Unions: Outdated and Unnecessary

There is a growing rift dividing Americans. Two factions are beginning to emerge, even further cracking the façade of unity in our still-young republic; the division is based on whether one belongs to organized labor or not, or whether one supports organized labor or not. Both factions seek to use to the power of the governments, local, state, and federal, to further their agendas.

The unions want their employers—ie., those that pay their wages—to give them more: higher wages, longer vacations, more benefits, higher pensions. They want to be paid more without working longer or harder, and without the marketplace making their skills and their labor more valuable. If their employers refuse to do so, they’ll use strikes and their influence in government to forcibly obtain their demands. This is particularly the case in regarding unions of public-sector employees, who are paid, by way of the government, with the tax dollars of the American people. Put another way, the unions want more of your money.

The non-union majority, however, wants the government to take less from them. The government spends and spends, and even if it were able to pay for its spending with higher taxes, it would make paupers of the entire nation. These people, the productive individuals of the nation, are “mad as hell”, and they are not going to take it anymore.

My father is the American dream personified. He grew up in a working-class family, son of the first licensed and accredited black plumber in Long Island. His parents divorced when he was a teenager, and he lived in fairly squalid conditions in South Carolina with his father, who was losing himself to alcoholism. He graduated early from high school, worked his way through college and law school, passed the bar, married, had three children, and is now a successful lawyer, at least, as successful as one can be in a small town in the poorest county in California. And yet my father, as he enters his fifties, the prime of his career, is sick of it and wants to quit. Living in the highest-taxed state in the nation, between state, federal, and local taxes he is forced to watch as more than half of every dollar he earns is taken from him. He is at the point now where it is easier for him to earn less and see less of it taken by taxes, than to try to earn more and be robbed of half his earnings.

And what becomes of his money? It supports parasites. It provides ER services, ambulance rides, public schools, police and prison to house the illegal immigrants who, as FAIR has estimated, cost the state of California twelve billion dollars every year.

Even if every illegal alien within the United States vanished tonight while we’re sleeping, there would still be domestic leaches sucking off the wealth of our nation’s hard-working producers. The criminals sitting in our prisons, getting food, shelter, medical treatment, and even education all as rewards for the damages they’ve inflicted upon society. Welfare trash of every race, white included; it’s not a racial problem, as my own family’s history has demonstrated quite clearly to me, but one of some individuals being garbage, plain and simple.

The unions are the worst parasites of them all, because they’ve been so detrimental to our economy. They’ve made American business unprofitable, forcing companies to close or to go overseas. The biggest factor in the failure of GM and Chrysler was the damned UAW, which forced GM to sink most of it’s earnings into the obscene, bloated pensions of former employees. GM had to borrow money to pay pensions, and yet some people are still wondering why they failed. And now, instead of letting them pay for their stupidity, and their cowardice in the face of the union leaders’ demands, GM is getting propped up by our tax money¸and the UAW is now the second-largest shareholder (the first is now the federal government).

Unions are out-dated and unnecessary, and pensions are no longer sustainable in a world of long life expectancies and slow or negative population growth. GM might have thought the UAW’s demands were reasonable back in 1950, when the Big Three signed the “Treaty of Detroit” (Google it for more), but now, people live too darn long, too many diseases are treatable (but expensive to treat!) and Americans have fewer kids and they have those kids older in life. The only way to pay for pensions is to incur the costs during the career of the worker; most private employers have phased-out fixed pensions in favor of systems such as a 401-k model, except, of course, the Big Three, and the government, all because of the unions.

The role of the unions in protecting worker rights should not be carried out by unions, which work for the benefit of their members alone, and are accountable to their members alone, but by the government, which is accountable to the people, and, at least ideally, works for the best interests of the entire population, not just the union members. Unlike our current system, under such a system the government (but only when asked to intervene) would be able to listen to the demands of a company’s workers, then listen to the company leadership, audit their books, and, then decide whether the workers’ demands are reasonable or not. If they say, “Nope, sorry guys, but I’ve looked at the books and there is no way the company can afford to give you all twenty-five percent raises and forty days paid vacation without going under,” then that’s that. The workers could strike, but they’d just be fired and replaced. Only when a disinterested third party- one accountable to the electorate-becomes the arbiter of wages will wages be fair. The market sets wages, true, but employers can get greedy and cut salaries, and, were it not for minimum wage, would pay as little as possible. Employees, especially when part of large, nation-wide unions that are politically-active, are also prone to greed, and can put their own interests over the health of the companies or businesses that employ them, as well as the health of greater economy and nation as a whole.

