly 20 years. we accumulated sick days at the rate of 1 1/2 days per month. Captain N got sick with the flu one December and missed two days(he had his 120 days in the bank) and so missed the bonus that year. All well and good and no hard feelings. However the next year he took 0 sick days and got no sick day bonus check, when he asked why, it was because he started the year with 119 1/2 days instead of 120. Captain N took 8-10 sick days a year after that til the time he retired and cost the town thousands in over time.
BTW this whole bonus thing was a town proposal in contract talks and the union (I was on the board at the time) told them it wasn't going to work and we told them why but what did we know, we were just a bunch dumb firefighters who ran into burning buildings while they had professional HR people.
We took the offer, at least some of our guys got money.
Management does not have to give the farm away but treat people decent and you will get better productivity out of them, in general. As a union official and most any honest union official will tell you, we spend 90% of our time dealing with or defending 10% of our members. We had some members who deserved to be fired but management was too lazy (or incompetent) to build their case.
In few instances they offered medical retirements to some rather dubious claims just to get rid of problem employees and then complain that medical retirements cost too much.
Sorry for the long post.