Union myths

By Jerry McConnell

A few days ago on Real Clear Politics online, one of my and the country’s favorite journalists, Thomas Sowell, wrote about the subject that I covered in my last column, Labor Unions. He titled his column, “Union Myths” and in this column I touch on some of their ‘myth-stakes’.
Sowell stated in his article, “the biggest myth about labor unions is that unions are for the workers.” And in my column I remarked that labor unions created, in their own minds, a “to be there” scenario for the worker. Both of us are correct in our assumptions. If either the myth or the mind scenario were true then union membership numbers in business and industry would be in vastly greater numbers than is the case currently.
This then is one of the labor union leaders big “myth-stakes” as union membership totals nationwide are falling off each year as opposed to growing as they would like and like you to believe. These same leaders also have this distorted belief that the workers, their members, absolutely love their unions because they get so much in benefits and financial advantages.

If that is true than why is it that U. S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics in their January 21, 2011 Current Population Survey of Union Members show the rate of union membership of wage and salary workers for 2010 to be only 11.9 percent, down from 12.3 the previous year? Another “myth-stake” perhaps? The actual number shown by the Labor Department of “workers belonging to unions declined by 612,000.”

Commenting on his ‘biggest myth’ remark that unions are for the workers, Sowell added that “unions are for unions, just as corporations are for corporations and politicians are for politicians.”

And I might have even added, “and union members are for union members.” We’ve just recently witnessed that in Wisconsin where the teachers abandoned the pupils in the schools to take to the streets to loudly and boisterously demonstrate against any loss of pay to help the state with staggering deficits in their budgeting processes. Their ugly aggressiveness, as captured by the television cameras, was not warmly received by a majority of the viewing public which most certainly will spill over into the other states of Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania, to name a few.

Governor Walker’s crafty victory over the union’s hand-maidens, the Democratic Senators of the Wisconsin Legislature who may have been part of the “myth-stakes,” out-foxed themselves by being cowardly and running for cover in a neighboring state, where their kind of politics is daily routine. Had they shown a bit of intestinal fortitude and fought it out with the fiscally prudent Republicans they may have at least registered some degree of respect from their constituents instead of the scorn and derision they deserved.

Some of the Wisconsin public openly called for the political Recall of Governor Walker and the Republican legislators; they would be wise to switch those calls to the cowardly Democrats that didn’t have the courage to stay at home to defend their cause.

They might also choose to study the causes for the serious budgetary problems in Wisconsin; certainly not from any initiatives put forth by the Republicans, but surely a lot of blame to be assessed to the public employee unions and their insatiable demands for more of anything that costs money. A Washington Examiner article by Phillip Suderman on March 10, 2011 stated in its headline that “One-third of U. S. wages are provided by the government.”

Where was it in our Founding Fathers’ notes and records where it called for a full one-third of all the employees wages in the total fifty states would be paid out to government sources? I would wager a farthing or two that those exact and frugal planners of the middle seventeen hundreds never would have believed that government employee wages would ever exceed probably five to ten percent of the country’s overall outlays for employees of all kinds. Now they capture THIRTY-THREE PERCENT of the employee payouts.

And it all leads back to just one thing: Labor Unions. And not content with such an overly large share of total employee payouts these ‘out-for-themselves’ gangsters still want their Congressional pawns and Obama the ‘giver of goods to labor unions’ to get the fallaciously named legislation, “Employee Free Choice Act” which is exactly the opposite in reality.

As Thomas Sowell said in his column and as you have read several times right here in mine, it actually would remove the free choice that workers now enjoy with the secret ballot and force the workers to bow even further down to their union parasites by having to declare openly whether or not they want to be represented by the union.

This deceptive misconstrue is another “myth-stakes” that these ugly and selfishly motivated thugs called labor unions have and continue to make, taking the rest of us for fools.

We have to stop this farce of freedom taking from the workers and all their other ‘myth-stakes’.


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