All eyes on Wisconsin: Public unions versus the Tea Party

I am probably going to sound overly harsh, but to the point.

Heavy unionization is destroying America.

The primary problem with collective bargaining is two fold.

One, the requested benefits are not asked for by individuals and therefor are not earned or based on any merit or contribution from the individual. When a non-union employee (which is the vast majority of the country) wants a raise or *insert benefit* increased, we show what we have done to earn it (usually discussed in advance as objectives to meet) and if not given seek employment elsewhere (its a free country).

The other problem is that the requested benefits are not only not based on the merit of the individual, but even the merit of the group. The request is based on simple extortion. If you don't give us X, Y, Z, then we shut down your business.

Union leadership is often corrupt, unions often prevent the most qualified applicants from gaining positions (such as the UAW, where you basically have to be a friend or relative to get your foot in the door), protect employees that need to be given the boot or appropriate disciplinary action for misconduct, and damage the work ethic of the individual due to a change in work culture (as an example, my ex-roommates uncle complained to us after he was REPRIMANDED for doing extra work cleaning up when the line was shut down since it makes the others look bad who were just watching TV, which yes the union requested be installed on the assembly lines, and was doing another union employee's job).

In the global market that exists today, it also generally renders American products uncompetitive, which is why Detroit which was the number one city in total production in the fifties into a dilapidated impoverished ghost town today.

Unions had a very important place in American history back when there was a massive discrepancy between available jobs during the great depression and the amount of workers competing for it, which resulted in child labor and unsafe work conditions.

But we already have national laws to protect workplace safety and everything else, so there is no longer any purpose for these unions, and they can and have contributed to the destruction of entire industries.

Here is a good video to watch which explains why almost no new manufacturing plants are being built in the United States:
http://apps.detnews.com/apps/multime...ex.php?id=1189

And I can assure you that after hearing about this in the news, no major businesses are going to want to setup shop in Wisconsin.

They will and HAVE moved South to Texas as an example, and it accounts for the statistics into why heavy pro-union states are seeing population decline while anti-union states are seeing population and job increases.

And just to add, only around 10% of the country belongs to a Union.

So I fail to understand the logic that 90% of the country can get by fine without unions, but 10% would be starving without being able to extort demands from businesses by threatening to shut down operations.

Well since I live in Wisconsin (all my life I might add)......

The Wisconsin government and residents of the state are being held hostage to the demands of 3% of the people (the public sector).

Having worked the the "private" sector for 20 years before becoming unemployed due to office closing and relocating I have NO SYMPATHY for these public sector/union employees. When I was hired as many people are in private sector jobs I had no say over any of my benefits/pay etc..... Paying for health care was a given and did increase every year. No chance of early retirement with a good pension, yada yada yada.

My first job right out of college was a state job and one had no choice about joining a union or not. Or the dues, I never in the 3 yrs I held that job ever had a union rep contact me on anything. Don't know really if my job was better because I was in a union or not. The only benefit I remember is if you used "X" amount of sick days or less(who even gets paid sick days now) one could get reimbursed for up to 3 days. Now it seems they can carry the unused sick and vacation days over until the retire and still get covered full health benefits without having to pay premiums.

The unions esp the teacher unions are strong in WI. Several schools had to shut down as too many teachers called in "sick". The teachers union had the nerve to call the superintendent of a large local school district to close the schools. The superintendent declined. Disciplinary action will be taken on the teachers who aren't actually "sick". As well as it should.

My taxes are going for these public employees -its insane. They don't care about their students (its mainly the teachers one is hearing about). They only care about how its going to affct them. Many are taking early retirement. (greedy)

And don't even get me started about the lily-livered Dems who skipped the state to avoid voting. And I'm a life long Democrat who is really disgusted at their actions. The Governer has mentioned that these Senators's staff members may not get paid as they have no work to do with the bosses being absent.

There are some really good articles on this entire debacle. The Wall Street Journal had some with good Op/Ed pieces. Also the Milwaukee Journal Sentinal. Or read the Appleton Post Crescent/Green Bay Press Gazette.
Don't read to much of the other out of state newspapers or much of the web based info as the facts are absent/misleading.

Sorry for the soap box but this issue is getting ridiculous!

This battle is going to play out again and again in most states. The retirement plans were not sustainable when they were started and they have now reached the end of the line. They have started the same legislation in Ohio. Fortunately in this state the Democrats are in such a small minority they can't do what they are doing in Wisconsin and we now have a Republican governor pushing the legislation. From what I understand an attempt was made to get concessions from the teachers and they refused. That is why this legislation was written. Even Jerry Brown, the old hippie in California, has realized this has to be done as has Cuomo in New York.

