A union leader Godwinizes a rally in New Jersey, right out of the gate.
[Friday morning update]
It’s hard to get good goons these days:
When people who are used to dealing with cave-ins, or ladles of molten metal, hit the streets, they’re putting those traits to work in an environment that’s probably less dangerous than the one they work in every day. That makes them pretty formidable.
In fact, it made them so formidable that they were able to put together unions solid enough to send the industries they depended on overseas, where labor was more tractable, because the bosses weren’t willing to face the headache of trying to get rid of the unions, and couldn’t afford to pay the wages the unions, with their toughness, had managed to extract.
But miners and steelworkers are one thing. When the public employees of, say, Wisconsin hit the streets, it looked more like a bunch of disgruntled DMV clerks and graduate teaching assistants, because, well, that’s what it was.
Though they displayed more creativity in signage than you might expect from steelworkers, overall, they brought pretty much the same work habits to their protests that they bring to their jobs. (Sleeping in the capitol? Pretty much what they do at the office.)
America’s DMV clerks aren’t known for toughness and dedication on the job, and it would be asking a lot to expect them to display such characteristics for the first time when they’re off the job.
As the author of the editorial would say in other contexts, heh.
I wish cowards like him really would start WWIII. Eliminating him and others like him would solve most of our nation’s problems.
Strange that the media doesn’t cover calls for revolution from the unionistas. Must not be time, takes a lot of manpower to go through Palin’s emails.
Yet another sign of the irrelevance of private-sector unions. Invoking the bogeyman of seventy years ago is only going to fire up the graybeards. For all the twentysomethings care, he might as well have called Christie a carpetbagger or Know Nothing.
Dog-bites-man story.
I guess that makes the dog a German shepherd.
“he might as well have called Christie a carpetbagger or Know Nothing.”
Then we can accurately refer to the Dems as Copperheads and their union goons as Wobblies.
What do you guys (and Andrea) around here do for a living? Are you all entrepreneurs? Independent contractors? This is a space-oriented blog — anyone around here have an Engineering education? Anyone here work for a Fortune 500 company? Anyone work in the public sector — teacher, college faculty, research lab? Any connection to government contracts?
I work as a research engineer and at different times have been an entrepreneur as well as employed in the public sector, worked for a Fortune 500 company, and for a small business. One thing my momma told me was something to the effect that as an engineer, I have an education credential, one acquired perhaps by more time and effort than other college degrees, and a person in my position may fancy myself as part of an elite. I was told, however, not to fool myself that I was above and beyond what the unions were about. Especially at that Fortune 500 company, the union contracts on wages and benefits elevated my compensation — they could not pay me less than the union guy because, hey, why would a person ever sweat to go through engineering school?
A few months ago, walking through the Chamberlain Physics building on the way to the Physics Library to try and hack Lagrangian Mechanics, I saw a poster on the union bulletin board with Richard Trumka’s smiling face, offering up the daily dose of union propaganda, pretty much saying the same thing my Momma said, that unions not only stand for their members but for the whole middle class, that is, people who derive their financial support from their employment and make enough money to lead comfortable but not lavish lives. I thought to myself (about Mr. Trumka), “What a tool, and what a bunch of propaganda!”
And that was weeks before a certain mid-state Governor announced that my compensation was being cut by 8 percent, talking in Newspeak that it wasn’t a cut but some kind of benefits package redeployment.
I suppose someone around here will chime in that in today’s economy I should consider myself lucky to have a benefits package at all let alone a job, and you get-no-sympathy-from-me-pal. And you are right. Of the few people I still know about from college, I believe I am the only one still working – those who were in the higher-paying industrial positions are all in early retirement by now. The Governor spoke of how I and others were now put on a somewhat more even footing with the private sector, and given the bloodletting in the private sector, it may have been wishful thinking public sector people would not see the same thing.
