Unions – Unionized Against Freedom
December 29, 2009
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Posted by Michael S. Langston
This year is really a banner year for the unions. Recently, they begin early pushing the Obama administration to pass the double-speak entitled bill, the Employee Free Choice Act (which actually removes individual free choice - here @DA).
Not content with simply removing your right to vote anonymously and thereby reduce your freedom of association, they went to the state level. There they decided that individual business owners can now be forced by law into the union (here @ WSJ):
…A year ago in December, Ms. Berry and more than 40,000 other home-based day care providers statewide were suddenly informed they were members of Child Care Providers Together Michigan—a union created in 2006 by the United Auto Workers and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees….
& obviously they are doing this for a reason:
…Today the Department of Human Services siphons about $3.7 million in annual dues to the union—from the child-care subsidies….
But not to worry, the union is doing something with all that money. More lobbying:
…Ms. Berry now sees money once paid to her go to a union that does little for her. She says she is “self employed and wants nothing to do with the union.”
The union claims it is working for Ms. Berry and others like her by pressing the legislature to increase child-care payments….
For the score keepers at home – the government through union lobbying has forced (by law) private citizens running their own commercial enterprise to pay dues, which they graciously will remove from their state reimbursed child-care subsidy checks…. all in order to lobby the government to raise the child-care subsidy.
For the union organization itself though – lobbying dollars spent pays off. Also from earlier this year, during bankruptcy of large companies involving unions, they got paid first (here @ DA):
…Now we have POTUS playing politics with the rule of law. Ensuring money goes to unions before secured creditors, the same unions who are using that money to buy up assets of the companies they helped to bankrupt….
The unions and their elected representatives of course are playing the game as designed and currently played by the voters. The unions know based upon their membership and war chest they can affect the outcome of an election. The leaders they help get elected know this and therefore craft union friendly legislation.
Effectively the unions moved away from an organization championing workers’ rights, into another corporation using the government to ensure their continued existence. & by doing so, they will ultimately raise the cost of doing business for everyone, including the working families they claim to support.
As always in a representative government, the voters are ultimately to blame. Whether their failure is due to an inability to care, critically think, understand basic economic incentives, or lack of equilibrium between the moons of Venus & Neptune…
Irregardless of why, given the current state of incentives and voters unwillingness to punish their legislators, unions will continue to rent-seek at the expense of the average citizen.
Categories: Economics, Free Market Principles, Politics
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Tags: Critical Thinking, Economics, Freedom, Incentives, Legislation, Politics, Unions
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