I Spit on Labor Day...

It's yet another way the once-mighty unions have distorted American values.

Besides, I'm retired :)

Elmer...

Via reader Jim M.:

A guy stopped at a local gas station, and after filling his tank, he paid the bill and bought a soft drink. He stood by his car to drink his cola and watched a couple of men working along the roadside. One man would dig a hole two or three feet deep and then move on. The other man came along behind him and filled in the hole. While one was digging a new hole, the other was 25 feet behind filling in the hole. The men worked right past the guy with the soft drink and went on down the road.

"I can't stand this," said the man tossing the can into a trash container and headed down the road toward the men.

"Hold it, hold it," he said to the men. "Can you tell me what's going on here with all this digging and refilling?"

"Well, we work for the government and we're just doing our job," one of the men said.

"But one of you is digging a hole and the other fills it up. You're not accomplishing anything. Aren't you wasting the taxpayers' money?"

"You don't understand, Mister," one of the men said, leaning on his shovel and wiping his brow. "Normally there's three of us: Me, Elmer and Leroy. I dig the hole, Elmer sticks in the tree, and Leroy here puts the dirt back. Elmer's job's been cut...so now it's just Me and Leroy.

The really sad part is that this story is completely plausible.  Might even be true...

Squandering Public Education Money...

CATO has a great article analyzing the return on our investment in public education.  Conclusion: Zip.  Nada.  Doo-dah.  All that money is being thrown at public education with no discernable increase in student performance.  Wasted.

Unless you're a teacher's union member, of course.  Or a politician benefiting from the union donations.

Every once in a while, you really need a revolution to clear out the rot.  Public education in the U.S. is long, long overdue for a such revolution.  Anyone up for a little “Education Spring”?

Unions Spend a Lot on Politics...

Well, that's not really a surprise, is it?  But today's Wall Street Journal is reporting that unions actually spend about four times more than what was generally believed...

A Window into the Entitlement Mindset...

If you'd like to peer into the mind of those who feel entitled, you'd be hard-pressed to find something better than this video of New York Times union members whining about proposed changes to their pension plan.  They're better than the rest of us, you see.  They're entitled to their defined benefit pensions, and business realities be damned.  These are the people who are trying to kill this country.  That's not, of course, how they would word it – but it certainly is how I would...

Non-Union Workers Enslave Unions!

Indiana employers are being sued on the grounds that they're enslaving unions by hiring non-union workers.  From an article at the Daily Caller:

The new lawsuit suggests that when nonunion employees earn higher salaries and better benefits because of the union’s negotiation on behalf of its members, the union has been forced to work for those nonunion employees for free.

And being forced to work without compensation, the union suggested in its revised lawsuit, is slavery.

Strictly from the perspective of an observer of creative litigation, this is absolutely awesome.  Should it succeed, it would throw open the door for more creative lawsuits.  For example, I might consider suing my employer for enslavement – they're “forcing” me to spend unpaid hours on the road for my commute, because I live so far from my employer's offices.  Clearly they should either pay me for those hours of commute, or count them as work hours.  Slavers!

But from just about any other perspective (aside from the slavering socialists, anyway), this is more demonstration of the decay of legitimate purpose for labor unions (as if we really needed any!).  I'm not in favor of outlawing unions, or anything nearly so radical – despite these ludicrous excesses, they do occasionally have a legitimate purpose in the U.S.  But I would be in favor of some carefully-crafted limits on their power and reach – most especially for the public sector unions, who in places like California (at the state level) and San Diego (at the city level) virtually “own” our local governments...

This Was NOT Written by a Democrat...

Via my mom, this parable of our (unionized) times...

On Public Sector Unions...

Peggy Noonan, in today's WSJ:

Unions have been respected in America forever, and public employee unions have reaped that respect. There are two great reasons for this. One is that unions always stood for the little guy. The other is that Americans like balance. We have management over here and the union over here, they'll talk and find balance, it'll turn out fine.

But with the public employee unions, the balance has been off for decades. And when they lost their balance they fell off their pedestal.

When union leaders negotiate with a politician, they're negotiating with someone they can hire and fire. Public unions have numbers and money, and politicians need both. And politicians fear strikes because the public hates them. When governors negotiate with unions, it's not collective bargaining, it's more like collusion. Someone said last week the taxpayers aren't at the table. The taxpayers aren't even in the room.

As for unions looking out for the little guy, that's not how it's looking right now. Right now the little guy is the public school pupil whose daily rounds take him from a neglectful family to an indifferent teacher who can't be removed. The little guy is the beleaguered administrator whose attempts at improvement are thwarted by unions. The little guy is the private-sector worker who doesn't have a good health-care plan, who barely has a pension, who lacks job security, and who is paying everyone else's bills.