I don't know what the situation was like when you were growing up, but today's unions represent the Democratic party not their members and are being used to divide the country. Every union worker, government or private should resent the hell out of that. Their union dues are not being used to help the members but help one political party. If they want to contribute individually to a party that is the member's right. It is not the right of the union representatives to take the members money to give to a political party.

And it's not the right of the top management to take share holder's money to give to a political party. And when you think that the shareholders of these companies are the pension funds of the public employee unions, it gets even stranger.

So it really is about the spigot continuing to run for the benefit of thuggish bosses -- political as well as union leaders. SEIU, for instance, represents some of the most low-paid service employees (kitchen workers, hotel staff, and that kind). I am certain many of their members are not doing very well in this economy. It is appalling that instead of taking the union dues to set up programs for their members, they use the vast amounts of union dues they extract from their low-paying workers to shower millions on politicians.

I guess I don't understand the whole political thing with unions. All I know is that, working for the Post Office, with the abuse that management constantly attempts to inflict upon us, I don't know what we'd do without the unions. What do you do if your boss is being a jerk and there's no union mediator or union lawyers to handle it? I suppose someone could just quit, but with the job market as it is, that's really hard to do when there are mouths to feed and mortgages to pay.

I mean, the manager at the PO my mom works at is a real pain. He harasses the women (not sexually, he just doesn't think women should work at POs so he tries to make it hard enough for them that they'll quit), although they can't prove it's gender-based discrimination or he'd be fired. Since nothing can be proven, HR isn't much help. They say he's just a "tough boss" and they can't do anything about that. So the women in the office sic the union mediator on him every now and then, and he behaves himself for a few months. What would someone do in a job with no union?

Generally speaking, when people don't like their job, they find another one that they do like. If they look around and can't find anything better, most would try to improve themselves and their resume to make themselves more attractive to the employers that they like.

Likewise, if an employer treats their employees poorly, they risk them simply leaving for a competitor that offers something better, and either being understaffed or left w/ the lesser quality employees that no one else wants. So just as employees make themselves more attractive to get their first pick, so too do employers.

In the private sector, what generally happens is that once a business is sufficiently infiltrated by a union, it can be bent over a barrel at any point by its labor force threatening to strike, since the loss to the business is greater than the loss to the union. Even when the union doesn't attempt to interfere w/ the hiring of their replacements, no business can find and train an entire staff overnight, and cash reserves are usually limited. Most are subject to the global market, and so become uncompetitive which costs the country jobs, income, and in the case of large companies tax dollars thanks to democrat pushed bailouts keeping the unions income source (and their campaign contributions) in business. For those that are protected from such competition, the local customers suffer, which is 90% of the American public.

In the public sector, obviously the victim is the tax payer. There are no competitors, no desire to innovate, and no chance of going under, just leaching on the public that has to front the bill and feels the cost of poor performance and inefficiency as the customer with no alternative provider to turn to. Why this is legal is beyond me, as the people here have no one to advocate their interests. At least in the private sector you have unions advocating the labor's interests and management advocating business owners/stockholders/customers, but in the public sector there is no one advocating the people to fight the unions.

And its a slap in the face when those potentially unhappy customers that are also fronting the bill find that their equivalent counterparts have almost no fear of losing their job for poor performance, earn higher wages, and have more vacation and greater benefits.

Well, you could say that TECHNICALLY the politicians are the ones that can advocate the people's interests against the public sector unions, but they are part of the public sector themselves and can hardly advocate the people when they are in the union's pockets with monies funneled directly into their campaign funds as is seen with a majority of Democrats. And so the bill keeps going up and up and up, until eventually the private sector doesn't produce sufficient income to pay for it all. And with the reduced economy as it is, that time is now and so yes many people are fed up with the unions.

One of the biggest problems with unions is that they actually foster this attitude. They don't WANT you to be happy, so they continually foment this strife.

Most of us deal just fine with bosses, get along with them, tolerate them, or quit. If enough people quit, the boss gets fired. Pretty simple.

I had a good friend who was a postal worker who complained all the time about his management. One time, he was ready to spit nails, he was so angry. I finally got out of him that he was angry because the boss had not let him "seven-and-one-it" one day. That means when the work is slow, they ask the employees to go home early. But the union rule is that if they work one minute of the eighth hour of the day, they get paid for the whole day. So they were standing around the time clock, waiting for that one minute to click off so they could get paid for the whole hour.