I can accept a minor reduction in my pay if it can help keep the State solvent and I think so can a lot of other people. But I could have also told you that going after Collective Bargaining is a Bridge Too Far (is that a Godwin analogy because it invokes WW-II?), and I don’t even belong to a union, and I haven’t been anywhere near the Capitol Square these past months. It is one thing to call for Shared Sacrifice; it is another thing to start acting like George Mortimer Pullman (I will call out the National Guard, but, only if I have to).
But the worst part of this is not the Shared Sacrifice and Necessary Cuts but the kinds of enthusiasms expressed in the Right Blogosphere. Thugs! Leeches and moochers (is that the correct Ayn Randian expression?) Parasites?
You know what, the Left engages in the same thing, chanting The Rich, The Rich, The Evil BOOSH Tax Cuts! The politics of envy and resentment and why should that guy over there have it any better is bad when it comes from the Left, and it is even worse when it comes from the Right. Why? Because the Right is naturally a minority party and we (note I still say we) will make ourselves a slimmer minority if we pursue this path.
Paul, my father was a union carpenter. He served as president of his local and was at a meeting as the local’s business agent when he died. He saw unions as a means for working people to get better salaries and working conditions. To that point, all is well and good. However, there are some problems with unions as well.
One problem is when the unions exert so much power that they bankrupt a company (e.g. GM) and the demand everyone else pay to subsidize their extravagance. What are the limits to their greed and selfishness?
Another problem is when government union employees demand and get compensation far above the private sector taxpayers who pay their salaries and then – as in Wisconsin – throw a hissy fit when elected officials point out that we can no longer pay for the gravy train.
Yet another problem is when people in many states are forced to join unions as a condition of employment whether they want to or not, and are forced to pay union dues that go to support political activity they disagree with.
Still another problem is when the NLRB can tell Boeing where they can and can’t build a factory. I don’t care if Boeing is building that 787 plant in South Carolina in retaliation for the last round of strikes as the union claims. Boeing lost over a billion dollars due to that strike. Do you think there should be no consequences for that?
“But I could have also told you that going after Collective Bargaining is a Bridge Too Far…”
You do understand that one side of the negotiations was contributing to the political funds of the other side?
Larry J:
Yes, your father worked as a carpenter and served as a union officer, but what do you do? Maybe I ask this as a rhetorical question because if you want to keep details of your work history private from this discussion, that is your right and choice. And I am not taking the liberal-left line that because you derive your living from work “why are you a Republican and not one of us?”
But our life and work experiences do shape our political and social outlook. Just speaking hypothetically for now, but maybe the combination of your father’s hard work and the efforts of his union to support wages helped put you through engineering school, and as a person in a technical position with a high degree of responsibility you may feel that you are beyond what the unions are all about and that the union is in fact endangering your livelilhood by threatening to sink your company?
Perhaps some of the union workers on that gravy train in Wisconsin are looking to put their kids through engineering school to advance the next rung up the social ladder? If a union worker wants their kid to get a good education, and lacking the resources for private school and Ivy League college, they are looking to AP Calculus being taught in public high school and perhaps getting their daughter or son into a public university?
Yes, union people famously engage in ill-tempered rhetoric as Rand’s parent post points out. They do this because such rhetoric advances their cause, or maybe it did in the past. But we in the Right blogosphere have turned to our own version of such rhetoric — goon, thug, parasite. Are we drawing a boundary around this rhetoric? Maybe we mean that only the protest organizers and maybe college professors in disciplines such as, dunno, Womens Studies fit those labels and we don’t mean it apply to professors in the College of Engineering or Department of Computer Science who work for the State of Wisconsin? Is this like “The Rich” doesn’t mean (families) making less then 250K (individuals less than 150K)?
And what about those Reagan Democrats, many of them union people but conservative on the social issues and perhaps skeptical of their union leadership? Are they among the goons, thugs, slackers, parasites, leeches (did I leave out moochers)? Is the current Right blogosphere rhetoric going to support them in their skepticism of their unions (the 787 plant being denied South Carolina, the forced dues, the political support for a pro-abortion political party)? Or is it going to drive them back into the liberal-Democrat-union camp?
