Unions, Parties and Killing Golden Geese

I have a friend who is a union man and we tend to get into some lovely conversations. I'm a conservative as you've probably figured out. Unions are pretty much NOT conservative and union men seem to take a particular delight in vilifying the president and the Republican Party, so sometimes the conversations get lively.

Let me make this clear. I feel about Unions the way I feel about Donald Trump. They both are doing some good, but sometimes they are their own worst enemies.  The idea of unions started out to be a good thing. The railroad union, in particular, to give it credit was able to work with the railroad companies to solve some of the problems of the economic transition that occurred in the twentieth century. The railroads were dying until finally the unions and the company figured out how to work together. That's how it should be done. 

But there are unions that don't do that. They ossify procedures, hiring and firing and pay rates. Unions can become so busy protecting specific jobs (and the Union income stream from dues) that the companies they work for keep folding. Hostess Bakeries was killed because their Union refused to budge. The union dug in its heels, the company couldn't adapt and folded. Retirement plans went away. So did a lot of jobs with the death of company and along with it, our supply of Twinkies and Hostess Cupcakes. Eventually someone else bought the brand but it was a near thing. 

Unions can do a lot of good, but too often in their blind hatred for the companies they work for, they kill the golden goose. I fault Unions for being so in the tank for Democrats. They do that because as in the case of Chrysler and then GM, the unions protect their turf so vigorously they frequently play a part in driving their companies to the brink. Let's face it, if a company can't make a decent profit, why should the continue to do business? Then when the company is on the brink, unions expect taxpayers to swoop in and bail them out, saving union jobs and failing companies. 

It's the same problem with environmentalists. These people want to somehow prevent the climate from changing. Unions want an unchanging job market. We are passing through climate changes as we always have. We are experiencinga titanic shift economically, as disrupting as the shift from a largely agrarian economy to an industrial economy. We are moving from an industrial to a tech-based information economy. Rather than preserve outmoded buggy whip manufacturing jobs, we need to be finding ways to adapt to the new reality.

The climate? Climates change. Get over it. We just have to deal with it. Clean up messes - absolutely. Stop polluting as far as possible. Of course. But do we have to create some vast centrally planned economy with an attendant huge army of bureaucrats to try and manage from Washington, a nation of 350 million individuals? That's absurd. The only way to do that is to simplify everything, stuff every peg, square, round or triangular into the same shape holes. That's why Marx was so in love with the idea of a homogeneous proletariat. If everybody (or at least most of us) were treated the same the theory was that they would be easier to manage for the leader class.

A nation of individuals is tough to make steady and predictable. Things change rapidly in a free market economy. Some businesses will close. Some will adapt. We're not asking mom and pop hardware stores to suddenly sell dresses because Walmart set up shot next door. But they can adapt  maybe sell hardware items that Walmart doesn't sell. They can offer higher levels of service that Wally World cannot offer because they have to sell such a huge volume of stuff.

In a time of upheaval, we have to change and adapt. In the past 200 years the world has changed in a profound way.  Two centuries ago we could be certain that, barring an attack by the nation next door and being carried off as slaves, for the most part however it was for your parents, it would be the same for you. After the huge scientific revolution of the 19th and 20th centuries, we came to believe that our lives would inevitably better than the lives of our parents.

It's ironic that the "progressive" movement that rose up seems to be attempting to reverse that course by making "progress" stand still. By insuring that everything from the jobs we work at to the very climate we live in stays the same, progressive behavior impedes progress. It's a losing battle. The world is changing and huge monolithic organizations and governments cannot possibly keep up. The reason America has thrived in this The future does not belong to those who learn something and then do that same something all their lives. That type of job is going away. The future will require us to learn how to learn, unlearn, and relearn something different. It will call for education that harks back to the old liberal arts education where we learn basic skills like math, writing, logic and computer skills and then layer on that first skill set you need to enter the workforce.

After that the worker has to stop worrying about fairness and start looking at what works to make that worker valuable to his employers. Here unions could play a role so long as they don't become the monolithic organizations, an image to the "beast" corporations they hate. If instead of propping up dying companies and industries we let the ones which try to kill themselves go ahead and die. We could spend that same money encouraging new companies to step in and start clean. We could train workers to do the new jobs using the new technologies and to meet the needs of a changing market.

