If you dont come in Sunday, dont come in Monday -- cause its Labor Day! Lets hear it for unions! Forgive me, however, if I shed no more than crocodile tears for the poor, put-upon employer. Unions exist to redress what is historically and consistently an imbalance of power between those who hire and those who do the work. We have moved beyond the most egregious abuses of the late 1800s - dehumanizing sweatshops with their if-you-dont-come-in-Sunday,-dont-come-in-Monday attitude - but the constant pressure to improve the bottom line leads to coal mining companies ignoring safety protocols and school districts putting sixty students in a class. The cards are still stacked in favor of management, and that disparity will only get worse as a result of the Citizens United ruling giving corporations the ability to give unlimited funds to candidates. Unions are the best and nearly the only check-and-balance in the system. I consistently see newspaper articles which compare how much public employees pay for their benefits with how much private employees pay for their benefits, with the clear implication that those public employees paying less are somehow scamming the system which would, in a laissez-faire, market-driven economy, require them to pay more. This is akin to saying that Equity actors on tour should not receive their generally higher salaries, pension payments, and health benefits because there are lots of non-Equity actors who dont get them. But is a market-driven race to the bottom on salaries and benefits truly in the greater public interest? Perhaps these “artificially” high wages and low benefit payments are a good thing; and the low wages and high benefit costs are actually a bad thing. The struggle in Wisconsin is a clear-cut choice. The unions have indicated their willingness to pay more of their compensation toward health insurance and pension benefits, and Governor Walker has rebuffed this near-total capitulation, insisting on the stripping away of collective bargaining rights. It is a war against unionism, and if the efforts to dismantle public unions are successful, unions in private industry will be next. As Florence Reece, the wife of a United Mine Workers organizer, wrote 80 years ago: Which side are you on, which side are you on?
Posted on: Mon, 01 Sep 2014 12:37:26 +0000