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Now that’s what I call “lip service”.
We must always follow the words of:
A. Jesus
B. Founding Fathers
C. Constitution
D. St. Ronnie
…except when we disagree with those words. When that happens we simply make up excuses to do the opposite.
Oh, how things have changed.
The difference is that collective bargaining is important but public sector unions are bad. They hold government hostage. Collective Bargaining and unions are not synonymous. Being a public sector employee I don’t have the room to tell you how worthless the union is here in California.
Normal union collective bargaining is where workers get to see what other workers are paid and then can go to management and argue together on what thier pay should be. In the case of government unions, management is the legislature. But when collective bargaining is done where comparative wage and benefits are negotiated and decided upon without management’s input (the legislature) then the government union is free to slowly increase their wages and benefits such that eventually they are larger than the private sector. And when that happens, the net affect is that the government worker pays less in taxes as a ratio to income then the non government worker. It’d be like McDonalds employees looking at what Burger King employees get paid and going on strike until they got paid the same or slightly more for cost of living, etc. Then Burger King doing the same thing. Neither the management at McDonalds and Burger King are ever consulted on whether they will or will not pay.
The video above has nothing to do with government worker collective bargaining. Just the freedom to unionize.
No one would disagree that President Reagan supported collective bargaining.
But in this clip he wasn’t speaking of collective bargaining for the public sector.
Consider President Roosevelt, who very plainly said:
“All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations. The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress. Accordingly, administrative officials and employees alike are governed and guided, and in many instances restricted, by laws which establish policies, procedures, or rules in personnel matters.”
And if that isn’t enough, consider what George Meany, then president AFL-CIO, said in 1955 “It is impossible to bargain collectively with the government.”
A couple other blogs are tossing around the idea that today’s anti-union sentiment is mainly driven by resentment, along these lines: union members get better benefits today, and that’s not fair, so we must take away their hard-earned right to a good living.
Collective bargaining is in the US Constitution, under the First Amendment, which reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
It’s the part that states “petition the Government for a redress of grievances,” that I feel is akin to collective bargaining.
As a disclaimer, I am a public employee, and can tell you that the union here has helped its membership quite well. If you don’t like your union, than you can do something about it, and get involved.
Reagan may have said that he was for unions, but when it came to bargaining with Air Traffic Controllers, he showed his true colors, and was against them. Reagan was a tool of big business, and don’t forget it.
“Reagan may have said that he was for unions, but when it came to bargaining with Air Traffic Controllers, he showed his true colors, and was against them”
Sorry Rabble Rouser.
Reagan also reminded the ATC that they agreed under contract not to strike. He warned them he would execute his end of the contract if they did not return to work.
So lets understand this: it’s ok to make contractural agreements that the union will demand the government uphold, but it’s also ok for the unions to break their contractual agreements with the government & go out on strike?
Many of the people echoing this pro-union line were against Solidarity at the time and wanted the Communists to win.
So we give BILLIONS to Wall Street and think we can balance the budget on the backs of workers – go figure.
Lets not forget what Harry Truman did to unionized railroad workers who wanted to strike, enacted emergency legislation to draft any one of the strikers into the war! This was a brilliant solution to problem at a time when a hard choice had to be made. At heart I’m a conservative but if someone with the love for this country and the guts that Truman had came along, I might ( cringing ) vote Democrat ( God forgive me ). Both parties have had a love/hate relationship with union, but it will be proven in the end that public employee unions are bad for the country, no doubt about it.
And now, I will be taking away your rights in a drug war. Then I will be sending your jobs overseas in a thing I call free trade.
Public sector unions are a tax on resources. And a source of institutional conflict of interest.
Politicians collectively bargaining with unions that fund political campaigns is a huge conflict of interest.
And public sector unions are funded by taxpayer dollars to influence the government as a special interest. And it is wrong.
Thank god the unions only fund the Democratic party. If they had both parties in their pocket, that’d be serious trouble.
Corporations are smarter and fund both parties, so ridding politics of undue corporate influence is going to be very hard.
I grow weary of misleading titles by Dvorak to these videos. Hijacking the quote to support public unions shows a sad misuse of his popularity. RR was of course referring to private unions as evidenced by his firing of the air traffic controllers after fair warning that he would do so. Dvorak it does not endear me to your blog to engage in such obvious baiting. Of course if you are oblivious to this truth you deserve to be relegated to the odium of such rags as Huffington etc…..just who do you think your audience to be that you would believe that such an attempt would convince anyone of supporting the likes of those who hold the taxpayer hostage to unions and the stolen public horse they rode in on?
So, MikeN, by extension anyone who is pro-union is a communist. Is that what you are saying?
The most important point to make about this is that Snott Walker has lost the “Reagan democrats”with his ham handed moves here in Wisconsin.
Ronnie’s best role was in that Genesis video.
He fired the air traffic controls.