The world is changing. There was a reason Chrysler was dying in the 80s and GM in the 00s. They probably should have. Someone or several someones could have bought the good parts and started clean. If the unions had been smart they'd have focused on working with newer, smarter, leaner companies. Sadly, too often the unions over time can become about accumulating power and fat budgets for the bosses instead of what they were about in the first place - a fair shake for workers on wages and safety. So when big bad corporations fall, unions probably should let them. Practically they never will.

There's a reason Detroit is rotting away. If you keep an industry barely alive and never get beyond treading water, an industry will rot and along with it the community that depends on that industry. Can corporations become corrupt? You bet, especially when they hook up with corrupt government which protects them. If one could allow a partnership of workers and the markets to which their labors provide goods and services to work as free markets can, we could keep corporations in line. But corruption doesn't just happen in board rooms. It can be found top to bottom. It happens in board rooms, union halls and city halls.

When owners and workers finally realize they are both on the same team and we get over envying the wealth of people who risk everything to start these companies, we might just see a greater sharing of the wealth. There's a reason Ford wasn't involved in the bailouts of the automakers. Henry Ford started the 40 hour week and assembly line and took care of his workers in ways no other corporate magnate did. There were free market reasons why he did right by his workers. Oddly enough he was very popular with people like Hitler because he was a capitalist who was also something of a socialist. Fortunately, his focus on his employees and treating them well hung with the company for a long time and kept them from falling into that adversarial relationship despite Ford's folly in embracing socialism.

It's amazing to me that very wealthy people cannot do the decent thing for very long, before they look round and decide to hook up with the government to try to take some of the responsibility for being decent people off of themselves. This protects their wealth, but puts the lion's share of the tax burden on the middle class through confiscatory taxation. Back in the 50s, when the upper tax rate was like 70%, very few of the 1%ers actually paid that tax rate. The rich were famous for hiring staffs of tax attorneys who helped them navigate the loopholes that the Democrats they support put into the tax codes. In the 50s and 60s the fat cats were supposed to pay 70%, but very few paid anything near that rate and some paid almost no taxes at all. 

There is no simple solution so long as we have vast complicated piles of regulations, laws and rules that hide the true intent of the government from the governed. It's not just evil corporations, it's evil government bureaucracies.

I think the devil's purpose is to keep us divided and fighting among ourselves. And what better way than to convince us to sling slogans at one another and lash ourselves to the mastheads of our ideologies. I used to do community organizing and it's so hard to get people to look beyond their pet ideologies and listen to each other. If you can, sometimes you can figure out how to fix the problem. Usually, people that figure out solutions that make sense just get pushed aside if they start talking sense that doesn't fit someone's ideology. Leaders on both sides of the ideological divide believe they need to keep the strife going in order to keep their jobs.

It's heartbreaking to watch the land that I love destroy itself from within. So it's good that Jesus is coming soon.

© 2018 by Tom King

How Much for a Mess of Pottage?

Still think that GM/Chrysler bailout was "good for America"?  Chrysler promptly sold itself to Italy.  Meanwhile, GM is busily transferring the bulk of its technology and resources to China with seven plants located there and 70% of GM cars now being made in China.  Cadillac is even a major sponsor of Chinese Communist Propaganda films.

Republican and Democrat corporate sponsors made out big time on the selling out of Americans who "saved" GM and Chrysler in the first place.  So did the unions. It's no wonder they're trying so busily to push religion out of American life.  Religion is not acceptable to their Chinese overlords (who are all driving Cadillacs these days).

The big losers?

1. Chinese workers who get slave wages, ungodly hours and medieval government healthcare.  
2. American workers whose jobs will go away so that soon we'll be unable to continue consuming more than we produce.  When that happens, our economy collapses under a weight of debt and we become Chinese workers in fact if not in name.

Corporate America is selling out, cashing in and moving to the Cayman Islands. They're looking ahead and whatever they're seeing, it's not an America where business has much of an opportunity.  Perhaps they're planning to wait offshore till we're fully "socialized" and then they can come back to America and get some of that cheap labor they have in China. 

The so-called 1 percenters aren't going to be hurt by this president or probably by any president that either party puts up.  They're the ones engineering this disaster.   Looks like the losers will be ordinary Americans who will be rapidly reduced to working anywhere at any price to feed their families.

