My Take On Unions….

At the heart, this is what unions fought for.

No. This has nothing to do with the Civil versions.

I’m talking the history of labor unions.

In my school district, there is a clash between the will of the Union on one side and the desires of the School Board on the other. Like it or not, the notion of unions is quickly going to become one of those things you don’t talk about at the dinner table: Politics, Religion, Sex, and Unions.

However, the animosity toward unions isn’t anything new. In their infancy, unions were viewed from a strictly Puritanical way. When the Lowell, Massachusetts girls went on strike in 1833, one factory owner commented that it was “An amizonian [sic] display” where “a spirit of evil omen has prevailed.” By the time America watched the largest unions form, during the Gilded Age, unions were seen as a threat to American values: capitalism and democracy. Today, unions are seen as either politicized or protecting workers who have no right to be protected.

Perception of unions hasn’t changed from their onset

When unions first came to a head in the United States, there is no doubt that workers were exploited. Slave wages, atrocious working conditions, brutal hours, child labor, health and safety issues amounted to a work environment ripe for disease, death, and poverty. Despite this, thousands flocked to America for the hope and chance at becoming something more than a dirt farmer from Europe.

Something else came with these immigrants. Something that seems to have disappeared over time. With opposing viewpoints in print– see The Jungle and How the Other Half Lives versus Horatio Alger’s popular rags to riches stories–and maybe despite these, migrants labored hard for their pennies. Sadly, some couldn’t even earn pennies. If they had the misfortune of finding themselves in Carnegie’s Homestead mills, they earned company scrip redeemable only in Carnegie owned stores and for rent on Carnegie owned housing.

Still, these workers toiled. They worked harder than any of us could ever imagine. And for this labor, unions formed.

People recognized that these workers deserved more for their labor. More in wages. More free hours for themselves. More time to recuperate for the next days work in the mills, mines and factories. Unions fought for the eight-hour work day. Unions fought for higher wages. They fought to end child labor and worker’s rights. They cleaned up the factories. They brought in safety. Unions got presidents like Teddy Roosevelt to acknowledge the need to regulate corrupt businesses.

The politicization of unions occurred shortly after World War II where government-employee unions gained strength.

Like most unions, government-employee ones were also vilified. Their history is one rife with animosity, from the citizens to governors to presidents. Case in point: the 1919 Boston police union strike. President Woodrow Wilson said of the strike that it was “an intolerable crime against civilization.” When Governor Calvin Coolidge broke the strike, he was lauded by the people of Boston and he commented that “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time.” These are both Democrats and Republicans respectively firing away at the rights of government-employee unions.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, the great liberal, the president whose administration brought in big government and its far-reaching hand into all aspects of our lives even warned against a growing government-employee union. In 1937, FDR commented that public employees had no right to collective bargaining, nor did they have the right to strike. He went so far as to say that unions in the government-employee sector were tantamount to revolution–

Particularly, I want to emphasize my conviction that militant tactics have no place in the functions of any organization of Government employees. Upon employees in the Federal service rests the obligation to serve the whole people, whose interests and welfare require orderliness and continuity in the conduct of Government activities. This obligation is paramount. Since their own services have to do with the functioning of the Government, a strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied. (Letter from FDR to Luther Steward, President of the National Federation of Federal Employees)

Since 1937, government-employee unions have gained traction in both membership and in political clout. The American Federation of Teachers, whose public policy is to discourage striking, admits on their website that from 1968–after the New York Teacher’s strike–to 1978 there were over three hundred strikes by teachers affiliated with the AFT. The purpose of the these strikes? To wield more political power over the local and state government and governing bodies of the school districts. The crux of these strikes was not better conditions for education but the rights to collective bargaining, the very thing that FDR warned against. We’ve had other strikes–Air Traffic Control/PATCO in the early 1980s–and what we see is a pattern of highs and lows, and what we are experiencing is a low in the economy when public unions are most vulnerable.

What makes these public unions vulnerable are their very clients. 

Why unions fail

We’ve entered a phase in our history where the entitlement generation is now employed. Parents see teachers who use the classroom as a place to either proselytize their political views or as a place to get easy pay, summers off, and a great retirement at the cost of the private citizen. What they do not see are the other hard-working teachers who resent the entitlement generation. There are plenty of teachers who find it appalling that the union protects the sloths, incompetent, or general toxic teacher. 

