Capitol Offenses are Offensive

This column presents a conservative viewpoint about items of interest in our community and our lives. Focus is on items impacting your pocket book, your personal freedoms, and your rights. I hope you will read the column regularly and it occasionally influences your opinions and actions.

As state after state struggles with budget deficits which have been created by decades of generous spending combined with sudden and significant declines in state revenues created by the current depression or recession (depending on how much you and your family has been impacted thus far), the hapless Governors are running directly into the massive power of the public unions. After millions of private sector employees have been laid off or fired as their companies went out of business or had to go through great sessions of cost cutting, after these destitute workers have suffered month after month of unemployment, …. the pain has finally reached the public sector. The “Time of the Crat” is upon us. It is their turn to feel some of the pain and reality of the recession.

Prior to the 1980’s there was an unwritten understanding between those who chose to work for government and those who chose to work for business and industry. If you worked for government, your pay and benefits might not equal those enjoyed by those working in the private arena, but you had a reasonable retirement and job security. You were almost promised to never be laid off, as government workers were protected from the ups and downs of cycles in industry.

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Alive and Doing Well!

This column presents a conservative viewpoint about items of interest in our community and our lives. Focus is on items impacting your pocket book, your personal freedoms, and your rights. I hope you will read the column regularly and it occasionally influences your opinions and actions.

I find it somewhat ironic that the government is struggling with the problems related to dealing with greedy, aggressive unions. For the past fifty years governments have enacted pro union laws which tilted the scales of justice, and the field of fair play, strongly in the favor of unions. After all, the situation was only dealing with industries and companies, and they were expendable.

Consequently for decades the labor laws, actions of the NLRB, and court rulings were strongly biased on the side of the unions and the poor oppressed workers they represented. (Even if they were auto workers, steel workers, miners, boilermakers, machinist, and other trades which were making hourly rates approaching that of a doctor, dentist, or engineer.) Now those same laws and that same system of bias is working against state and federal officials as they attempt to deal with the unions which now represent the government worker instead of the industrial worker.

I would be silently pleased with this paradox except for one thing …. It is my and your tax dollars that they are negotiating with. In industry it is only the revenues of the involved company that they are greedily squabbling about. However, when it comes to a public union, it is the money the government garnered from poor struggling families that is being delivered to satiate the greed of the public union membership.

For that reason, I do not feel government workers should be allowed to unionize, strike, and collective bargain. The dues they pay goes to support the campaigns of pro union political candidates who enact legislation which favors more payments and benefits for the union members, often promising benefit levels which are unsustainable, which causes taxpayers to pay more and this cycle of greed and corruption continues until the system fails. That is the condition we are approaching today. It must be stopped. Government unions must be curtailed.

They have created a situation where the public servant is making more and has more luxurious benefits than the hard working taxpayers. Their practices have allowed our school systems to become impregnated with underperforming teachers which can not be terminated. Their practices make wasteful, unproductive elements within the bureaucracies become more and more commonplace. We can no longer afford their presence and actions.

It is paradoxical that the unions played a major role in pushing labor costs and regulatory actions against U.S. industry upward in an unchecked manner for some sixty years, until we finally created a cost model which could not compete on the world market.

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