“And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name."  Revelation 13: 16-17

Over a century ago, a 19th century church leader wrote, "In all our great cities there will be a binding up in bundles by the confederacies and unions formed. Men will rule other men and demand much of them. The lives of those who refuse to unite with these unions, will be in peril........Men will bind themselves together in unions that will wrap them in the folds of the enemy. A few men will combine to grasp all the means to be obtained in certain lines of business. Trades unions will be formed, and those who refuse to join these unions will be marked men. These unions are one of the signs of the last days. Men are binding up in bundles ready to be burned."  - E. White


Can't those of us who study history and Scripture see where we're headed?  Or are we prepared to sell our American birthright for a mess of pottage like Esau.  At least Esau sold his birthright to his brother who did some good with it.  Corporate America and our elected leaders are in the process of having a fire sale and those who are buying us up are neither our brothers or our friends.

Just one man's opinion....

Tom King

Screwing Around With the Constitution - Is This a Concerted Effort to Suppress Religion

 The IRS recently threatened to go after the nonprofit status of churches whose  pastors included political ideas or instructions in their sermons to their congregations or in their literature, brochures and pamphlets. Cruise the net and you'll discover tons of angry vitriolic calls for Christians (mostly) to sit down and shut up where politics are concerned, calling for the muzzling of religious groups under the principle of "separation of church and state".

Don't get me wrong, I believe strongly in the separation of church and state.  The constitution (the amendments part anyway) clearly forbids the government to establish any state religion and not to meddle with churches governance or the exercise of the principles of any church's faith by it's members.

The Amendment which guarantees these rights, however, does not, forbid religious people or their leaders from sticking their nose into government by lobbying or the exercise of the freedom of the press, speech or assembly.  The establishment clause is a one way prohibition.  It clearly restricts the government from meddling with one's religion, not vice versa.  Free exercise is a right of the citizenry. The government is not allowed to interfere with that.

Pastors, under the free exercise amendment can say whatever they want to, ask their members to vote anyway they want to and even lobby if they wish. If union leaders can do it, why not pastors.  Union leaders instruct their members as to how to vote all the time and nobody's going after them for that!  I listened in to a live SEIU union teleconference in Washington State last week that was nothing less than a political rally for Democrat candidates.  The freedom of assembly, speech and the press allows them to do that.

Trying to say churches cannot do the same thing is at the very least trying to game the system in favor of nonreligious groups and at worst an attempt to suppress the free exercise of religion at worst.  If nonprofit animal rights and environmentalist groups can do what they do and maintain their nonprofit status, churches must be allowed to do the same.

The American Constitution is a unique document in that it protects citizens from the government. Nowhere in there is anything that protects the government from it's citizens.

I'm just sayin'

Tom King

What’s Wrong With New Ideas in Education?

(c) 2012 by Tom King



Anyone?   Anyone?


Trick question. The answer is, “Nothing” or maybe “It’s about time we got some!”


When we built the US education system around the German model back at the beginning of the 20th century, we were in essence trying to fit a round peg in a square hole (the square hole being the German education system). The United States was settled by waves of people seeking opportunities outside the ancient and "ossified" societies of Europe. An unpopular Harvard sociologist once wrote a treatise suggesting that people with ADHD tended to migrate to the US at higher rates and because there is a genetic component, we, therefore, inherited a nation with an inordinate number of restless, high energy people in it. It accounts for the impulse people had to load up creaky Contestogas and move away from the more settled East Coast to the Wild West, which probably explains why the west was so wild in the first place. 

All these hyper people, goes the theory, continued percolating westward till they hit the Pacific Ocean where they piled up on the beach and invented California. (It explains a lot - this theory). So after filling up this country with people who didn’t fit in the Old World’s rigidly classed societies, what to 19th century progressive education theorists do?  They run right back to the Europeans and adopt an education system designed specifically for that stratified European culture. It seemed like a good idea at the time. We were, after all, entering an industrial boom at the time and needed lots of well-mannered factory workers and the Germans did have the ideal education system for that.