Dottie's grandfather was a union organizer. None of his children would ever join a union; they knew all about the inner workings, etc. That told me a lot about unions in general.

And, as far as the post office is concerned, while I don't think their unions are their only problem, I think it's a big problem, and I wouldn't be surprised to see the whole thing dismantled in the near future.

As far as Wisconsin and other states are concerned, the big problem is that often the people the unions negotiate are elected by the unions. That isn't a fair negotiation. It's collusion to rob the taxpayer.

Texas is a right-to-work state. That means no closed shops. Guess what? Union members in Texas are some of the happiest in the country. Why? Because if the union doesn't actually do anything for them, they can just withdraw from the union.

And one of the most unionized and productive countries in the world is Switzerland...where strikes are illegal by national law.

If I were in leadership in Wisconsin, I'd be taking photos of the "teachers" raising such a ruckus and cutting out of class and firing them next week.

After opening provision of what services to the private sector will competition, cost savings and increased responsiveness occur ? Generally speaking government services are monopoly capitalism whether unionized or not. I work in a non-union library, for example, that has suffered cuts of hundreds of thousands of dollars the last two years from declining property tax revenues. We may have to consolidate hours, get creative about make work projects, and streamline positions (no layoffs ! ) but won't be eliminated because libraries historically are a necessary function of city government.

Although so were public schools at one time and teachers have been getting axed and cut all over the country. In many cases many of these union busting ventures have been turned over to "private temp firms" who place teachers and especially substitutes in positions at half pay with no benefits. By the way, the average starting salary for a teacher in Wisconsin is around 25k and normally maxs out at around 48K. How many Tea Party folk would go into the class room and put with what teachers put up with, then bitch and moan about temp-wage compensation ? I'd pay to see it.

They would work long hours with no compensation and then get laid off as a reward.

Some of the things that unions have done for the working class was to force the issue of 8 hour work days and 40 hour work weeks. I worked in IT for 30 years. There were vast stretches of time during that career where I worked 100 hour work weeks (with no overtime pay), and it was made clear that if you didn't like the work demands, that they would replace everyone with offshore resources. So people bowed to the demand and their jobs were eliminated by workers in India, Brazil and other countries. And when all the jobs were off-shored, good luck in getting a job in your profession in this country. It has nothing to do with improving yourself to find another job. It doesn't matter the degrees or certifications you hold. I've seen people with doctorates being pushed as hard then laid off as a reward. There aren't unions in many white collar professions, but I've thought for a long time that the IT profession needs a union.

Bailouts are an interesting topic in itself. In recent history, the republicans approved the bail outs of the financial institutions and the democrats approved the bail out of the auto industry. Another form of a bail out is reduced taxes to corporations and to the ultra rich, which is clearly supported by republicans. So I absolutely disagree with the statement that bailouts are a democratic party thing. It's not.

Putting all of this aside, what I see happening is the start of a class warfare. Hard working middle and lower class people all over the country are getting darn tired of having their income reduced (a reduction of benefits is a form of income reduction), while they see rich individuals and corporations having their income increased (tax cuts are a means to do that). If the unions only represent 10% of the people in this country, then the majority of the remaining 90% have no recourse to stop the greed of large corporations, which mostly support the GOP.

And stop and think about why unions support the democrats. Unions support lower and middle income working class. They don't support the GOP because the GOP supports the upper class. The upper class can afford to run attack ads against unions because by doing so, it sways people in their favor, which basically puts more money into their pockets.

I see them as the last sane protection against corporate greed, which is exactly why republican governors want them destroyed. I'm rooting for the protesters in Wisconsin for that simple reason. If they get away with it for public sector jobs, what happens with private sector unions? And what happens to the middle class?

I agree that the real division is not between Democrats and Republicans, but between average citizens and the corporate and financial elite. And that the liberal institutions which historically have spoken for the interests of the poor and middle classes -- the Democratic Party, unions, journalists, universities etc -- have been co-opted, by a corporate elite to the extent that it has become much more fundamental than a party difference. The social safety nets for the middle and working classes are being relentlessly destroyed... but how do you even begin to address it without transgressing the taboo of class warfare ? The world's ruling uber-class are interested only in acquiring more and more wealth and power. Technological advances further enable job automation or the offshoring of work which will only result in more dramatic inequality of income as wages get depressed and unemployment rises.

