Governor Walker, Unions and Public Employee Bullies

I am much less an anti-union person than most people would imagine.  I was active in my teachers’ union (National Education Association) for years.  I was building rep, grievance rep, picket captain during three strikes and spent two years as co-chair of the teachers’ negotiation committee in a state that did NOT have collective bargaining rights for its public employees. The NEA, by the way, calls itself a professional organization, but if you waddle like a duck, quack like a duck and swim in the pond with other ducks, chances are you are, indeed, a duck.

There is a huge difference between a public employee union and a private union.  Modern private unions grew out of the market place imbalances of the industrial revolution.  People were looking for work in the rapidly expanding industries located in the cities.  Because of the glut of workers, most needing little if any special skills and therefore easily replaced, the majority of the power was with the employers, not the employees.  Even employers like E. I. du Pont de Nemours, a leader in responsible and humane employee care, had limits to their largesse; lest their costs exceed the markets elasticity and everyone lose their job.  This imbalance of power led to excesses on the part of companies all at the employees’ expense.  However, God hates a bully and it is the nature of mankind to fight back when your back hits the wall; ergo, the creation of the labor movement and unions.  [For those of you who are experts in this area, I apologize for condensing a whole semester’s class into one paragraph, but you get my point.]

What made the labor movement a proper exercise in human social evolution was the fact that it corrected disequilibrium.  Those first union workers were like our first civil rights proponents.  They risked it all.  It wasn’t just their jobs on the line, it was their very lives.  There is no doubt that the people who unionized this country were fighting the right fight, driven to the brink of what a human being can take, and achieved a better economy, democracy and national soul for their efforts. 

Unfortunately, just as the market place rises to equilibrium, human frailty succumbs to corruption.  There are users and fixers and ruthless, exploiting scum everywhere.  Some people will grab power every chance they get.  The public employee unions are leading that pack.  They found the sweet spot in union negotiations.  Public employees are negotiating salaries, working conditions and benefits, not with a company president who knows he will sink or swim on the success of his company, but with the taxpayers who are as diverse and individually powerless as the original mill workers.  The only people the public employee unions have to keep happy are the legislators whom they elect through organized votes and powerful, well-funded political action committees.  By putting all of the power in the hands of the public employee grandees, the unions have created their own disequilibrium.  And like all those with too much power they have misused it.  They have become the bullies.  It is the unions who have chosen to disregard the good of the whole body.  Like a hemorrhagic virus, they consume the host they depend on for life and are now shocked to find themselves without a victim.  The proof of this is in how the union membership fled when they were no longer coerced into joining.  Evidently the product doesn’t sell itself!

Gov. Scott Walker had the guts to stand up to these bullies.  He survived a recall and justice prevailed.

 On Wisc, and keep the faith!