The German graded system was designed specifically to teach kids to show up on time, sit still and do repetitive work all day while their supervisors kept up a steady monitoring of their production. In essence, the graded school system was designed as a production line to produce production line workers.  Great if you are training future workers for arms factories and munitions plants (which, as it turns out, was what the Germans were up to). Not so great for the kind of kids we have in great abundance in America. Don’t get me wrong. Some kids do quite well in a graded setting. I, myself, made good grades, but was bored to distraction and never quite found a job that matched my training.

So I gave teaching a shot.

I once taught at a one teacher school in New Mexico where I had 14 kids in 6 grades on 7 reading levels and at least 8 of them were diagnosable with ADHD. This is not uncommon, especially in rural areas, or at least that was my experience. When I started the kids were an average 3 grade levels behind. Their previous teacher was a rigid, old school teacher, much loved by the school's board of directors (4 of the five of whom were retired or former teachers). The parents, on the other hand, did NOT like the teacher and had demanded a new teacher, threatening to pull their kids out of the school en masse because they hated school and were learning nothing. I took the job because my previous school let me go. I was the last hired, so I was the first to go when the school lost a lot of kids at once. I needed a job. They needed a teacher.

I enjoyed the challenge of my new school. My classroom was a moveable feast. I had to keep the kids going all the time. Our recesses were sometimes rather long to allow the kids to blow off steam. We did a lot of cross-grade mentoring in the classes with older kids helping younger kids with their work. I must have done something right. That year my class reached grade level on average on their achievement tests - some exceeded it. My parents were meeting in their homes for prayer groups at the end of the year, praying I would stay. The school board, meanwhile, asked me to leave. Apparently my school room didn't look like a school room was supposed to.  What I learned was that "old school" was more about appearance than results.

Yesterday I wrote about the objections being floated about corporate foundations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funding new ideas like those proposed by groups like Teach For America and Students First. I think Gates' support for these new education entrepreneurs is admirable. The children of America are not square pegs. They come in a beautiful array of shapes, sizes and learning styles. We need some fresh ideas in education that utilize new technologies and capabilities. Computers, as it turns out, really work with ADHD kids. Maybe that’s Gates’ angle – teach the kids to use computers to educate themselves, so Microsoft will have more customers. I want to know what the heck is wrong with that?  All opponents can give me is either that it threatens the teacher unions or that the funders might make a profit doing it.

Education that makes a profit?  How cool would that be?

What was it Alvin Toffler said? “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” The tools being offered by the Gates Foundation and others are just the tools that kids need to learn, unlearn and relearn throughout their careers.

If Gates sells a few extra copies of Windows or Apple sells a few more Macs as a result of their investments in education, I can live with that. If they make it possible for young education entrepreneurs, freed from the shackles of teacher’s unions and politically polarized school systems, to figure out more effective ways to teach kids, I say, “Good on ‘em.”

The old fossils in the education establishment, however, are really gonna hate it.

Tom King

Defending the Phrog Farm - Education "Experts" Opine on Gates Foundation 'Meddling' in Education

Diane Ravitch is puzzled by the Gates Foundation.  Apparently Diane thinks " their efforts to “reform” education are woefully mistaken."  It seems, to Ms. Ravitch's horror, the Gates Foundation is funding "astroturf” groups of young teachers who insist that they don’t want any job protections, don’t want to be rewarded for their experience (of which they have little) or for any additional degrees, and certainly don’t want to be represented by a collective bargaining unit.

And there is the key to Diane's anger with Gates. His foundation supports "non-unionized" groups.

(insert gasp of collective horror)

Also, apparently, Diane can't get a meeting with Bill to tell him her opinion and she seems more than a little upset about that.

Rick Cohen over at Nonprofit Quarterly is also righteously indignant and pulls together a lot of supporting commentary in his article, opining that the Gates Foundation is promoting an anti-teacher, anti-public education agenda in state after state.

I understand Rick and Diane's concern. Education is a frustrating issue, whichever side of the fence you sit on. If you're on the blindly pro-union side, however, all that loose money, uncontrolled by some "collective bargaining unit", must make them nervous. Some schools might take the money and be 'corrupted'.

Diane seems most worried, about the supposed deleterious effects of the Gates Foundation's support for a non-unionized, dare I say, free market approach to education. As soon as anyone funds a group that is even looking at an approach that rewards performance rather than time served, the pro-union crowd rises up with pitchforks and torches.