So maybe there is no "solution" at the end of the road. As long as corporate interests get what they need and want from the government, whether that is in the form of bailouts or deregulation, there will be no realistic check on the power of big business in America today. It's pretty bleak, and I can only wonder how far this clash of money interests will go before degrading into violence as the middle and working classes become increasingly disenfranchised, angry and confused.

I'm rooting for the protesters in WI as well. Both DH and I are diehard union believers....we always have been and we always will be. I worked for 18 years in a paper plant; god help us if the union hadn't been there....it was that bad. I was the recording secretary for several years. The company wanted nothing more than to cut wages and benefits.

Sure there are laws for safety in the workplace. The problem is that those workers in OSHA and the like are so busy that those laws are pretty much a joke. And I read all the time about how companies try to cut corners to be more profitable.

I'm not in a union now and I miss it. DH is still with a union and he works with the executive board as well. He is just coming home from a financial meeting.

Unions may support the Democrats. That's OK. Company reps are diehard Republicans. The members of many Chambers of Commerce organizations are diehard Republicans. Many of the manufacturing organizations members are Republicans. We need people sticking up for the middle class....or we won't have a middle class. It's that simple.

I don't see unions as unnecessary....not in the slightest. They are still important. As for right-to-work states, the people who don't pay union dues should not get the same wages and benefits as those who do. It's the union getting those salaries for the workers. You don't pay, you shouldn't get paid. And those companies who pay higher salaries to their workers do so simply to keep the union out. No other reason.

The fact is that labor costs is a main item that can be controlled by companies. It's all about profit at the top. The little guy gets squeezed and squeezed until there's nothing left.

So yes, I am proud to be union. And I'm also proud to be a Democrat. I'll root for those people all the way.

There may be somewhere "good" unions workers but I haven't had contact with them yet.
The mfg plant that I do landscape maintenance has a union for the plant employees. The maintenance guys for instance will not clean up in their own parking lot as its not in their job description so even though they may not have any work to do I as a contractor have to sweep their parking lot. (I refuse to pick up their hearing protection that many are to lazy to throw in a garbage ban before they leave.)

I hope the school districts and other public sector employees receive severe repercussions for skipping work this past week. To me the unions have only their bet interests in mind not the entire state.

Working for the P.O. I have about as much respect for my union as I do management- which amounts to none at all. Even with the unions postal management continue to walk all over us. I don't get into trouble with work and I do my job, but the working conditions at our plant have been deteriorating for a couple of years and only continue to get worse because of incompetent management and poor leadership out of our last three branch presidents who did nothing but roll over for management.

If the unions are gone, I would be seriously worried and I think it would be a threat to our democracy.

Yep. My dad had a private sector job for a while (he now also works for the PO, LOL), and his boss didn't like him. So he made up some crazy story (really, it was positively insane) about my dad doing something illegal (but not illegal enough to have him arrested, evidently) so he could fire him, and then trashed him to any other potential employers who called for a recommendation. It would have been impossible for my dad to get another private sector job. So my parents hired a lawyer and spent thousands of dollars on trying to get this guy to quit dragging my dad's name through the mud, and finally had to quit fighting because they ran out of money. It was a tough time for the family. Fortunately USPS doesn't much care about your former employers' opinions of you. I really can't see a union as a bad thing in light of all that.
Yeah. Management is a problem. One guy I used to work with said that he thinks that somebody high up in upper management is deliberately trying to shut down USPS. He said it's the only way to explain the horrible, money-wasting decisions they make. I thought he was bonkers at first but now I'm not too sure. He could be on to something.

And, no, the unions don't make much better decisions, but at least they can balance things out a little.

Compare the operation and efficiency of Fed-Ex with that of USPS. And they say that the USPS isn't subsidized anymore, which is nonsense since they are awarded no-bid nationwide contracts and are allowed to borrow up to $15B interest free from the treasury and other democrat bailouts. I don't think FedEx or UPS gets that treatment.

When a business is either providing services that exceeds demand, or a service that is entirely no longer in demand due to technological or other changes in society, it is beneficial that they downsize their operations or no longer remain in business with those resources reallocated elsewhere accordingly. A library is a large building used to house and catalog information, but since the internet contains almost limitless amounts of information with far greater ease of distribution, contribution, and access thanks to advanced search engines, and computerization allows tens of thousands of books to be housed on a single tiny e-reader for example, it is inevitable that these will be in decline, just as the paper industry is, and ice manufacturers and distributors went away with the advent of refrigeration.