In 2011, labor unions are corporations too — and they treat their employees the same way they claim Big Business wants to treat their members.
And God help you if you want to organize the administrative staff of a union into a union against them — they’ll bust you like nobody’s business.
““But I could have also told you that going after Collective Bargaining is a Bridge Too Far…”
You do understand that one side of the negotiations was contributing to the political funds of the other side?”
That is perhaps one of the advantages of advanced education: the ability to understand metaphors.
To the degree that I am perhaps unaware that unions and especially public employee unions help Democrats, perhaps others (not you Bill Maron!) may be unaware of the history behind Operation Market-Garden.
Operation Market-Garden was a British (of course) idea to bring the war against Germany to a quick conclusion. The operation was based on using masses of airborne troops to capture a string of bridges in Holland (Holland being one massive river delta, which accounts for many features of its history, and it has many bridges). The British paratroop division (yes, an entire divison) that was dropped at the last bridge was surprised by a German tank corps, that happened to be on R&R at that town. The main body of Allied forces were never able to relieve the paratroopers at that last bridge who were subsequently taken prisoner, causing the entire operation to collapse and hence prolong the war against Germany from a 1944 conclusion into 1945.
Asked about the failure of this bold but risky operation, in stereotypical understatement, a British general remarked that the operation was “a bridge too far.” In other words, if they didn’t have to capture and hold that last bridge, they may have pulled it off and achieved a spectacular victory over Germany, but then again, a mass operation that could be defeated by such a single-point failure was probably a stupid idea to begin with.
This thread is how a union leader has Godwinized Chris Christie. Does anyone here even “get” that when I call Scott Walker’s agenda “A Bridge Too Far” I am Godwinizing the unions (i.e. the liberal-Democrat-union axis) as being the WW-II Germans? And that I am anti-Godwinizing Scott Walker as being Bernard Montgomery, that is, on the Allied side but someone who is bold but maybe too arrogant to listen to any voices of caution?
And do you suppose that I am suggesting that the Conservative Movement is on a path for Conservative (not simply Republican but solid Conservative-Libertarian-Tea Party) control over the Presidency and both houses of Congress in the 2012 election. But that the 2010 election did the same thing on a smaller scale here in the State of Wisconsin. And like Operation Market-Garden, the Walker Agenda is what Liddell Hart would have called a Direct Approach? And that tactically speaking, the Direct Approach has the disadvantage of telgraphing one’s intentions to the opposition, giving them the warning and means to stiffen their resistance?
And that the cakewalk everone expects in 2012 will turn into a Charlie Foxtrot by the time the Right Blogosphere is through with their idea of prepping the battlespace?
I’m with Larry this time.
My grandfather was a truck driver who fought for the Teamsters Union back in the 20’s and 30’s.
I learned about unions from him, and he always taught us that the unions were getting TOO much power. He taught us that the companies would eventually over price their products, piss off the customers and the unions and companies would wind up in financial trouble because of their combined greed. He said someone would step in with a cheaper product. And all this from a guy with a 6th Grade Education!
Pop said the unions had ceased looking for a ‘decent’ wage and ‘SOME’ guarantee of employment and had begun to see themselves as ‘indispensable’ to the companies. His next line used to send my Grandmother over the edge because of his language, ‘…how the hell is some dumb SOB who drives a truck or drives a screw, indispensable! Any retard can be taught to do that!!” And all this from a guy with a 6th Grade Education!
I don’t really think he was saying he equated his past jobs with being sub-intelligent, he simply saw it for what it was, non-skilled for the most part. Working on the line at GM or driving a truck is NOT skilled labor. And I used to drive a truck, so back off me saying it wasn’t exactly brain surgery!!