Myself, I've watched too many outstanding teachers over the years fired because they rocked the union boat, made other teachers look bad, taught in ways that upset their colleagues or drifted outside the holy curriculum. One of my favorite teachers, Marva Collins, left the public school system and started a private school in a garage that quickly filled up with kids who had been kicked out of the Chicago Public School system. I've met some of those kids and they are miles ahead of their peers. Marva could never have taught like she did in the unionized public school system. Her teaching methods would not long have been tolerated.

What the Gates Foundation's support of non-unionized teachers does is add a competitive element to education. (And, yes, Virginia, there are teachers who don't want to be in teacher's unions.) How that having a place in education for nonunion teachers profits Microsoft is something of a mystery to me.

Any school that doesn't want Gates' money is, of course, free to not take it and go ahead and do what they want, just as my own alma mater chose not to accept government education grants and the strings that come with them.

Let's face it, the public school system is in dismal shape in much of America. Even the kids know it and are rebelling even more than we were back in the 60s. What's wrong with trying something different?

Kids and parents both want education that teaches our young-uns to do something valuable, something marketable so they have good jobs when they grow up and don't have to live in our basements. Companies (including the evil corporations) want trained workers too. So why is it so bad to teach kids more of the kinds of things that get them good jobs and start successful careers? Foundations wanting to fund innovation in education shouldn't damage the unionized education system if, as the unions claim, their system is better. If kids aren't getting a good education, parents will simply refuse to pay for it and send their kids back to class with a suitably reliable union teacher.

Why not, let's try something new and see if it works better before we summarily pitch out the bath without checking if the baby is still in there? The biggest complaint parents like me have with education is that the teachers unions protect bad teachers, reward them with steady raises and benefits no matter what sort of miserable teacher they prove themselves to be. All they have to do is mark time and not do anything spectacular.

I'm wondering why paying teachers by how well their kids learn isn't a good idea. So what if some students are poorly motivated, poorly disciplined and troubled. Shouldn't we as parents be willing to pay teachers who have the ability to handle those tough kids, motivate them and inspire them. And I'm tired of hearing teachers whine about the poor quality of their students.

I worked with multi-diagnosis emotionally disturbed kids. They came from horrific homes. I did things with my kids that people said couldn't be done. My kids struggled; a few let me down, but for the most part, they made me proud to be their teacher. I worked outside the teacher's unions and the education system. Our kids had the best outcomes records in the state next to other treatment centers and we were hated by our colleagues and our government supervisors for showing them up.

I'm tired of the teacher's unions complaining that we are teaching children to be good test takers and yet quote the results of those same tests to prove that we need to spend more money (largely on union teacher salaries and dues) ostensibly to enable our kids able to pass those same tests with as good a grades as their Japanese or Europeans counterparts.

Little secret here - that's going to take more than a little "teaching to the test" to kick up those test scores and prove that all that money was well spent.

The problem with governments and unions and even schools is that they mistake sameness for fairness. If they could make us all "C" students, I think they might be happy.  They know damned good and well they're not going to make "A" students out of all of them. 

In so-called "progressive" societies and organizations, if you do too well, if you stick your head above the crowd, the rest of the group WILL lop your head right off for making the rest of them look bad.  It's well known that at Harvard and other progressive Ivy league schools that the quickest way to not get tenure is to win the teacher of the year award. Unions all meant well in the beginning, but, especially in the field of education, they've turned schools into swamps.

Management guru, Dr. Jerry Harvey, once pointed out in his insightful 1977 paper, "Organizations as Phrog Farms" that:

"The Job of most swamp managers is to maintain and enhance the swamp, not to drain it.... The purpose of swamp consultants—in the eyes of swamp managers—is to help the swamp operate more effectively."

Simply substitute "school superintendents" for "swamp managers" and "teacher's unions"  for "swamp consultants".

You should read professor's Harvey's wonderfully subversive book: The Abilene Paradox and Other Meditations on Management.  It explains what happened to education and why many big corporations, especially the ones that are "too big to fail" aren't much better off.