The other issue at hand is the fact that President Obama is seemingly comfortable living in the front pocket of unions. In 2009, he signed Executive Order 13522 and for the most part the order went unnoticed. In a complete reversal of the Democrat party ideal set forth by FDR, Obama has brought government-employee unions not only into the forefront, but given them a chair at the decision-making table. According to a Pew Research poll conducted in April 2010, by and large Americans have a declining view of the bureaucracy that is our government (ironic that in 2010, the one agency that gained the most trust was the IRS… let’s see what those numbers do now).

At its heart, EO 13522 is supposed to help make a 

 A nonadversarial forum for managers, employees, and employees’ union representatives to discuss Government operations will promote satisfactory labor relations and improve the productivity and effectiveness of the Federal Government. (EO 13522)

Honestly, when does a union do anything to make work harder for its members? What we will find is that EO 13522 gets more government workers in the agencies that Americans don’t trust to do an effective job to do less. Entitlement has its benefits. 

Unions started out with great intentions, especially when its workers deserved what the unions fought for. Unfortunately for the unions themselves, their membership, for the most part sees union membership as a means to keep their job whether they deserve it or not. In lean times, the private sector will rebel against what they see as people suckling at the teat of the people they are supposed to serve. This is one of those times. 

If unions want to succeed and move forward they need to better police their own constituents and, though highly doubtful, pull back from the politicization of their organizations. 

The destruction of a U.S. institution

In 1972, Richard Nixon went about collecting as much power as he could find and insulating himself within a nest of lies and deception. What is known about Watergate is limited to the idea of a break-in at the now infamous hotel and Nixon’s attempts to utilize Executive Privilege to insulate himself and his tapes. There is a bit of irony in the fact that Nixon came to power by “discovering” the Pumpkin Tapes, and it was the taping of White House conversations that brought him down.

We now have an administration that had promised to right the wrongs enacted during the Bush years–including a revisit of the Patriot Act.

Unfortunately, the Obama Administration has fallen short on this promise. However, I am not about to cast stones; surely if this were the Puritan era I’d have been pressed long ago.

Rather, the three scandals–Benghazi, IRS, and the AP wire-tapping–are doing more to discredit an institution and that’s what I think we need to be focusing on right now.

Here’s where things are going sour for the American people. The Watergate scandal brought a sense of mistrust to the office of President; Ford didn’t do much to help and WIN wasn’t “win”ning over any voters. Sure, every president had their detractors, but you have to dig deep into the darker corners of the opposing party, or even outside of it. No matter how hard FDR tried to stomp on the Constitution, and he did, the American people, all of them, rallied behind their president to the tune of four elections. The only opposition he faced came from firebrands and radicals–chiefly Father Coughlin and Huey Long.

Now, hating a president has become the new zeitgeist. Recently, President Obama joked at the Correspondent’s Dinner about a new architecture to go with presidents… he was going to build his own “Blame Bush Library” next door to the recently opened Bush library in Dallas. George could have one next door to Clinton’s library. Imagine walking in and in the foyer you find a mannequin dressed in the infamous blue dress.

I would love to save all the comments on the various web sites out there were Republicans lambast Obama and Democrats cry fowl, just so that when the roles are reversed, they could see how idiotic the statements are since they’d be parroting exactly what the other side was saying earlier.

What we’ve had for the last thirty or so years is the slow destruction of the office of President. The termites have nested, undetected, and are rotting out the insides. I won’t say that I have the perfect solution to any of this. There are far too many people in America that view politics like the finals in a sporting event, pitting two opposing giants against each other for a meaningless trophy–or the right to re-write American history to their narrow world view.

I would suggest, however, that we step back from press and shock radio. Reading the trending articles now one would think that the Democrats are completely innocent of attacks on a President and that Republicans are one screw short of insanity. Here’s an example from the National Journal:

Red-faced Republicans, circling and preparing to pounce on a second-term Democratic president they loathe, do not respect, and certainly do not fear. Sound familiar? Perhaps reminiscent of Bill Clinton’s second term, after the Monica Lewinsky story broke? During that time, Republicans became so consumed by their hatred of Clinton and their conviction that this event would bring him down that they convinced themselves the rest of the country was just as outraged by his behavior as they were.

There were plenty of Red-faced Democrats, circling and preparing to pounce on Bush over Iraq, WMDs, Patriot Act, World Trade Center, etc. Sadly, it goes both ways and it only serves to divide this nation into the few haves and the many have nots.

If we allow this to continue, the smokescreens that will be sent up from Washington will become so dense that no one will know what is happening until it is beyond too late. A few politicians will learn how to utilize the polarization, get Americans to yell at one another during family gatherings, our kids sporting events, church, wherever, and then use the distraction to undermine the very fabric of a democracy we fought for.

The institution is crumbling.

For the most part, we are letting it.