some min wage jobs really aren't after paying union dues
Posted on 03/16/2021 5:37:11 AM PDT by Kaslin
In 1978, when I was 17 years old, I worked as an usher at concerts and sporting events earning $2.25 an hour, the minimum wage. I had to surrender about 15 cents of this meager hourly wage to a union I was forced to join. I could never understand what a union was doing to help me since the company had the legal requirement to pay me $2.25. I was infuriated over the principle of this confiscation by labor bosses I had never met.
I wanted out of the union, but they told me I must pay dues to keep the job. Shouldn't there be a law against this type of coercion?
There is, actually. It is called the First Amendment. The right of association is not explicitly listed in the Bill of Rights. Still, the courts established this "fundamental right," ironically enough, in 1958 in the landmark Supreme Court case NAACP v. Alabama. Crucially, the courts declared that "the First Amendment protects a right to associate and a right not to associate together."
I was thinking about this when I watched the viral video of Rep. Tim Ryan, the Ohio Democrat, on the House floor slamming Republicans for opposing the Protecting the Right to Organize Act that would force tens of millions to join a union.
"Heaven forbid that we pass something that's going to help the damn workers in the United States of America," he fumed. "We talk about giving the right to organize; you (Republicans) complain."
The left lionized him as a champion for the little guy. But hold on there, Congressman. No one is saying that unions should not exist or that they should not be able to organize. I would be first in line to defend their First Amendment right to do so.
But let's be clear: This bill doesn't allow people to associate with a union. It forces them to join the union. In other words, it violates millions of workers' First Amendment right not to associate with a union.
In 27 states, voters have adopted right-to-work laws that prohibit forced union participation. Those laws are popular with voters and workers. Mark Mix, the president of the National Right to Work Committee, which defends nonunion workers' rights, said that "almost every attempt to repeal RTW laws and create 'closed shops' by Big Labor has been soundly beaten on the ballot or in state legislatures." That's why the union bosses are running to Congress.
There are good reasons why blue-collar workers may not want to join a union. The corruption with Big Labor has been so rampant with union bosses taking high six-figure salaries, parties, and spending union dues on junkets to Hawaii and the Caribbean that workers have said they want out. Unions also donate tens of millions of dollars of worker dues to Democratic politicians. In many unions, as many as half of the rank-and-file workers on the line aren't even in favor of the Democrats. They are Trump-voting Republicans.
High-performing workers also don't want to be under the umbrella of "collective" bargaining agreements because they want to get pay raises above what low-performers and shirkers earn. Union laws often prevent productive workers from getting more, just as teachers unions all but prevent poor-performing teachers from getting fired.
For whatever reason, millions have freely decided they don't want to be in the union. How is Ryan helping them by taking away that freedom to choose, which is another core principle I thought Democrats believed?
Don't forget the convenient reason why workers of right-to-work states don't want to be told by Washington they must rush into the union bosses' arms. Right-to-work states are where the jobs are. Right-to-work states create about twice as many new jobs as forced-union states. Right-to-work states have created triple the number of manufacturing jobs as forced-union states. America hasn't lost auto jobs. The jobs have left states such as Michigan, Ohio and New York in favor of free states such as Texas, Tennessee, Florida and Alabama.
That raises one last question for Ryan and his Democratic House colleagues, nearly all of whom voted for the Protecting the Right to Organize Act. Rather than force states such as Florida, South Carolina and Utah to adopt the policies that have economically crippled New York, Illinois and New Jersey, why not encourage the worker freedom policies that are standard fare in the economically high-flying states.
Workers should think about this: If all 50 states become forced union states, where will the jobs go next? Probably China and Mexico.
My brother, a union man until death, used to work for the old Eastern Airlines- ‘member them? When they went on strike and shut the airline down, my brother was out of work for a year, lost his condo and had to work as a bartender until he could get back with another airline.
The entire time, he whined about how much the CEO was making and what a bastard he was, etc...
I asked him: did he know how much the head of the union made? How come the union wasn’t stepping in to help him keep his home? Why weren’t they trying to help him get another job? Did it bother him that, once they had shut the airline down, they walked off, smug and satisfied that they had shown another big company who was boss with their fat paychecks secure, thanks to their idiot members, and leaving so many people- including my brother- out of work?