Dr. Harvey's paper "The Abilene Paradox" explains as well as any book on management I've ever read, why groups of people try to make good decisions about what to do and with the best of intentions, manage to decide to do what nobody wants to do and make themselves miserable in the process.  I recommend reading the book curled up in a chair with no distractions.  You can get the two key articles at the above links in a pdf file, but be warned:  there is a danger of spewing coffee all over your computer monitor.  Just so you know the risk.

Just one man's opinion.

Tom King

An Open Letter to President Hoffa

 

September 7, 2011

James P. Hoffa

International Brotherhood of Teamsters
25 Louisiana Avenue NW,
Washington, DC 20001

Dear Mr. Hoffa:

You, sir, seem to have no idea who the members of the Tea Party are.  We are not corporate shills. I’ve never received a dime to attend any rally or event, nor been offered any incentive to cast my vote in a certain way – something the Teamster’s Union can’t say with any honesty.  If your recent call for the Teamster’s “to take the son of a bitches out” was designed to intimidate me and other Tea Party members, you badly miscalculated. You have only succeeded in mobilizing us to further action.  All you accomplished was to encourage us to keep our ammunition a little closer and a little more accessible.

Nobody in the Tea Party I belong to declared any war on the unions or on your puppet president. We did however show up to vote last time and we’re going to do it again.  We’re sick and tired of the damage you and our cronies in the Democrat Party are doing to our country.

You can label us, you can threaten us and you can try to intimidate us, but wouldn’t it be better to listen and find out what our concerns are?  Your father thought he could use the Mob to help the union. Maybe you believe you can use the Democrats and the Liberal/Progressives in the same way.  You’re mistaken.

Once they are through with you and have the Worker’s Paradise in place, they’ll have no further need for the Union Brownshirts. Remember the night of the long knives. It’s happened before and it can happen again. Capitalism pays the workers that pay the union dues that keep you in that nice big office of yours in Washington. Don’t kid yourself like your old man did or you could wind up like he did. And it won’t be little old ladies from the Tea Party who did it.  Remember Leon Trotsky. Tyrants have no use for troublemakers.

I’ve sent you a nice unused bag of Lipton Tea.  Make yourself a nice hot cup or better yet, some iced tea and try and remember that the Tea Party folk are regular Americans just like your membership.  We will fight for your right to exist and to speak and to vote the way you wish, even when you call us “sons of bitches”.  The threat, however, was a bit much. We would appreciate it if you’d remember why we fought the Revolution in the first place.  Believe it or not, we’re on the same side.

Tom King

Puyallup, Washington (late of East Texas)

Shouldn't Firefighters Receive Fair Pay and Pensions?

....and benefits.

(c) 2011 by Tom King 

Union rally for so-called "Free Choice" law prohibiting secret ballot elections on unionization

There are friends and loved ones I count on to sound the proverbial B.S. alert when the press and PR guys have done their work exceptionally well. Someone whose opinion I value asked recently whether people actually believe that firefighters and cops who risk their lives daily in their jobs should be denied fair wages, benefits and pensions. Apparently the spin doctors have convinced good old soft-hearted Americans that the governor of Wisconsin is going to take away the pensions and bennies of cops, teachers and firemen.

You know, when someone has to tell outright lies to people in order to get them on their side, there's something unholy going on - unholy with a capital "U".

I'm not sure who it is that doesn't think firefighters should get benefits or pensions?  The implication is that it's those nasty tea-partiers and the mean people they elected to the statehouse in Wisconsin. Well it's not. Everybody thinks we should pay these guys a fair wage. Where we have a problem is when they start demanding an unfair wage.

I have a real problem with the union bosses that use rank and file union members to strong arm the taxpayer and that's what is happening here. In essence, these thugs are attempting to force taxpayers to pay more than we can afford to feed a badly mismanaged and bloated union bureaucracy. The unions are the problem, not the firefighters, but the unions have hired PR people to do all they can to cloud the issue and manipulate the media coverage. Their purpose is to make it appear that the whole thing is about cheating cops and teachers and firemen out of a fair wage.

"But unions have done so much good!" someone protests.  And that's true. They have helped stop the exploitation of American workers by corrupt robber baron industrialists. No argument there.  But this fight is not about past history. Wisconsin public sector employees are doing quite well thank you very much. The problem is with a bloated union bureaucracy that is never satisfied with what it has.

