You “heard” someone “quoted”. Well, that’s definitive.
This is the same old boring union bashing rhetoric that has been going on in the US for decades. Why you’ve chosen to participate in a thread about how to increase union penetration if you hate unions so much is beyond me, but at least bring in some original rhetoric.
It’s particularly acute with public service unions.
I’ve been in 4 public sector unions in the US (and one in England), and we’ve only ever bargained for bargainable items, though the reactionary press not infrequently has misrepresented our positions.
Unions do fight against things like layoffs and demotions, not as part of bargaining but as part of their job of representing their members, often through grievances which are then either arbitrated or taken to the courts. Sometimes they win, sometimes they lose, but arguing they are evil for doing this is like arguing that public defenders shouldn’t defend indigent clients.
If management decides to lay you off you should have the opportunity to fight for your job, and the union is there to give the worker some smidgen of the power that management already has. Obviously management - be they corporate fat cats or government officials - would prefer to be able to just make capricious layoff decisions unilaterally.
You seem to be referring to cases where workers have fought within the system and lost. Are you saying they shouldn’t have had the opportunity to fight?
Incidentally, your extra assertion that it is “particularly acute” in the public sector calls for some elaboration.
My mayor is on the patrolman’s shit list for doing his job and negotiating for his constituents
His constituents apparently not including any union members?
I thought the mayor of Hoboken was Dawn Zimmer, who would have been on the PBA membership’s shit list in any event for being generally progressive, and who seems to have been politically successful regardless.
However, this is a completely different matter again than negotiating, it is the question of whether unions ought to be allowed to engage in open political activity on behalf of their membership. This is a pretty fundamental and important right, otherwise the only voices in the ears of politicians on matters of labor law are those of management. I appreciate that in the specific case of police unions many of us would just as soon they had less influence, but that’s the price we pay for the ability of worker’s unions to lobby for important social benefits like living wage bills.