And having attended schools overseas, both public and private, don't get me started on the mismanagement of the public school system in the US. There are many teachers that are unqualified, unmotivated, or at least mismanaged, with English teachers just putting Superman from recorded cassette on for the students in English class and kicking their feet up (yes, thank you Montgomery). On the other hand, our private universities are amongst the top in the entire world. That is not to say that there is no purpose for the public sector, as not every industry can benefit from necessary direct competition, but the point was that unionization and strikes should never be legal there for obvious reasons as there is no balance, which I may have worded clumsily before. It is extortion of the tax payers and corruption of the political system at its core.

Well, the anti-union people can't just easily skip work to go protest the unions, and they are obviously highly motivated and organized through the union leadership......

If you're in the UAW for example, not many other jobs that require no more than a highschool education will pay $40 an hour + $35K in benefits to tighten bolts.

As a more impartial source, third party polls show that 64% of Americans are anti-union.

The specific breakdown for pro-union is:
Republicans: 10%
Independents: 23%
Democrats: 49%

For regional pro-union is:
Northern States: 42%
Southern States: 24%

International Times: http://uk.ibtimes.com/articles/11418...218/unions.htm

I was reading an article this weekend in the Maciverin Institute from Wisconsin.

http://maciverinstitute.com/2010/03/...tops-100kyear/

I don't know if that is true or not but that seems to be the wage I have read on other sites on the internet. I guess the fringe benefits would be health insurance and retirement?

Thank you for this comment! Nicely said!!

I'm not sure "anti-union" is the right term. I'm anti-coercion at any rate.

In this particular instance, there are a lot of accusations flying back and forth, and I have to say that had the Tea Party activists resorted to the tactics used by the unions in this disagreement, I'm sure the national news organizations would have been all over them.

If you haven't seen it (and it's very unlikely you have), there is a movie called "Matewan," about the formation of unions in the coal mines there. The wives, especially, were very much against their husbands forming unions, knowing that the result would be fatherless families in some cases.

"We going to form a union. Do you know what that means?" asks one organizer to a miner. "Yeah...it means if I try to join the union, my boss will shoot me, and if I don't try to join the union, you will."

Much wisdom in that one line.

As far as Ohio goes the only part of the state with any union supporters are in the Northeast part of the state which is where Canton is. It is also the only part of the state that has remained in the old rust belt state of mind which means high unemployment.

In my experience, party affiliation is generally a cultural issue, not a financial one, and the recent political rhetoric of the Democrats of late that their opponents represent only the upper class is IMO nonsense. There are boatloads of upper crust "latte Democrats" and lower working class "trailer park Republicans", and more often than not it boils down to whether the individual has a liberal or conservative ideology.

Exit polls typically show income, and demonstrate the upper and middle class vote is very evenly split, with extremes in party affiliation seen only in at the poorest level as the Democrats of late have been buying votes by promises of income redistribution, greater social welfare programs, and relaxed enforcement of immigration law. All the other extremes are from urban/suburban/rural background and racial and religious differences, all cultural at their root IMO.
The idea that Americans only compete with other Americans for a piece of the pie is antiquated reasoning IMO. The fact is, this is a fast paced highly networked global economy, and competition is less between different classes in the United States and more about the crumbling of the wall between the same classes in different countries as distance and communication barriers are becoming very small.

No longer can John doing the exact same job at the same pace and quality expect to make ten times the wage of Hong in another country. They now compete with one another for work, so if John doesn't use the advantages provided by a developed country to improve his skills and thus quality and/or productivity per man-hour, how long does he expect he can use extortion to milk out a higher salary without rendering his industry uncompetitive? What happens is that the factories close one by one, and new factories are built elsewhere, slowly but surely reducing American jobs, prosperity, trade balance, and lifting competitors.

Now, yes, of course there are serious problems with the upper crust as well, and I too am angry when we see GM going bankrupt and yet board members are still flying and maintaining personal jets and throwing lavish parties and awarding themselves huge bonuses for a job-well-done while they are neck deep in the red. I don't have an answer to that, but do know that two wrongs don't make a right.

What is happening is something on a scale America has not seen before. Engineering, programming, legal, radiology--high expertise fields all--are going offshore. Anything that doesn't require your physical presence in America is at risk, because someone, somewhere can do it at a wage you would starve on. In reality it is precisely the low-value work that has a future in America, because the savings in moving it offshore is minimal. Garbage truck drivers, burger flippers, and nail salon employees are probably safe, except they'll have to compete with illegal aliens.