Such questions made brother angry, and still DO. I just don’t get leftists and why they believe what they do. Are they just that stupid? (rhetorical)
“Workers should think about this:”
Indeed.
But, critical thinking has been deprogrammed by our pubic school teachers, for many decades now.
Blacks should think about this:
Women should think about this:
College students should think about this.
Corporate leaders should think about this:
Single moms should think about this:
Censors should think about this:
Homosexuals should think about this:
Millennials should think about this:
Had those people been actually thinking, America would’t be so royally f’d up.
It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.
- Mark Twain
It seems there are several camps in America. People the love their unions are in one camp. They got there by a good dose of socialist brainwashing. Perhaps that is a bit harsh. Let's call it indoctrination instead. Then there are people that simply love big business. That camp belongs to the ones that can conform, play politics and move up the corporate ladder. They buy into that latest business fads (whatever is being fed to them by corporate training). We can call that indoctrination too.
Then there are people like me. I am jaded about big business, big unions, big government and a lot of other things.
“But, critical thinking has been deprogrammed by our pubic school teachers, for many decades now.”
I think that mass, large group schooling itself contributes to the lack of critical thinking in our society. Our family home-schooled for many years and we all think much more independently than everyone we know whose children attended schools, and this includes their parents. They became part of the “group” and tended to think the same as the group. When our children did the obligatory testing for home-school students I was asked how they had such great critical thinking scores. I attributed that to more reading, actual “doing”, (life activities) and almost no television or computer for years.
VW, Mercedes, BMW came to Right to work America.
GM came to right to work Tennessee but forced a Union. The Saturn’s the UAW built failed. The UAW killed them
GM Sees’s the writing on the wall........ another failure. So she is running to the Federal government for support of her electric vehicle
The UAW is a cancer on the Automobile industry
NO “required” union membership, etc.!! NEVER!!!
Also, stop the unions’ “leaders’ “ money machines, etc. to themselves!!
“The UAW is a cancer on the Automobile industry.”
The NEA (national teachers’ union) is a cancer on ALL of America.
Pubic schools are the biggest single employer in most counties. Critical thinking is purposely untaught. Most everyone’s children are indoctrinated K-12 to NEA’s guidelines (Godlessness, feminism, pro-abortion, LGBTQ+, males are bad, green/global warming, now BLM.)
The factory was unionized. Engineering was not. When asked, the union reps didn't have an answer how our department was riding on the coattails of the union, as the salaries were not affected when new contracts were negotiated.
The results: Admin, Engineering, and Sales voted "no".
The particular outpost of the corp was in Illinois, specifically the Chicago area.
No in this case the Union was on the money and right to go out on strike. What Frank Lorenzo was doing was taking the assets of Eastern Airlines and giving them to Continental Airlines it was theft plain and simple within the airline industry Eastern Airlines was on the cutting edge of everything technology wise. One little thing that you might have missed Frank Lorenzo married into the Rockefeller Family so when he said that in a few years that the airline industry would have only 3 or 4 years he knew a lot more than we gave him credit for.
Amen
That’s why these unions are so tied to politicians. A steelworkers union, for example, doesn’t give a damn about the 100,000+ active workers it represents. It cares more about the 800,000+ retirees among its members — many of whom haven’t worked in years.
Unions have the strange idea that they
can get more eggs by strangling the
chicken.
Then there are people like me. I am jaded about big business, big unions, big government and a lot of other things.
Same here. There are those on the Right who would replace the tyranny of Big Government with the tyranny of Big Business. I'm a conservative. That doesn't mean I worship Mammon or idealize business owners to the point of idolatry.
some min wage jobs really aren't after paying union dues
Any working man should have the right to join a union if he wishes, but only to the extent of making a similar decision NOT to join a union. A worker, in many cases, may need some legal representation, but too many unions are their for their own advantage, giving little thought for the workers they “represent”. That’s how I see it.
If someone were ever to try to tell me that there were corporate CEOs that WERE NOT corrupt, I wouldn’t believe it. Same with the big unions. I really don’t care what they were striking about, just that the union was not there for the workers, continued to line their fat pockets and walked away, leaving thousands of workers in the lurch.
I hate the unions and see them as part of the problem...maybe the biggest part and now, can point to the teachers’ unions as stellar examples of corruption and the ruination of generations of kids.
Unions are dying. Only 7% of the US workforce is in a union. Unions are fighting yesterdays war.
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