We need a white collar/non-union working class rebellion, and the first targets of that rebellion should be the unions. Workers deserve a living wage, that is true, but what is also true is that a man should be entitled to what he earns. The government should not be in the business of redistributing wealth, and, rather than encouraging dependence and an unproductive existence, as Obama wants the government to do, it should instead provide equality of opportunity and a fair playing field, and encourage productivity and enterprise.

Our nation is headed for an unhappy future if the most productive citizens would rather work less and instead receive a handout for doing nothing. Such conditions increase the parasitic burden on the remaining producers, forcing more to switch from being productive to being the burden of the productive, until no producers are left, at which point our nation ceases to be the superpower of the world and instead becomes like Zimbabwe, or like Barack Hussein Obama Sr.’s native Kenya.

If you wish for this country to keep this high standard of living we enjoy, and not become a sprawling Third-World slum, do your patriotic duty, and tell a union worker to go jump in a lake filled with leeches. Maybe then they’d see how unpleasant it is having your life’s blood sucked dry by slimy parasites.

2 Responses to “Unions: Outdated and Unnecessary”

1. Jeff Nettleton says:

   June 29, 2009 at 5:36 pm

   “Workers deserve a living wage, that is true, but what is also true is that a man should be entitled to what he earns. The government should not be in the business of redistributing wealth, and, rather than encouraging dependence and an unproductive existence, as Obama wants the government to do, it should instead provide equality of opportunity and a fair playing field, and encourage productivity and enterprise.”

   Equality of opportunity is a farcical notion at its very core. Regardless of how equal opportunities are, there are so many factors that can enable one to take advantage of their opportunities to a greater extent than another that at the end of the line, what it really boils down to is not what opportunities are available to someone, but what assets they have in their life that allow them to capitalize on their opportunities. No matter how hard a child in a family of five with a single mother that works paycheck to paycheck tries, the likelihood that they will end up on top is exponentially lower than that of a child who begins life with everything.

   Government should be obligated to provide equality of outcome, with free schooling from childhood onwards, whether it be university or vocational school, free and equitable healthcare, among a host of other things. Unions should be unnecessary, for the workplaces which employ union labor should be nationalized to nullify competition and ensure equality and fairness. Bollocks to those who say that government corporations are always doomed to inefficiency and bureaucratic deadlock; if the focus is always on decentralization and efficiency, there should never be an issue. The In-N-Out Corporation is the perfect example of an entirely vertically integrated entity that runs beautifully. You are trying to create equality in an inherently inequitable and flawed system, as opposed to viewing the problem through another lens.

   In conclsion, it’s not the unions that are the problem, but the system that systematically attempts at every turn to take advantage of it’s constituents rather than assist them in their every need.
2. Jeff Nettleton says:

   June 29, 2009 at 7:48 pm

   Additionally, the “issue” of illegal immigrants could be largely remedied if instead of sitting by idly and complaining about their being “parasites” on our society and clamoring for their immediate deportation, their presence in our country was legitimized and their income taxed. I’m not saying that they all need to become citizens, but if they were allowed to be registered as legal workers without the ever-present fear of deportation, and guaranteed the same basic rights and minimum wages as other Americans, then instead of getting two dollars an hour cash under the table, they could be paid a subsistence wage which could then be taxed and therefore contribute to the economy of both California and the country as a whole. People aren’t parasites, parasites are creatures that survive solely by taking advantage of some aspect of another creature’s existence. Illegal immigrants are people, just like you and me, that unfortunately are stuck between a rock and a hard place, trying to provide for their families and themselves in a country that they came to for its promise.