Any time you create a powerful governing structure, it's only as good as the people who run it.  Unfortunately, power attracts corruption. The problem is that the only reason for a union to exist is to "improve" the lot of the worker. Once the worker is getting a fair shake, the union leadership finds itself looking for a reason to exist. The leadership soon becomes discontent with merely managing the pension funds. They find themselves trying to justify an ever more bloated union bureaucracy and covering up, in many cases, misuse of union funds, malfeasance and even embezzlement. The bosses need to gin up new issues so they can call a strike once in a while, just to prove the leadership is worth what it's being paid.  So, the union bosses encourage an adversarial relationship with the employer and the employer is forced to charge more for his product. As a result, in order to maintain adequate profit levels for their investors, many companies wind up sending their manufacturing jobs overseas. The unions have killed more than one industry that way.

Look unions have done a lot of good where abuses were taking place. The federal government should have been part of protecting workers in the first place, but for too long the powerful leaders in Washington have been taking money from the corporations. Sadly, when the unions came along demanding a fair shake for workers, the politicians merely switched to playing a double game with both sides - one against the other and using the consumer/taxpayer as a cash cow to fund the whole deal.

There comes a point when any organization gains too much power and needs to have its wings clipped by its membership. That takes courage. It's time union members realize that they have a responsibility to the people who buy their goods and services. The problem in Wisconsin is that the public sector unions provide essential services. The consumer of the public sector union's product (the taxpayer) has no choice about purchasing those services anywhere else. With the auto industry, we had a choice of not buying cars that were too expensive or shoddily made. The consumer, by his buying habits, was able to curtail the excesses of both union and corporate fat cats who had to scale back their profit and wage expectations and improve their product in order to survive as an industry. Even then, the feds found a way to charge the taxpayer for cleaning up the mess that the bosses in both the corporations and the unions made over the years.

That's why I'm less than sympathetic with public sector employees. The only way the taxpayer (who consumes public sector services) can withdraw his support of a service he thinks is over-priced is to withdraw from the bargaining table and make it the responsibility of local cities, counties and state governing bodies to set the wages of public sector workers. That is actually a fair way to do that. If employees are unhappy with their wage, they may quit and go to work somewhere else. A city that wants good workers will, in turn, have to pay a competitive rate or workers will go elsewhere to find jobs.

If you don't believe your local public sector employees are getting a fair wage, simply approach the appropriate government body on their behalf. Attend public forums where budgets are discussed and speak up for fair wages for your garbage men, cops and even firefighters. I promise you, you have much more influence with your city council or county commission than you do with union bosses and state bureaucrats, who cut deals behind closed doors and use methods and do things to close deals that you would be apalled at if you knew the details.

Corruption is always an issue when you gather too much power in the hands of too few people. That's what's happened with the public sector union in Wisconsin. The state is in major budget trouble and the union bosses don't care. They would rather destroy the private sector economy through massive taxation than to compromise on already over-inflated salary and benefit packages in order to help the state ride out the crisis. The only move for the taxpayer is to elect officials who will take the union bosses out of the wage-setting process. Nobody wants starving firemen, but since they already make twice to three times what I did when I was risking my life daily working with emotionally disturbed kids, I'm not terribly sympathetic. I spent 30 years working in the nonprofit sector doing my best to do good for others. I had knives pointed at my face; two by fours swung at me; I had to restrain and protect large, violent people who wanted to do me harm. I had to deal with 5 to 7 such incidents a day working for not much more than minimum wage while a similar government employee received 2 to 3 times that much as I did with benefits (which I did not get).

The reason for that was that the public sector unions made certain that the state paid private sector agencies, not only less than what they gave to government facilities (about a third), but also only 80 to 90% of what it actually cost to do the job. The nonprofits had to raise the rest themselves rind ways to do the job with volunteers.

Do I wish I had a fat pension? Do I wish I had a guaranteed job making two or three times what the average worker in my town makes? It would certainly be nice, but I chose to follow my career track in non-government public service knowing full well that I was making a sacrifice to do so.

 Public sector and private sector unions are two different creatures. If you're a private sector union and get greedy, I just buy my goods elsewhere. You can't do that with public sector unions. Tell you what. I'll support collective bargaining for teachers when the government institutes a voucher system for schools that allows me to take my kid elsewhere if they aren't doing their jobs.

