Labor Unions Are Not Friends Of The Working Man/Woman

A series of TV ads by UnionFacts.org has been hitting the airwaves lately, slamming the labor unions for their attempts to make changes to the way employees can decide to form a union.

One of those changes is to do away with secret ballots, long a mainstay of American democracy. Union leaders say secret ballots allow employers to threaten potential union members, though how that can be is something I've puzzled over for some time. Instead, the unions want to replace the secret ballot with an “open” voting procedure which consists of merely signing a card. If this method doesn't lend itself to intimidation, I don't know what will. And in this case the intimidation will more likely come from the union organizers and not the employer. It's strong arm tactics they want written into law.

Here's one ad run by UnionFacts.org showing how it would work:





You think it wouldn't be like that? You're wrong.

Having been a member in good standing of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers for 20 years, I can say from first hand knowledge that it probably would be, at least in some areas of the country. And while union membership can have its advantages, there are plenty of disadvantages, too.





In my local, if you didn't have a certain ethnic last name (no, not Italian, but Portuguese), you had zero chance of being elected as a steward or any kind of union official, unless of course you married onto one of the families that were the backbone of the local. Needless to say, my experience with union stewardship soured me on unions.

While there are still a few professions where I believe unions are a necessity, for the most part they have far outlived their usefulness. While they purport to protect working Americans, most of the protections they used to provide are now codified in labor law, something the unions themselves pushed for.

For decades now labor union membership has been shrinking. Some of that can be attributed to the loss of jobs in the so-called Rust Belt, and some to foreign competition. But other losses can be attributed to union abuses that ended up forcing businesses that had employed their members to close their doors or to relocate because they couldn't meet the demands of the unions. If that isn't an example of how the unions aren't really looking out for the welfare of their members, then I don't know what is.