Unions Must Go

Jan Morgan ^ | 11.16.2012 | Jan Morgan

[Morgana]

What unions are doing in America today, not only to the companies but to the workers they supposedly represent, is unconscionable. It’s sad that a majority of their own members can’t or refuse to see that these unions are not truly on their side and in fact have done much to destroy capitalism. Unions have become the people they were originally formed to oppose.

Unions are a socialist concept. The whole concept of unions pits management against the workers. The assumption is that management is an evil force whose sole purpose is the abuse of the worker. While this may have been true in the early days of the industrial revolution, it is not as common today.

The union philosophy is predicated on the notion that everyone should be paid the same regardless of the quality of their work. Who wants to do a better job than someone who is getting paid the same amount for doing the same job poorly? Obviously, the quality of the product will suffer.

Unions now are big, powerful lobbies, whose sole purpose is to keep people who are not in the union from working, while demanding higher pay and benefits for those who are. They keep inadequate workers on the job, but do not reward the better workers. They create unnecessary jobs by dividing the labor of one person into the work of three. The man that turns on the lights, can not pick up the trash. The man that turns the bolts can not also put on a tire. They have driven the prices up on everything, while their ‘management’ gets fat on the pensions of the workers.

[Undecided 2012]

If anyone is enteprenureal enough they could see the Hostess shutdown as an opportunity.
I am a Texan by choice from Philly. For some one this is an opportunity to set up some distribution of “Tastykakes” to Texas and all Hostess places.

[Huskrrrr]

“We the people” website (White House site) now soliciting support for nationalizing Twinkies. Just heard this on Rush.

[re_nortex]

Unions are a socialist concept. The whole concept of unions pits management against the workers. The assumption is that management is an evil force whose sole purpose is the abuse of the worker.

In my humble opinion, this qualifies as among the top hundred posts ever to grace the pages of Free Republic. Everything you wrote is accurate to a T and your conclusions are unassailable.

The labor union movement in the United States is a direct result of foreign socialist influences operating here. Believe it or not, Hollywood leftist Warren Beatty's Reds film from the 1981 depicts this properly with the rise of the IWW, known as the Wobblies. The whole gang that accelerated unionism in the 1800's and 1900's is a rogue's gallery of evil: Eugene V. Debs, Big Bill Haywood, the foreign-born Samuel Gompers, socialist Walter Reuther and many others of that ilk.

Perhaps the worst president in our nation's history, Franklin Diablo Roosevelt gave fuel to Big Labor with the vile Wagner Act, giving unions and their corrupt bosses unprecedented power.

It's long past time for unions to be abolished. I contend that RICO laws can be brought down hard on Big Labor to put every last one of them into the graveyard of history. Unionism is tantamount to an extortion racket. The Mafia has been defanged over the years and the same aggressive approach must be taken to forever exterminate the blight of unionism. When unions are extinguished, the light of American Free Enterprise will shine brightly. Watch our economic engine come roaring back when the stranglehold of unionism perishes!

[morphing libertarian]

Can’t deny the role of communism in unions history in the US.

However, as someone who had 1 grandfather thrown in the river and shot by Sheriff Chapin’s deputies for organizing and had another with his leg crushed in a mine and was on Blair mountain during the battle, I know there was a reason 100,000s of thousands of workers joined unions a 100 years ago.

And it wasn’t communism which attracted them.

[central_va]

Unions are dead. In the USA 94% of the private work force is NON union.

[paglia444]

Unions are going the way of the dinosaurs. In today’s global economy, those with skills and technical expertise will be paid a premium. Manual labor is expendable and is slowly being replaced with automation. Unions have held on only so long because their forced-dues give them political clout.

[amihow]

I am conservative, but I disagree with this author.

Unions are not a socialist concept primarily. They are, rather, a concept adhered to by Christians as a balancing force between management and capital to insure a living wage for the worker and a reasonable return on investment for capital.

That unions goer too powerful and need to be reined in and that capital gets too powerful and need to be made pay just wages is obvious, but unions have their place.

[muawiyah]

hmm ~ somebody forgot to tell you that union membership is way down these days ~ somewhere around 15% of the workforce.

Tellingly, unions fell into disfavor at the same time government undertook to set and enforce workplace safety standards.

Could be workplaces weren't safe ~ actually, I've worked in factories where big heavy things like engine blocks and cupolas full of molten iron could break loose and fall on the floor, or the employees. Bunch of them over in the foundary at Naptown IH truck engine works had their legs burned off in just such an accident.