Paul, I have no idea where you work, but the GM thing was a bad analogy. It’s been that a number of years ago, 32 to be exact, that I read that ‘many’ of the UAW guys WERE making more than the GM engineers. It seems to me that it was back when we bailed out Chrysler, and why they were talking about GM I have NO idea. Just to make the point, I expect, that it was industry wide.
I can’t imagine that the unions have backed down much since then on pay or bennies.
I’ve worked in, around and with engineers over the years. I don’t ever remember them making the kind of bucks the UAW guys are said to be making. I’ve got a buddy who grew up in WV, his dad was a coal miner. It was a mark of pride when his father bragged to me that he made more DIGGING coal, than the engineers who planned the mine.
I don’t begrudge anyone their pay. But at the point where the union guys lose sight of the fact that they endanger their own future, for a pay raise today, they deserve what they get. It falls into the same categories as people who buy on credit to me to have a better lifestyle today.
Stupid and shortsighted.
Paul,
Cry me a river….
So you are OK with making a few cosmetic changes to your already overstuffed benefit package (like actually paying for some of it!), but when push comes to shove, you still want to make sure that the negotiations are rigged from the start? The arguments against public sector unions center around the impossibility of honest negotiations when the unions can vote out (and bribe) the negotiators on the other side of the table, not whether or not the workers are slackers, etc. If you don’t change the nature of the collective bargaining (or better still, simply eliminate the public sector unions, which should have never been allowed in the first place), no amount of fiddling at the margins of benefit packages will fix the underlying problem. Like it or not, that is the core of the problem, and any attempt to present it otherwise is simply ignorant or openly dishonest.
As for the workers being moochers or parasites, any long term exposure to most government workers (and lets be very clear about this, the largest fraction/faction by far are unionized teachers) richly deserve their lousy reputation. If we cannot win over these people with reasoned arguments about the overall problem that we are facing (and judging from the response to even the fairly modest changes being made in several midwest states, we aren’t going to), then it makes little sense to spare their delicate feelings by failing to call a spade a spade….
“So you are OK with making a few cosmetic changes to your already overstuffed benefit package (like actually paying for some of it!), but when push comes to shove, you still want to make sure that the negotiations are rigged from the start? ”
What the rollback of Collective Bargaining seems to be telling me is that the 8 percent cut in my take-home pay is just the first round and that much deeper cuts are in the works. So, f1b0nacc1, what you are saying runs counter to what the Governor is telling State employees but pretty much confirms the darkest suspicions of everyone in public-sector employment here in the State of Wisconsin. If this adjustments in the benefits plan fixes the budget, why take on Collective Bargaining? If the adjustment in benefits doesn’t fix the budget long term and Collective Bargaining needs to go, then much deeper cuts are in the works, not just for the union people but for everybody.
The other thing about those public school teachers and their overstuffed benefits, there are teachers employed all throughout the State, especially in the small towns. And many of these teachers (and also nurses and other health care workers) are married to farmers and small contractors and other self-employed in these small towns, and the public education benefit plan is the only way many farmers and small business people have access to health insurance.
Are these farmers and business people going to share in the deserved lousy reputation of public employees? In addition to giving up on getting the votes of school teachers, are we willing to give up the votes of farmers and the rural self employed?
Since I earned my engineering degree, I’ve always worked for Fortune 500 companies. I’ve even consulted to Fortune 50 companies. But I live in a state that is still somewhat prosperous and has low cost for standard of living. I also live in a right to work state.
Now, I know that my income isn’t as high as it would be if I went to work in California, New York, DC, or Illinois. However, they don’t call the homes I can purchase in Texas “McMansions” for nothing. I don’t need a high income, because all incomes are somewhat lower, including unions. These lower incomes keeps the prices of all goods and services down. These lower costs make my state my competitive in the interstate and international markets. In turn, we stay more prosperous than other states.
