Posted on 02/21/2011 4:11:51 AM PST by Scanian
The organized tactics of intimidation by the public employee unions in Wisconsin last week came as no surprise to me. I'm from New York, one of the most union-friendly states in the country, and I've seen the negative effects of unions my entire life.
I dislike unions. But I didn't always feel that way. My first job as a 16-year old grocery store shelf-stocker was a union job. I grew up in a union household; my father was an employee of one of the Big Three automakers. Although he wasn't active in union politics, he worked in a "union shop" and was required to be a member. He always credited the union for the standard of living and benefits he enjoyed. When I was in grade school, the social studies curriculum taught the evils of management and the glory of organized labor, with morality tales like the Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1911. Management had locked the doors to prevent non-unionized employees from leaving; when the place caught fire, workers were forced to jump to their deaths or be burned alive. Who could argue against the progress unions had made in safety and wages? In our blue-collar universe, there was one simple explanation for everything: management bad, unions good.
The industrial economy of Western New York imploded in the 1980s with the closing of the Bethlehem Steel plant in Lackawanna, which had once employed over 20,000 people. I'd heard stories about union people who worked in the steel mill or the auto plants who would punch the clock and than find a place to sleep all day, or would get drunk at lunchtime and return to work and still not get fired
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
All it took for me to realize unions were not good, was to see how they treat people who do not want to join.
Seeing the antics of union members on the streets participating in protests solidified that perception.
“..I once was blind but now I see....”
To me they represented a hammer in the mafia tool box... these days they are more likely in a communist tool box.
LLS
Bump
Paying union members not to work is by the same politics that pays farmers not to plant.
I was threatened by union thugs when I was still a teenager in high school, barely old enough to work part time. I have hated unions ever since then, with that emotion growing as I learned that bullying young children is entirely in keeping for union enforcers and not just an isolated aberration.
This man’s childhood reads like my own. Grew up in a union household. My father was the union shop rep. My grandfathers and great grandfathers all worked in the Steel Mills, all in the union. My Great Grandfather was a union leader (union secretary) at the turn of the century. Back when it was real dangerous. Of course I grew up, union good, management evil. As an adult, the scales slowly fell from my eyes...
A worker was on our office floor one day trying to maneuver a 4x8 foot display board around a corner, and I could see he was having a very difficult time, so I got up out of my desk and said, :hear let me help you and lifted a corner and swung the tail end around for him. All of a sudden, I her “Hey! What the hell do you think you are doing?” – turning around I see a Shop Steward red-faced and firing more angry words at me for daring to lay my non-union hands on a job they do. If he would have seen me spray painting his car, I don’t think he would have been any more angry. It was a real eye-opener.
I hear ya.
My first brush with unions came when I was about eighteen. I obtained a part time job as a box-boy at the local market. Nobody told me I had to join the union when I signed up. I was already working when I found out.
For some reason a guy several years my senior didn’t like me. I think it had something to do with the cashier ladies who did. Poor guy couldn’t take it.
At any rate, I decided it wasn’t worth dealing with the bonehead or the union, and I walked...
My folks introduced me to information regarding union activity when I was a young kid. I realized the mob quotient, and the tendency for the unions to bully people. That didn’t sit well with me, and I didn’t want any part of that.
It’s too bad that unions are so negative in our nation. There are times when I think employees should have representation. Sadly, it just turns out to be the death knell to business IMO.
Par for the course.
I used to get that same crap if I ever touched any machinery or materials when I was a supervisor in a union shop 30 years ago. Solution? If something had to get done, I’d just do it when nobody was looking. (It usually involved heavy lifting and all those rough, tough union types would invariably start whining about “bad backs”)
They used to love to “grieve” me but that was hard to do with no witnesses.
My brother-in-law, God love him, worked for Ford, and would go on drunken benders and be AWOL for days.
The union protected him every single time. He should have been fired.
“(neighbor) worked “under the table” all winter doing side jobs tax-free while collecting unemployment. In the summer when he did union work he’d tell stories about the roofers getting drunk and stoned at lunchtime and making $22 an hour.
That really frosted me. Why in hell was I bothering to get a postgraduate degree while a semiliterate guy who barely made it through high school got $400 a week for not working half the year?”
Good question, Mr. Galt. Why were you working for a degree while in the same building a semi-drunken, cash-flush, union cretin was showing you the way regulated urban capitalism really works?
"People of the same trade seldom meet together even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public or some contrivance to raise prices." - Adam Smith
That quote by Smith is usually cited against businesses colluding - but it describes unions to a "T".
I agree....But I seem to remember this little thing called “shop talk” from my foreman days.
That was the blanket excuse the NLRB and the courts gave for most anything union goons said or conspired when they got together.
40 years in a god forsaken communist “Comunications Workers of America” union.
I tried to get out but it ‘s state law.(wisconsin)
The membership doesn’t know the leadeship is progressive (communist). If they do they are commie also.
Sux donit?
"he'd get $400 a week in unemployment. It seems that in our state union employees didn't have to look for non-union work. If the union didn't call, the unemployment check was a certainty. But the phone stayed off the hook all winter to make sure the union couldn't call anyway. He wasn't idle, though; he worked "under the table" all winter doing side jobs tax-free while collecting unemployment."
Gaming the system and milking the taxpayer is fast becoming a cultural thing in this country and this mentality is more of a problem the then the Unions themselves.
Here is an example: I know a woman on welfare, who's husband was at the time, making $50,000+ a year. They had one kid with another on the way and she was working a $20,000 a year job for a combined income of $70,000 a year.
So how is this family on welfare? The husband is working for cash money that doesn't get reported and so it looks like they are supporting a family for $20,000. They are proud of this and are quick to brag about it. It is a cultural thing for them and its spreading like wildfire as more and more people feel they are "entitled" to other peoples money!!
“Paying union members not to work is by the same politics that pays farmers not to plant.”
Not exactly; part of the logic in paying not to plant involves crop rotation to allow soil to recover as well as ensuring the existence of farms instead of developments in case of an emergency. We will never have to import food; we probably have never had to in our history. On the other hand, wherever there is a crisis in the world, you’ll find American produce being sent as aid.
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