To a degree union representation didn't protect them at all from that sort of accident happening, but they did use union representation in court when they sued the company for damages.

Lot of this stuff is time and place, of course.

There's a contracts clause in the body of the Constitution. Simply requiring employers to sign work contracts with the people they hire to work ~ with conditions enforceable in courts of law ~ would go a long way toward disposing of even residual inclinations toward unions.

[MrB]

If it weren’t for govt and violence (but I repeat myself) backing them, they’d have gone the way of the dodo long ago.
There’s really no legitimate reason for their existence today.

[MrB]

“Ensure a living wage” is a non-concept, it’s just a slogan.
Read some Sowell (Basic Economics) and then post.

[muawiyah]

you got that right.

Part of the problem was when people were hurt or murdered by the company guards or enforcers you couldn't get back at them with standard damage suits in court, nor would the government enforce the statutes against murder and mayhem.

If perhaps everybody had been allowed to carry a pistol to work (currently one of our ambitions, right?) management might not have been so ambitious to do some of the things they did then.

The second amendment is there for a reason ~ USE IT.

[BobL]

“Unions are dead. In the USA 94% of the private work force is NON union.”

Awww, we were waiting for you. Congratulations on sticking it to THE MAN again. You guys REALLY taught big, evil, Hostess a lesson!!!!

[Cyber Liberty]

I just glanced over your posting history. Blog Pimp much?

[re_nortex]

Unions are dead.

But even what's left of the stinking, rotting corpse still exerts its evil influence. Every last vestige of unionism must be purged from a free America.

In the USA 94% of the private work force is NON union.

And that's something to celebrate as employees throw off the shackles of slavery. The new evil masters are the union thugs and bosses. Fortunately, there's one part of our country that rejects the bondage of Big Labor. The South is where individual liberty, free enterprise and freedom for both the employee and workers reigns supreme. Short of exterminating unions forever, adopting Right to Work as the rule throughout America would extinguish this corrupt blight since, given a choice, workers reject the racketeerism of unions.

Compare how the liberty-cherishing "Solid South" with its brave stand against union slavemasters also voted against the Marxist regime in 2012, the same as it did in 2008:

These maps vividly illustrate why business is booming (even in Obama's dismal economy) throughout Dixie and in the other states where unions are held in check.

[morphing libertarian]

In Logan County, WV (see the film Matewan) the sheriff and his deputies were the private army of the coal companies. When Chapin retired, he was given half ownership of a mine as a reward for his “service.”

My grandmother ran a boarding house on High Street in Logan and the sheriff would come by every now and then to check out the new arrivals in town. I know that after she asked if the sheriff had her husband killed, she would have pulled the trigger, but she had no firearms.

[Rapscallion]

Unions are a socialist concept.

Brother that's a massive understatement. Historically, we owe the strong Communist Party USA to the unions that took seed here. In the 1930s+ the FBI almost stamped them out.

Now our cracker-jack communist president has brought them back and given them what was General Motors and several deposits of stimulus monies....all to aid the unions in massively transforming America into a socialist state.

?Have you begun to miss the old America where you actually had a job and paid your own way? I do.

[re_nortex]

In Logan County, WV (see the film Matewan)...

In spite of my unflappable anti-union stance, I'll admit that Matewan is among my very favorite films. I enjoy watching fine acting by people such as Chris Cooper and James Earl Jones. At my age of 70, I've long been able to divorce a message I may not agree with yet still acknowledge a well-done filmic achievement. I may very well be in that small subset of people who has both busted a union (as I did in Western Pennsylvania) but owns a DVD of Matewan. The music in that film, of course, is outstanding.

[ExCTCitizen]

What unions are doing in America today, not only to the companies but to the workers they supposedly represent, is unconscionable. It’s sad that a majority of their own members can’t or refuse to see that these unions are not truly on their side and in fact have done much to destroy capitalism.

How true!! All of you should DEMAND RIGHT TO WORK laws in your states...

[morphing libertarian]

I was a Cal sate employee for 28 years, much fit a manager. I remember when Brown signed the bill.

The public employee union bribery system in which a union can contribute to those with whom they negotiate their contracts is inherently wrong. I think a hundred years ago it was easy to organize a union because of work conditions almost everywhere. Nowadays when we’re hurting, hard to have sympathy.

I remember the quote, by I think Samuel Gompers, when they asked him what his union wanted. His answer: “More.” Just like a great white shark you have to blow out of the water before it eats everything.