Thursday, May 1, 2008

Disband Those Unions?

Here's a great essay by Joan Tintor. Joan makes her case against the unions - and her arguments are quite convincing:
Think of the state of our roads, the quality of our education and health care, the cleanliness of our streets. The overall tax burden has grown, but this has hardly been matched by an increase in the quality of government services. Yet the wages and benefits of public sector workers continue to rise. Of course they do: by their very nature, public sector unions tend to drive up the costs and size of government. Union dues – themselves a cost driver – go to employ officials whose full-time work consists of filing grievances, lobbying the government for more workers, coordinating with other unions and supporting sympathetic candidates.
To this I may add that union dues not only go to the pockets of overpaid executives and left-wing candidates, but also to various special interest groups, including radical feminists and militant homosexuals. Members who oppose those policies gets ostracized.

Not to mention some of the unions going as far as putting their nose into international affairs and declaring a boycott on Israel for daring to protect its citizens from terrorist attacks. What does that have to do with negotiating just wages and acceptable working conditions - for which the unions were created in the first place?

Even if disbanding the unions would be going too far, what we definitely need is a complete overhaul of Canada's labor laws. First and foremost - there should be a right for people to opt-out of union membership and to create their own alternative unions. Union activity should be restricted to its actual raison d'ĂȘtre which is maintaining fair working conditions for its members, not political activism or promotion of marginal special interest groups at members' expense.

No member should be forced to contribute against his will, directly or indirectly, to any cause or interest he doesn't support. Those unwilling to remain union members, should have the right to direct their union dues to a charitable organization of their choice. It should be unions for the people, not people for the unions.

P.S. This essay was originally posted by Joan about couple years ago. Check out the comments - they are worth reading. And yes, I know that today is "may day" so I posted this on purpose :)

2 comments:

Nik said...

It's unfortunate that you believe there is something wrong with feminists and homosexuals. I sincerely hope you can find a time machine to return your ideals to the 1800s.

Leonard said...

Well, it's unfortunate that you choose to ignore known facts that homosexual lifestyle is a serious health hazard and that feminists proclaim superiority of women, rather than equality.

As for the time machine - guess what - it's not going to be me needing it after all. You see, since you folks have have aborted most of your children and since it's getting harder for you to recruit ours - your society will collapse in a generation; two at most.

What will happen then - try to figure that out yourself if you ever choose to get out of your coma. But in the end it might be you looking for a time machine, hoping to travel back in time rather than face the consequences of all those social experiments which you support today.