I can hear the public sector unions howling from here at the mere mention of that idea!

Just one man's opinion...

Tom King

Prophets and Unions and Socialists, Oh My!

Glenn Beck is not alone in distrusting unions....

© 2011 by Tom King

A best-selling writer (not a radio talk show host or conservative blogger) wrote the following excerpts:

“Those who claim to be the children of God are in no case to bind up with the labor unions that are formed or that shall be formed. This the Lord forbids. Cannot those who study the prophecies see and understand what is before us?"

"A few men will combine to grasp all the means to be obtained in certain lines of business. Trades unions will be formed, and those who refuse to join these unions will be marked men."

“These unions are one of the signs of the last days. Men are binding up in bundles ready to be burned.”

"Unionism has revealed what it is by the spirit that it has manifested. It is controlled by the cruel power of Satan. Those who refuse to join the unions formed are made to feel this power. The principles governing the forming of these unions seem innocent, but men have to pledge themselves to serve the interests of these unions, or else they may have to pay the penalty of refusal with their lives."

Her name was Ellen White and members of her church consider her one who had the gift of prophecy, though she did not, herself, claim to be a prophet. In fact, the church considers refusal to join unions a tenet of faith because of a whole series of these warnings to the church that unions would eventually be complicit in the actions that will confirm the power of the Anti-Christ, the so-called “Beast” of Revelation. She wrote these warnings in the late 1800s and early 20th century until her death in 1915. Whether you believe she had the prophetic gift or not, her warning against unions (and corporate monopolies) seems prescient given that at the time, unions were actually accomplishing some good on behalf of workers in areas like child labor, workplace safety and fair pay.

Today, a hundred years later, we see Union-sponsored unrest worldwide and spreading quickly. Mrs. White was not the last person to issue warnings about unions either. In the 1950s, newspaperman Victor Riesel had acid thrown in his face for warning about union corruption. The Kennedy brothers, Jack and Robert, both made efforts to address union corruption issues and faced threats on their lives for their trouble. Notably, Robert Kennedy once claimed that Americans didn't know of tenth of how corrupt the union bosses were.

Recently, radio talk show host, Glenn Beck, has drawn widespread public ridicule from mainstream media pundits for his allegations that unions are part of an unholy alliance with progressive socialists and Islamist fanatics.

Yet, many Christians find themselves increasingly uncomfortable with the behavior of unions in a world in which sweeping cultural and political changes appear to be marginalizing, if not actually threatening, the faith. Union leaders, increasingly anti-capitalist and pro-socialist with a dash of atheism thrown in for good measures, appear to be on the side of the progressive/socialist forces within our government. Many Christians fear a loss of fundamental rights like the right to freedom of religion, speech, assembly and the right to bear arms if political forces jockeying for power today have their way. With unions marching lock step with progressives, evironmentalists and even their own churches many suspect the corruption may be as deep as Robert Kennedy suggested.

A Christian church member (not my church) just yesterday, reported finding his church's bulletin board plastered with pro-progressive messages urging parishioners to “support” causes like global-warming, environmental issues, universal health care and even so-called “women's reproductive rights” causes because "that's what Jesus would do". She complained that the pastor's homily sounded more like a Democrat stump speech than a sermon.


I'm not surprised. God criticized the last historical church described in Revelation as "lukewarm" and wishy-washy (not His words - mine).  I suspect God knew we'd need further guidance and didn't stop sending messages to the human race just because the last of his disciples died off. There have been other messengers to the church time and again throughout the history of the Christian church who have steered us in the direction we should go.

Whatever does happen in the coming months, one thing is clear: Christians are becoming more aware that there are signs in the Earth that as Shakespeare put it, “Something wicked this way comes.”

Jesus said, “When you see all these things, recognize that the end is near, even at the door.” When I was a young man no one talked much about the Second Coming of Christ. Now, I find myself talking about the coming of Jesus and the end of the world with strangers in the street, the checker at the grocery store and Facebook friends.

I've always thought God would let his people know when it was time. It seems He's doing just that, albeit using some rather unusual prophetic tools. It really doesn't surprise me, though. After all, God does have a habit of working “in mysterious ways”.

Tom