That's exactly right. I've seen people with doctorates get laid off in favor of cheap offshore wages. Let's take the Information Technology field as an example. The average IT wage is say, $75,000 a year. When a company offshores that work, they pay the contracting firm on the average of $50,000 a year. I know this because I used to negotiate these contracts.

My company laid off about 1000 IT professionals in favor of offshore staff to do the work. Of all of the people that I've kept in contact with, exactly 1 of them found a job with comparable pay. The remaining IT market in the US is saturated and people cannot get jobs in this area. So they get whatever work they can, and it often means taking minimum wage jobs. Education means nothing right now. I found an estimate that close to 40% of IT jobs are now offshore.

So take the math 1 step further. 1000 people have had their incomes cut on the average in half (it's actually more like 75%, but lets give it the benefit of the doubt). 1000 people x 75,000 = 75,000,000 cut in half is 37,500,000. That is $37.5M dollars that are no longer spent in the US economy because those wages are no longer earned in this country. The company saved $25M, and the economy as a whole lost $37.5M annually.

In the mean time, ubber rich corporation is pocketing the $25M annual savings and not reinvesting it in this country. Corporate executives are compensated on how much cost they can get out of running the business, and laying off the middle class wage earners is the easiest way for them to earn their bonuses. How do I know this? I've received bonuses for achieving "operating cost reductions", and yes, it makes me sick to my stomach that I actually did that at one time in my career. The corporations get richer and the working class gets poorer.

Unions try to protect these people, and it is clear that the move in Wisconsin is to silence the voices of these people, not to resolve a so-called budget deficit. The Wisconsin union agreed to every monetary demand of Walker, and he won't even talk to them. Bust the unions, silence the voice of dissent. Preserve the tax cuts for the rich on the backs of the working class. The working class is the backbone of this country. Break that backbone and this country fails.

I've never belonged to a union in my life, but I'm becoming more and more convinced of the need to expand the protection they provide, rather than agreeing to bust them up.

The term "global economy" has been the rational for so many layoffs in this country for a long time now. No one has even been able to explain how this helps anything other than the US corporations that profit at the expense of their laid off workers.

Please help me understand why reducing the standard of living for US citizens to promote "global economy" is antiquated reasoning. I seriously want an explanation that doesn't come out of a corporate handbook. But be careful - I've written some of those corporate handbooks and know how the BS is formulated to go into them.

Wow. Really? So it isn't the 10 years of solid good, honest work that earns the money in my paycheck? Just because I don't belong to a union?

Glad to know you believe in the American Worker! We are NOTHING WITHOUT A UNION!!

First off, (I didn't quote the rest of the post simply because this would have been WAY too long), at least in Colorado unless your father listed his former boss as a Reference the only thing he could legally do is verify employment. Maybe that's just because it's one of those Right to Work states.

The part I did quote and the section is simply flabbergasting to me. As someone who works hard and takes great pride in the work I do I wouldn't want to get a job with people who don't have a good reference from anyone. Your father is likely the exception - the rule would be that if you can't get a decent reference it's because you're not a good employee.

Yet once you're hired into a Unionized company everyone - whether they are dedicated to doing the best job they can or just sliding by - gets pre-negotiated pay raises, heath and other benefits, plus a pension with benefits far into (early) retirement.

Granted, Monday was a holiday. I still had to work. Actually everyone at my company was at work on Monday.

Looking at this list with the majority of these rallies taking place on non-holiday days...Don't these people have jobs?

I guess if it's a "Union" activity it's a "sick-out" day?

Wouldn't fly for the 90% of us non-union employees.

I absolutely 100% agree with you. There are problems with upper management in some companies. There are problems with people at all levels. However driving up the costs of doing business at all levels will end up putting the company out of business because it will be unable to produce a competitively priced product.

The issue is usually not that management just wants to double the profit margin by stomping on the backs of the worker drones.

The consumer demands affordable products. When American producers of widgets have to compete against Chinese and Korean and Mexican widgets they have to find a way to bring their costs down. Or there won't be any Made in the USA widgets. Try finding Made in the USA toys that the kiddies want...that's why there aren't many toy manufacturers left in the US.

How many people on their own limited incomes will spend 2-3 times more money on any given widget to support salaries and benefits that are grossly hyper-inflated because the generally lower-skilled workers are unionized?