When you build a house, you hire a bunch of people to put the thing together, make sure that they have ultimately built something close enough to what you specified, pay them and then send them on their merry way to go help someone else. You don't pay them to sit patiently in your living room waiting for you to decide you want another wing, or a new bathroom, or a closet. They're done.
This, of course, brings me to the state of 21st Century unionism, a classic example of a country paying through the nose for services performed 100 years ago.
At the risk of oversimplification, it is, well, simple. A century ago, the workforce was agricultural and industrial, and the industrial part was characterized by physical and financial abuse of employees without protection or the opportunity for legal recourse. No one would describe it as a reasonable working environment, and it required a systemic fix. Organized labor grew, instituted collective bargaining on a broad scale and, most importantly, was able to achieve Federal legislation to prevent the types of abuses characteristic of the era (and, of course, legislation that was equally abusive in the other direction, but that's another posting).
Unfortunately, having achieved the systemic improvements needed and the legislation required, we were left with one problem -- the unions still existed. Yes, although they had built your house, unions were still sitting in your living room with big smelly cigars, being paid to wait for you to ask them to do something else.
They had to continue, of course, at least if you asked them. They had built up a system where dues were being paid -- in many states, by mandate -- and applying the FTM precept (follow the money), we can easily see they weren't going away. No, instead of being defenders of workplace injustice, they were now professional bankers (with billions in pension funds), thugs ("don't mess wit da pension dat I'm protecting") and other things not associated with workplace stabilization. Look up the name "Victor Riesel" sometime.
It is no surprise that organized labor and organized crime made for a happy partnership, given the money and the power and the money and the money. OK, maybe not so happy, if you were to ask Jimmy Hoffa.
But I digress. It is 2014, and union membership has shrunk drastically to where if there weren't government-employee unions (and why there should be is beyond me), then unionism would be a bare blip on the radar. And yet, there are government-employee unions, most notably those of the teachers, and they're not going away anytime soon.
The largest teachers' union is a great example. It is hilariously called the "National Education Association", presumably to hide the fact that it is a labor union; it has nothing really to do with education per se. Last year, the NEA took in $367 million in dues. About $90 million of that went for "union administration" and "general overhead." Another $89 million went for lobbying and political activities and "representational activities." This stuff is pretty easy to find, my friends.
The teachers I had as a high school student in the '60s are now in their seventies and eighties, and their pension amounts are available online, by name in fact. They aren't getting a heck of a lot of money. I wonder how they all feel, looking at the fact that fully half of the dues they paid went essentially for the feeding of the union itself, its staff, its overpaid management, and its political lobbying to keep itself alive. Pension funds can be outsourced to professional fund managers for a fraction of what a union would need for that part if its infrastructure; the union does not need to be paying internally for that.
Oh, by the way, another quarter of that $367 million went for grants, which included money given to great educational achievers and researchers like the "Reverend" Al Sharpton ($40,000 in 2011, for example, even though his organization promotes the charter schools the NEA opposes. Go figure).
Do you get the idea? The union movement did its part, and now serves the primary function of sustaining its own existence. Member defense is a negligible part of its budget, since the law and process itself takes care of preventing most institutional abuse. The abuses today are on quite the other side.
That "lobbying" and those political contribution costs, that take up so much of the union budget, are spent creating pernicious arrangements -- the local governments are run by politicians, who rely on contributions to be reelected, who get the contributions from the government employee unions (NEA and others), who negotiate their contracts with the same politicians whose campaigns they donated heavily to. The public is the victim here.
When an onion has been around too long, it can no longer serve its original purpose, and it starts to stink. The American union has done its part, solved the problem it needed to solve, and has no utility anymore. But it won't go away; it is sitting in the living room of the USA paid to continue forever.
Like the old onion, the longer it goes without being discarded, the worse it stinks.
Copyright 2014 by Robert Sutton
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