Richard Trumka’s Cheshire Grimace

Union leaders have having a hard time talking about last week’s Harris v. Quinn decision – largely because their case involved extorting money from people who had neither the need nor the desire to be in unions in the first place:

After all, it’s not easy to make to a convincing argument that labor organizations should have the right to extract money directly from the paychecks of people who don’t want to be union members in the first place, which is ultimately what Harris v. Quinn was about.

As a result, the responses to the ruling from people like AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, Service Employees International Union President Mary Kay Henry and Center For American Progress President Neera Tanden all claimed the decision was a blow for working families without ever mentioning that the plaintiffs in the case were eight people from working families that just didn’t see a need to be in a union.

I’m not anti-union – in fact, unlike most Democrats, I’ve been a union member.

But the drive to force home daycare and personal care workers into unions against their will (using “elections” that were as rigged as any Chicago alderman’s race) should be seen as a catastrophic blow to whatever moral case Big Labor might think it still has.

6 thoughts on “Richard Trumka’s Cheshire Grimace

  1. Unions may have had a place in the 1930’s to counter abusive employers, low wages, dangerous working conditions. Workers ground under the iron heel of management had no recourse at law. Unions negotiated better wages and working conditions for all so all should bear their Fair Share of the cost of negotiations.

    Can anyone show me an American government employee being ground under a heel? Working in dangerous jobs? Working brutal hours? For crying out loud, they are the STAFF at OSHA, Fair Labor Standards and Equal Opportunity. Why do they need a union?

    Unions are the buggy whips of the 21st century.
    .

  2. I don’t know about buggy whips, but the public unions are certainly whips, cracking over the heads and pocketbooks of taxpayers. That said, my grandfather started his career as a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse. The games the rural communities played with the salaries of people in his position – who would be public union members now – showed the potential for abuse when the power is all on one side. It appears the table has completely turned, but with the success Scott Walker has had and some common sense decisions by the SCOTUS, we may be on the way back to some sanity. The crux, of course, is the symbiotic relationship between the public unions and their “adversaries” on the other side of the bargaining table.

  3. Joe, actually I have worked in a place where no less than the safety manager admitted that when it came down to brass tacks, production overrode considerations of the workers getting overuse injuries. It isn’t the grotesque amputations and grieving widows being billed for cleaning up metal presses after their husbands were crushed because nobody had heard of “lock out tag out” procedures at the time, but it is a reality.

    So the question in my mind is not whether workers from time to time get abused. They do–as the makers of “Ambien” and “Prozac” profit from. The question is whether the situation will be helped by adding a union, which is at its best a second layer of management unaccountable to stockholders.

  4. BB, I’ve been on both sides of the union, and a lot of the problem is trying to get employees to follow those “lock out tag out” rules. Throw in the ones that are abusing various chemicals, from the legal ones like Prozac to the illegal ones, that get “protected” by the union and you magnify those problems. Try to can a unionized line worker who’s spaced out sometime, it’s just about impossible even if the other guys on the line want him canned out of concern for their own safety.

  5. (Mitch) I’m not anti-union

    I am. Whole-heartedly. Especially public unions. Those bastards take my money and use it to elect politicians that want to take even more of my money.

    (big-government Republicans, not withstanding)

    (Joe Doakes) Can anyone show me an American government employee being ground under a heel?

    If you ask the right (meaning: WRONG) people, they’ll say “every public sector worker in the entire state of Wisconsin”.

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