It's been a long time since I had positive feelings about unions in general; I think they've long outlived their original worthy purpose and have become more a drag on progress and on the economy than any possible benefit could justify.  Public sector unions have seemed wrong to me from their very beginnings in the early '60s. 

I remember a high-school history teacher (can't remember his name) – in 10th grade, I think.  He was a recently returned Vietnam War veteran,  one of the first wave of Kennedy's “advisors”.  He was deeply offended by the unionization of federal employees (something that Kennedy approved), and saw it as a betrayal of the values he fought for in Vietnam.  His passionate lecture on that subject, over 40 years ago, is still a clear memory.  His reasons for opposing public sector unions are the same reasons opponents use today, most emphatically the unholy alliance that Noonan refers to in this column (third paragraph above).  

Think the TSA is a Pain Now? Just You Wait...

John Fund of the WSJ:

...But if you think TSA is dysfunctional and unpopular now, wait until it unionizes. This month, the Federal Labor Relations Authority ruled that 50,000 TSA personnel will be allowed to vote on whether or not to join a union with full collective bargaining rights. The American Federation of Government Employees and the National Treasury Employees Union are already gearing up their campaigns to win over the screeners.

After 9/11, Congress wisely decided to forbid TSA employees from coming under union work rules out of fear that it could compromise security. Imagine if every change in procedures had to be cleared with union shop stewards. While it is not easy to fire TSA personnel now, just think how difficult it will be to remove bad employees if they are covered by union job protection agreements...

Read the whole thing...

A “No” Vote...

Well, that's refreshing!

Your Morning Voter Education...

James O'Keefe – the guy who's been making those videos that look shockingly like actual journalism instead of the press release parroting normally seen in the lamestream media – has done it again.  This time, he took his video cameras under cover into the New Jersey Education Association's (NJEA) Leadership Conference.  The video below is the first volume of the results; it's a graphic illustration of what happens when you get generations of parasites sucking on the public teat.  Click over to YouTube to see the rest.




Remember: the teacher's unions (that's what the NJEA is) are, nationwide, the number one source of funds for Democrat candidates.  Remember that when you vote.

Who Doesn't Want to Save Kids' Lives?

If you read this blog, then you already know that I'm no fan of the unions.  The report below covers a recent flap wherein the teachers' and nurses' unions come down squarely against saving kids lives.  Seriously.




The only solution that comes to mind through my anger is high-velocity lead...

Unions and Schools...

Megan McArdle on teacher's unions, with a particularly interesting example that's a nearly perfect side-by-side test of unionized vs. non-unionized...

Quote of the Day...

This post could just as well have been titled a flying pig moment.  This is from that bastion of progressive propaganda, Newsweek:

It is difficult to dislodge the educational establishment. In New Orleans, a hurricane was required: since Katrina, New Orleans has made more educational progress than any other city, largely because the public-school system was wiped out.

My blunt title for their article is How the Unions are Destroying U.S. Education.  They title it Why We Must Fire Bad Teachers.  Either way, it's extraordinary to see a piece like this in Newsweek.  It's the end time, folks, it must be...

The Biggest Loser?

Michael Barone in the Wall Street Journal, making an interesting observation about yesterday's elections:

But you missed seeing the guy who may have been the biggest loser of all—a man who according to recently released White House logs has been a guest in the White House 22 times since Barack Obama became president, more than any other single individual.

That man is Andy Stern, who has boasted that the Service Employees International Union, which he heads, ponied up something like $60 million for Barack Obama and other Democrats in the 2008 campaign cycle. Altogether, Mr. Stern and other labor union leaders reportedly gave Democrats some $400 million last year.

This was, to borrow a word from Mr. Obama, an audacious gamble. Unions these days represent only 8% of private-sector employees (and that's counting General Motors and Chrysler as private sector) and some unions went into debt to make these contributions. Public employee unions of course are financed by taxpayers, who pay the salaries from which dues are extracted, but even so their resources are ultimately limited.

What have the unions gotten in return? Some not insignificant things. The Obama administration bludgeoned General Motors and Chrysler bondholders, in what I called an episode of "gangster government," and effectively turned over the two auto companies to the United Auto Workers. The building trades got project labor agreements—i.e., plenty of dues money flowing to their coffers—in the $787 billion stimulus package.

A lot of that stimulus money went as well to state and local governments. The goal was to spare public employee union members from the vicissitudes of the recession to which the rest of us are subject—and to keep that dues money flowing in.

But the union leaders have been frustrated on their No. 1 goal, the card check bill that would effectively abolish the secret ballot in unionization elections. A couple of bulky guys in varsity jackets visit your home and, um, persuade you to sign a card, and later the union—with the help of a mandatory arbitration clause—impose contracts on employees and rake in the dues money.

With all the healthcare bill noise I'd completely forgotten about the damned “card check” (aka “union takeover plan”) bill...