And yeah, I can still afford (and have) expensive cars, big screen TVs, high speed
railinternet, and can go out to eat at nice restaurants much of the week. I’m not missing out on anything. Neither are most of my neighbors, most of whom have blue collar jobs for companies that are neither Fortune 500 or unionized.Der Schtumpy, a sixth grade education used to amount to something. At minimum reading, writing, and enough math to balance a checkbook.
I’ve no objection to private-sector unions at all. They serve as a very useful counterweight to management’s ability to speak with one voice, greater access to capital, and ability to collude with other firms. Go unions!
There’s no ultimate danger there because there is a natural corrective to union greed, which is economic reality. The UAW drove GM out of business, I believe. The fat wages and benefits enjoyed by UAW workers in the 60s through 80s caused their grandsons to have to emigrate to Tennessee and work for Toyota at non-union wages, and start all over again. It killed Detroit and made it impossible for them to leave their children a cleaner, happier, wealthier home town. Penny wise, pound foolish.
Hopefully the grandsons will learn the lesson and be moderate in their demands. But if not — the same opportunity will be given to their grandsons to learn from bitter experience.
But government unions are another story entirely, because the same corrective does not exist. The absurd demands of the prison guard’s union in California can’t drive California out of business and leave the prison guard’s grandson in the same sadder but wiser place as the UAW worker’s grandson.
So government unions are evil and should be exterminated.
Also, Paul, all of your arguments are unreasonable, because they rely on only what is seen. You have not considered all that is unseen, to paraphrase Bastiat. Unions provide better wages for some at the cost of poorer wages for others. Or reduced services. Or less investment. Foregone inventions, missed opportunities, and so on.
On balance how does this work out? That’s the question. But you’ll never come close to answering it as long as you do not acknowledge and study the costs for the benefits you describe. TANSTAAFL.
Ah, right, since you asked: one grandfather was a steel man who worked for Bethlehem from ages 17 to 62. The other became a physician on the GI bill after serving in the Pacific during the Big One. He made house calls with his little black bag. Pop was also a physician, but mostly worked for the VA. I was the first to go to graduate school and become one of them fancy scientist types, but my sister kept the family tradition by becoming a surgeon.
I’ve never belonged to a union in my life, but I haven’t felt a big need to, either, since my skills are valuable on an individual basis, and that means I’ve always been able to negotiate the compensation I want and the market will bear individually. I can understand how this doesn’t work well for people who are only valuable collectively — GM doesn’t care about one of 2,000 lineworkers, only about all 2,000 at once. That’s a place for a union, sure. But my impression is that the direction technology is taking us is towards my situation: every man his own entrepreneur, able to negotiate directly with an employer. Fewer and fewer situations where a man is just one of several thousand essentially interchangeable cogs.
Paul, I don’t belong to a union and likely never will. I did joke that after Obama gave all those exemptions to unions for ObamaCare, maybe we should form a union. It was good for a laugh but that’s it.
People have the right to free association under the First Amendment. However, compulsary union membership seems to fly in the face of that. Why should an organization have the legal ability to force people to not only join but to pay it money? Why are unions trying to do away with secret ballots for elections on joining a unon? All of that seems unamerican to me.
Wisconsin public employees are upset about having to pay a small percentage of their income for their benefits. Boo freaking hoo. In the past 2 years, I’ve not only had a 20% reduction in my income but the cost of my benefits has gone up as well. On top of that, the Obama administration pushed a “Contractor to Civilian” program to poach employees from my company while cutting their salaries.
Even FDR knew that public employee unions were against the national interest. The Wisconsin public employees are complaining that the state’s voters elected people who promised to get government spending under control and one of the things they did was address an inflated government payroll. The union members who are protesting are demanding that the state’s taxpayers keep giving them ever increasing amounts of money to maintain them in the manner to which they’ve become accustomed. The majority of the voters are finally balking at the union demands and saying that enough is enough. Elections have consequences. The protesters are saying that elections be damned, they want more and will keep protesting until they get it. Their greed has no limits. If it were up to me, I’d fire a lot of them.
