[bowzer313]

"My dad worked at Ford for 30+ years. 99% of the time, he didn't vote for dems. Neither did a lot of the people he worked with."

We've all heard apocryphal stories about how so many union members are really all just Republicans. It's only their leadership that support the Democrats. Bullsh*t, I say. If this is so, then why can't any union member explain to me why they sit back and allow their unions to support and their union dues to bankroll every idiotic leftist cause, leftist candidate, and leftist party to come down the pike.

I have an apocryphal story to tell of my own. My brother-in-law's father was an Electrician who worked at the Ford Rouge Plant for over forty years, beginning in the late thirties. He was one of the original members of the UAW Skilled Trades council, back when the UAW was being created. He saw it all through the years, including the "Battle of the Overpass", the burning of the Ford Rotunda, the construction of the Ford World Headquarters building. But, before he retired he was so disgusted with what the UAW became that he hated every day he went to work and was against everything the union advocated and everyone the union propped up just on general principle.

He told me the turning point for him was during the sixties, when the union was forcing minorities into positions that they were obviously unqualified for just to fill racial quotas. He viewed this policy as life-threatening to him and his colleagues. There was one Sunday he had to repair some high-voltage welding transformers on the line with some minority guy they told him to work with. The minority had brought a liqour bottle with him and was drinking shots all day. My brother-in-law's father had to tell this guy to just sit down and drink because he was afraid the guy would either knock over his ladder or wind up flipping a switch and zapping him to death.

The fact that the union foisted these types of things on the membership, and many other things too numerous to mention, led him to despise the day he ever bought into the "union brotherhood" bullsh*t.

[wmichgrad]

If this is so, then why can't any union member explain to me why they sit back and allow their unions to support and their union dues to bankroll every idiotic leftist cause, leftist candidate, and leftist party to come down the pike.

It's called fear. I worked in an assembly plant for a short period of time (5 months) and heard many grumblings about people wondering why they were paying dues and what good is the union. I think the fact is that while some or most union members dislike the union, they blindly rely on them for their standard of living. They are afraid to stand up to the union for fear of retaliation or for fear of losing the union that supposedly keeps their jobs secure. As more and more foreign automakers build plants here in the U.S., the UAW membership continues to dwindle. The UAW has resorted to representing workers in non-automotive industries (e.g. my sister-in-law who works at a Delta Dental customer call center). So what these workers don't realize is that the UAW is sacrificing jobs (and thus membership) to keep wages and benefits inflated.

The same thing happens with the teachers unions. The majority of teachers are not democrats, yet every year the NEA sends hand picked representatives to their "convention" where they vote to endorse democratic candidates for political office. Why does this happen? Fear. My wife is a teacher. I am confident in her skills and ability to do her job and I know if there were no union, she would still have a good job. But she has no interest in learning about what her union is really all about and fighting the crap the union is involved with. None of her younger colleagues are either. But why would you be when you have $5 co-pays on prescriptions and zero co-pay full medical coverage?