Saturday, March 05, 2011

What unions can do for you

There once was a time when Harry and Nancy Harrington — their teenage children in tow — walked the picket line outside the nursing home where she was a medical aide, protesting the lack of a pension plan for the unionized work force.

But those days of family solidarity are gone.

Harry now blames years of union demands for an exodus of manufacturing jobs from this blue-collar city on the shore of Lake Michigan. He praises new Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker for attempting to strip public employee unions of nearly all of their collective bargaining rights. Protesters opposed to Walker's plan have held steady at the Wisconsin Capitol for nearly three weeks, though their overnight sit-ins ended Thursday with a judge's order.

"I'm sorry, but the unions want to yell, they want to intimidate," says Harry Harrington, 69, as he sets a coffee cup down next to another newspaper headline about the union demonstrations.

"They want to be heard," retorts Nancy Harrington, 66, who fears a weakened union would jeopardize the teaching career of their now 38-year-old daughter.

The Harringtons typify the new national reality for labor unions. Support is no longer a sure thing from the middle class_ not even in a city long considered a union stronghold in a state that gave birth to the nation's largest public employee union. National polls show that the portion of the public that views unions favorably has dropped to near historic lows in recent years, dipping below 50 percent by some accounts.

All I can say is that I grew up in a Teamster household. When those bastards pay my dad back the pension money they stole, I might be willing to support a union again.

More....

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Unions mode of operation is simple: get the biggest percentage of money possible. They do not add net value to society, just transfer it around. Bad business model for survival.

Anonymous said...

I was watching the WI unions complain that their collective bargaining rights are under assault. Bargaining rights against whom? The taxpayer basically.

Then it occurred to me that taxpayers also have collective bargaining rights under the US Constitution. It's called election day. We elect representatives to carry out our collective will. The WI democratic state reps, by fleeing the state and shutting down the electoral process, are denying the collective bargaining rights won by the majority of WI taxpayers.

Anonymous said...

Everything in this whole debate, and I mean everything, comes down to public union benefits, and mostly the pensions. The public pensions were a nifty way for politicians to beef up the ultimate pay of public union employees without raising taxes. The long term nature of a pension fund, along with the amount of funds involved allow all sorts of financial tricks to be played by public trustees. Overoptimistic investment and income assumptions can be made regarding a pension fund and promises are made based on those assumptions. When the assumptions don't pan out the finance breaks down....but the promises remain. That's where we are now and it causes the kind of dysfunction going on in WI and OH.

Everyone needs to take an honest look at this. The WI governor is not trying to break the union. Just limiting their right to negotiate long term pensions. It makes sense because the autopilot nature of pensions will fly the public system into the side of the mountain.

My opinion is to for the state system to liquidate the pension fund and give it to the union to manage. Then pay the union a lump sum that they negotiate every year. That lump sum would be equivalent to current public expenditures on wages, health care, and pension funding. It will be up to the union to decide how much to allocate to wages, health care, and pension funding for members.

Under that system, the union can still collectively bargain for all forms of benefits under one blanket fee. You'd think that unions would accept this? Not likely. Why? Because in the current system where pensions are negotiated as a separate line, taxpayers bail out the inevitable shortfall. A union managed pension would force members to hold union leadership accountable. The dynamic would be completely different if a union-owned pension was being depleted. The union would never go for this because they have been conditioned for decades that it's much more lucrative to negotiate a promise made by this generation that must be kept by the next. That's the type of cycle of corruption that needs to be stopped now or the plane will hit the mountain soon.