fairness or control?

i just got home from the union hall where we voted on a contract proposal for the upcoming year...the company and the union held two days of negotiations earlier in the month ...not much to talk about really..we all know how the economy is doing...two days was doubtlessly enough time...the vote was scheduled for today..okay...things to print...stories to get straight...but what irritated the hell out of me was the secretiveness the union behaved toward the rank and file with...they told the negotiating committee to keep quiet, and they did...leaving everyone to speculate about what was in the proposal...so why do i pay these guys to represent me? so they can keep secrets about something that impacts my future? i asked one of the business agents why all the secrecy and he fed me a line of bullshit about how he thought that it was fair if everyone heard the proposal at the same time ( this in itself was bunk...not everyone in the bargaining unit came to the meeting, so everyone did not hear it at the same time...others will hear what went on filtered through the biases of the tellers...the acceptance was not unanimous...i suppose there was a quorum...but only just...another hole in his explaination) and he illustrated his point with a story about a contract they negotiated for installers ( we are an industrial production group) he said that people on that negotiating committee talked and all sorts of rumors started and he had a hundred people walking into the ratification vote saying thay were voting against it because that all had the wrong numbers...at which point i thought that if these bozos had been upfront with their installers from the beginning and had been a bit transparent instead of secretive the installers would have had the real numbers involved in the contract and there would have been no misconceptions...so is it about fairness or controlling events? if you walk into a meeting, discuss the terms for five minutes and call for a vote who has time to digest the implications and ponder possible outcomes? it's all about controlling the outcome and getting through the process while investing as little time in return for dues as possible...john r. commons business unionism...cost-effective representation as viewed from the supply side ...members=dues=assets...negotiations=debits=loss...they simply have more in common with management than with rank-and-file...craft union philosopphy is irrelevant to industrial workers