Hmyers, sorry to say, but you are SO incorrect when you said that unions only support Democratic candidates. My union, CSEA, supported several Republican candidates in the last, and EVERY election that I can recall. Heck, they even supported Pataki early on. However as Pataki went back on his word, more than once, they backed his opponent.
Public sector unions make sure that elected officials keep their word, and don’t fire someone, just because (s)he is of the opposing party, or some other arbitrary factor. Public sector unions make sure that there is a safe workplace. For example, how would you like it if the person plowing snow did so in an unsafe truck with little rest between shifts? Unions are responsible for this, and other things that people often take for granted, and yes, public service unions too.
Unions have protected workers from bosses forever. Why should people like police, fire, DPW, public health workers, and others not strive to have the same protections that they can in the private sector?
Why is it that people don’t understand that the bosses will roll over you each and every time given the chance, and without unions, you create unsafe workplaces, with low wages, and no benefits. After all these things cost money.
Why should public sector employees, who get paid less for their services when compared to private workers, have less rights than those in the private sector?
I don’t understand why people constantly roll out the Gipper, in all of his myth all the time. He raised taxes on the middle class, gave arms to terrorists, funded illegal coups in South and Central America, busted legitimate unions, and got us into the largest debt and recession that was ever seen, only to be outdone by “Dubya.” Why do you people vote for politicians like Reagan, who said that government can do no good, then go on to prove it when they are elected?!?!?!!
#21 Rabble Rouser
So it’s always a us against them adversarial relationship with unions standing up for the little guy. Unions are never part of the problem, right? Makes a good story.
Breaking collective bargaining with public sector unions in Wisconsin is, to me, just the same as Wisconsin passing a “Right to Work”-style law that just effects the public sector.
All of the frustration against public workers just underscores how far US wages and benefits have dropped over the years. Defined benefit pensions used to be about five times more common in the private sector in 1990 than 2010. In 2010, public sector union members outnumbered private sector union members.
The lack of collective bargaining is blamed for the lack of wage increases, over the last 35 years.
>So, MikeN, by extension anyone who is pro-union is a communist. Is that what you are saying?
Not at all. Indeed many of the unions in Reagans time supported Reagan in his anti-communist efforts. However, many of Reagans opponents then, and much of the left now which is taking the pro-union stance, were and are pro-communist.
He mentioned “free unions”. Try refusing to pay your union dues as a government employee, let me know how that works out for ya.
“But in this clip he wasn’t speaking of collective bargaining for the public sector.”
This is a distinction that government union backers deliberately choose to blur. They want you to equate a meat packer or steel worker with the fat lady working behind the desk at the DMV.
Anyone that is in Wisconsin knows that Walker wants to rid the state of unions entirely. He is moving many current government contracts to his buddies’ companies that are anti-union.
Many conservatives are against union workers; public sector and private sector. They like to say that workers should have the right to join a workplace without being forced to join a union. Those states are called “right to work” states. The problem is that every state with this legislation also includes a clause that requires any workplace with union workers to offer the same union benefits to non-union workers. This can’t work, because if you have a staff at a union local they rely on union dues to for their job. Union dues today are much lower in ratio to a paycheck than they were in the early days of unions. You would be surprised how much a union works for its members today. Even today companies are constantly putting the workers’ safety in jeopardy by making them do things they aren’t qualified to do and accidents happen and the company usually tries to deny responsibility.
In public sector unions the workers try to get the same benefits than upper-level government workers get (pension, health care). If Walker and the state representatives get a pension and health care then don’t the other government workers deserve the same? I mean if you are against the government workers getting benefits then it should be all or none. The worst part is that the Governor only needs one term to earn a pension, whereas the other government workers have to put in at least 10 years. Most people are against teacher tenure and the NEA has already said they would remove it, but Walker kept pushing for removing collectively bargaining.
The sad part is even with no public sector unions, the taxpayers will keep paying the same taxes. The financial sector will keep gambling with the taxpayer’s money, and they’ll get bailed out by the taxpayer’s whenever necessary.
Yes, unions support candidates. But don’t companies support candidates.
All of this yelling is to get government union work “privatized” – from private jails to homeland security to for-profit schools or whatever else.
The Right to Work that certain states passed in order to attract manufacturers – generally from the north to the south – was undercut by NAFTA, CAFTA-DR, etc. The manufacturing jobs could move instead to where there were pennies-to-the-dollar wages, no environmental standards. no worker safety standards, etc.
RR was all about the power grab, and he cared for no one but himself.
I didn’t see this until the end of his first term. It is amazing how many people never saw what RR was up to. There is an excess supply of stupid people.
>Most people are against teacher tenure and the NEA has already said they would remove it,
I’ll believe that when I see it.
# 10 MikeN said:
“Many of the people echoing this pro-union line were against Solidarity at the time and wanted the Communists to win.”
Huh?
Let me answer like the child I heard of, being urged by his mother to eat his dinner with the argument that there are millions of hungry children in Asia who would gladly eat it:
Oh yeah? Name six!