When I was a lot younger, I used to look on The Union at work as a something akin to a nuclear warhead - its very existence stopped a lot of nonsense even getting started. There were things the bosses would like to have done but the presence of a union acted as an effective deterrent to their muddle-headed nonsense. I think what had set me thinking this way was an incident which happened a few weeks after I started as an office boy at the Glasgow Herald. One of my duties was to file a bunch of newspapers on some hangers dangling at waist-height. This involved working on my knees. When one of my knees started to hurt badly, I didn't immediately make the connection. But eventually, I had to see a doctor. I had a case of prepatellar bursitus: better known as housemaid's knee, though at the time Glasgow Herald copyboys and coal miners were the most likely workers in Scotland to go down with it, there being very few housemaids around. Anyway, I had to take a few days off work. A week or two later, those days were docked from my pay. It was explained to me that as a new employee, I was not entitled to sick pay. I decided to keep my mouth shut. Any employer that could inflict an industrial injury and then dock someone's pay for taking time off to recover from it was capable of anything. I wanted to keep my job. Now, decades later, it can be told. But I cannot help feeling that if I had been in the union, the management wouldn't have dreamed of docking my pay.