It isn’t the taxpayers’ responsibility to see to it that the public employees can send their children to college or to enjoy a lavish retirement. They should have to provide for themselves like the rest of us have to do. I refuse to be forced to eat dog food in retirement so some government employees can enjoy steak.
Leland, I hate you. I’m looking at a modest 3BR house on barely a quarter acre in a tolerably nice low-crime neighborhood with moderately competent (for California) public schools. Want to know the asking price? $680,000. And it’s only that “low” because of the real-estate crash: two years ago it was on the market for over $800,000.
Paul,
Your whining about an 8% take-home cut, which is actually merely requiring you to actually pay some of your own health care costs, instead of getting a free ride, doesn’t garner much sympathy among people who are paying 20% of their healthcare premiums, before factoring in copays and multithousand deductibles for major medical. From where I sit, you’re complaining that you have to live like everyone else. (Well, obviously, everyone else, who’s still working, and who has a job that actually _provides_ meaningful healthcare coverage.)
I understood your point perfectly. I thought you were wrong. I also understand that not eliminating CB now will leave the next Dem gov to “give back” the “give back”. Which is why I asked you the question I did. I’ll ask this one, if not now, when?
Paul,
apparently my reading comprehension is somewhat lacking, so I take back whatever I said that’s incorrect.
Hey Carl, I already have a mortgage for a 4 bedroom/2.5 bath/2 car garage with less than 6 figures left to pay. Only crime in the neighborhood is the raccoons that occassionally get in the trash.
When I worked for Visa, I stayed with a college buddy in Redwood City. His rent for a 2 bedroom apartment was twice my house note (including property taxes and home insurance with flood and wind). Then again, that was the height of the dot com run. I’m sure the rent went down…
Paul,
The entire point about removing CB for Public Sector workers has been made far better than I can by Carl (big surprise!), and to suggest that Walker was doing this just to close a temporary budget gap (when in fact the entire argument has been made in long-term actuarial terms) is unworthy of you. If this is your darkest fear, congrats…it will only get better from here.
As for the spouses, etc. of Public Sector Employees (PSEs) , this isn’t about punishing them (though some punishment for the DMV folks might be a good idea), it is about removing an imbalance that distorts the marketplace, and contributes to unsustainable levels of government spending that will eventually destroy all of us. If the Greek example isn’t good enough for you, there is little that I can do to improve upon it.
Will we lose some of those votes? Certainly….and that is unfortunate, but if the price of those votes is buying into a corrupt and ultimately self-destructive system, then we are better off without them. The GOP has been complicit in the grotesque spending orgy that has brought us to this juncture, and simply because the Dems are even worse (hard to imagine that, eh?), does not mean that we should vote for the GOP absent some sort of comittment to walk back the cost of government. If the GOP (or anyone else) won’t do this, then why, exactly, should we vote for them?
Finally, nobody forces anyone to be a PSE. Some are excellent, most are wastes of carbon that might otherwise be used for topsoil. The argument that we should be paying outrageous salaries and benefits to individuals who have been unable to provide even a modest return on investment escapes me entirely. Most PSEs make far more than the equivilent private sector worker (some highly skilled positions are the exceptions here, but even then…), and judging by results, they are worse far less. To throw in the corrupt CB system on top of the gold-plated everything is simply making a bad situation worse, and largely unchangeable. This is what Walker is addressing.
That’s right, Leland, rub it in. You know St. Peter is going to hold this against you later on, right? Hmph.
