March 19, 2010

I don't like unions!

I think unions are ruining the country, ruining the economy and are not fighting on behalf the people they supposed to represent but trying to justify the existence of the leadership by blinding the membership with empty promises.

At the beginning of my working life I was in a union. I had to be in in order to be able to work in the construction industry. The head of my local union who happened to be the son of the president of the larger local came to visit one time.

He was a young kid who couldn't have cared less about us. He told me that he was hoping that we would get a raise because that would justify him getting a new car.

On our regular monthly meetings the speeches by the leadership were always centered on how we could give the "business" to those damn employers. In our case we were engineers, professional people yet, the atmosphere was as we were longshoremen or bricklayers or any other physical workers.

Prior to the union the way the system worked was that when a particular construction job was over the company would send the engineer back to the home office to work on something else while a new assignment materialized.

After we became union members our salaries became too high for the companies to carry the engineers until a new position happened. Therefore, the only solution was termination.

Thanks to the union, the protector of the working people, I became unemployed and eventually forced to look for a new career.

You can see that I have no great love for them at all.

Many times their unreasonable requests forced businesses to close and put their members on the street.

Years ago New York City had several daily newspapers. In 1966 the unions were successful enough to put most of them out of business. I wonder who won that war. The poor slob who lost his livelihood or the union leadership whose main interest is to keep their cushy jobs with all the perks.

If one thinks back Ronald Reagan was right in 1981 when he threw out all the striking air controllers and replaced them with the military and eventually with a new breed of people.

Striking should be illegal. Striking is self serving and it hurts the public and the strikers as well. For the general public it creates inconvenience they didn't ask for while for the strikers it creates economic hardships.

A sanitation strike creates health hazards since garbage is not being collected. A cemetery workers strike creates health hazards because the dead can not be buried. A transportation strike creates general hardship because people can not travel or can not go to work.

A nurses strike creates health hazards because the sick at the hospitals can not be cared for.

I worked in the engineering business for over forty years. This was not a unionized business, nobody represented me. Yet, I received raises, I had benefits, I had sick days and I had holidays.

Maybe with a union I would have gotten half of that. But that's not the point. Unions protect the mediocre workers. The workers who don't want to excel at what they do, the workers who just want to get by.

If a person works good he should be rewarded and if he doesn't then make room for one that has ambition. There is no job in this world that can not be done either well or not well.

The sad thing is that there are glamor unions and there are ordinary (nobody cares) unions. When a glamor union strikes everybody look up and even the government tries to step in to find a solution.

When a "nobody cares" union start a job action nobody cares. One can see a couple of people walking a picket line somewhere in the city because they are striking against some small company. Their job actions do not hurt anybody but the workers. They do not have the strength in numbers.

What could happen is that the company will not care, hire non union workers and go on its merry way; or maybe come to an agreement and continue operating; or maybe just close up shop and tell the union to piss off.

I can see that in the old days when there were no labor laws and workers were not protected some kind of organization was necessary. But today there are laws protecting the workers, there are minimum wage laws, there are safety regulations and a myriad of other rules on the side of the working people.

I am not advocating the abolishment of all labor unions but I do not believe they are serving their constituents as they claim.

I believe they are close to as phony a Bernard Madoff.

The reason of this entire outburst is that British Airways cabin attendants are threatening a three day work stoppage starting this Saturday, thereby creating hardships for countless of people.

Who needs them anyway. As far as I am concerned airline cabin attendants are not needed anymore. They are really not doing anything useful.