I didn’t read Paul’s stuff (tl;dr) though I gather he’s in favor of unions or something? And he asked me what I do for a living. Well. I’m not sure I’d call what I’m doing “for a living” though it keeps gas in my car (and not much more). I work as a part time office temp. And if I was told I had to join a union and pay dues out of my tiny paycheck I’d reply “F*** you” and quit. Fortunately Virginia is a right-to-work state. And no — I don’t have benefits. I can’t afford insurance on my tiny part-time pay. On the other hand, I stayed in a lot of my previous jobs way too long (when I could have been a little more adventurous and moved on) because everyone kept telling me “but– your benefits!” Most of which I never used. Let’s just say I’ve changed my philosophy and decided not to chain the rest of my existence to so-called “benefits.”
Carl, you ever thought about moving out here to the beautiful 908xx’s? For that money, you can get two 3BR’s right next to each other and have enough left over to make your own cinderblock wall — just wrap them up together for your own exclusive hood like in the OC…
“America’s DMV clerks aren’t known for toughness and dedication on the job, and it would be asking a lot to expect them to display such characteristics for the first time when they’re off the job.”
On the contrary, the protesters were very dedicated. They protested every day for over a month. They went to people’s homes to protest. They sent threatening letters to businesses that had donated to Republicans and started boycotts. They ripped up recall petitions for Democrats. When the capitol was closed, they were so dedicated they broke doors and windows in an effort to gain access. The true sign of their dedication was the massive amount of death threats delivered to their political opponents.
The funding crisis facing most states comes from government worker pensions and health care benefits, Medicare, and Medicaid.
Changing benefit plans to a pay as you go system like a 401k would solve the long term problem of unsustainable pension plans. It wouldn’t be very nice to mess around with current retirees. So in the short term, states would have to find other solutions to find the funding.
Medicare and Medicaid costs will be going up for all states because Obamacare shifts more of the costs for those programs onto states. Good luck to a single state trying to change either of those programs.
Paul Milenkovic Says:
“What do you guys (and Andrea) around here do for a living?”
I am a Computer scientist working for the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory on the ACIS instrument OPS team of the Chandra Orbiting Observatory.
“Are you all entrepreneurs? Independent contractors?”
I run a side business making replica period Nautical navigational instruments for museums, sailing ships and individuals who want to buy that stuff.
” This is a space-oriented blog — anyone around here have an Engineering education?”
I have a Bachelors in Aerospace Engineering
Bachelors in Computer Science in Engineering
Masters In Computer Science.
” Anyone here work for a Fortune 500 company? ”
I used to work for Pratt & Whitney Aircraft and Hamilton Standard – all part of United Technologies.
“Anyone work in the public sector — teacher, college faculty, research lab? ”
I taught computer programming at a technical school. SAO is a kind of research lab.
“Any connection to government contracts?”
All my working life.
So what’s your point? I’vee benefitted from union deals as a white collar engineer – when the Union gets a day off I got the day off. So what?
What’s all this got to do with the politics of envy? If the Right is a minority party it’s because (in my opinion):
1) They stray
2) They are lousy as communicating the Conservative Proposition
3) Lots of people are suckered by the “something for nothing” promise (see #2). At least until it comes crashing down around their ankles.
Der Schtumpy Says:
“I learned about unions from him, and he always taught us that the unions were getting TOO much power…….
Pop said the unions had ceased looking for a ‘decent’ wage and ‘SOME’ guarantee of employment and had begun to see themselves as ‘indispensable’ to the companies. ”
Unions are no different than a government entity or a business: they want to increase their power and, because of human nature, will do it almost any way they can get away with.
Carl Pham Says:
“I’ve no objection to private-sector unions at all. They serve as a very useful counterweight to management’s ability to speak with one voice, greater access to capital, and ability to collude with other firms. Go unions!”
For the most part I agree with this and your concern about government unions.
However regarding the private unions I sometimes wonder if the union should be able to cover multiple instances of an industry. Meaning, the UAW can choose to strike, Chrysler, and/or GM, and/or Ford.
I sometimes wonder if unions should be limited to a company level:
Chrysler auto workers can create a Chrysler AW union and do anything they want (legally) to Chrysler, protect the employees. But not to Ford.