More good news........TechieHypocrisy is big labour’s problem
Published: September 07, 2010 8:06 AM
TEMECULA, Calif. — Amid Labour Day’s parades and picnics, union bosseswill bellow Monday about workers’ rights and the alleged greed ofmanagement, especially inside big business. Such class warfaresloganeering would be easier to stomach if big labour were internallyconsistent. Instead, when their own workers channel Norma Rae anddemand better wages and benefits, labour leaders imitate union-bustingrobber barons:
— “I was fired for tryingto start a union at the UFT,” said a stunned Jim Callaghan. For 13years, Callaghan penned speeches and newsletter articles for Gotham’sUnited Federation of Teachers. He told the New York Post that whenmanagers sacked one of his colleagues without cause, he decided toorganize the UFT’s 12 in-store, non-union writers.
His employers were notamused. About two months after Callaghan announced his plans, he wasjettisoned on August 12 and given 30 minutes to clear his desk. When helingered, union bosses got six uniformed police officers to eject him.
The UFT claims thatCallaghan had disciplinary problems. Even if true, compare Callaghan’sinstant dismissal to the years it can take to fire failed teachers.Even those accused of groping children have become virtually permanentfixtures in union-protected “rubber rooms” where they receive salaries,read newspapers, and even run businesses while their cases inch throughadministrative hoops.
— InternationalBrotherhood of Teamsters President James P. Hoffa resembles a stingyCEO in a July 2009 letter to his local officers. Hoffa andSecretary-Treasurer C. Thomas Keegel wrote that the union for workersat IBT headquarters “refuses to acknowledge the current economicconditions and their impact on per capita revenues at the IBT.” Hoffaand Keegel counsel “prudent belt-tightening” and conclude: “. . . wemust make contingency plans to operate in the event of a labourdispute.”
So, an organization’spresident and treasurer decry falling revenues, urge belt tightening,and operate during a strike. Isn’t this why big labour got started?
— “We’ve got todownsize,” a United Auto Workers source said last December. As itsmembership shrank from some 500,000 in 2008 to 431,000 in 2009, thecar-industry union fired 120 of its own staffers “to balance itsbudget,” the Detroit News noted. More amazing, after UAW personnelvoted down their management’s austere contract proposal, union bossesimposed it on remaining staffers anyway. The UAW’s workforce sufferedreduced retiree benefits and, for each labourer, the choice of either atwo-week unpaid furlough or no matching 401(k) contribution for 2010.
— “Justice for all, notjustice for some,” several dozen members of the Service EmployeesInternational Union chanted last March as they picketed their ownunion’s headquarters. The union axed some 75 internal employees. “We’rein the middle of realignment,” SEIU spokeswoman Michelle Ringuette toldthe Associated Press. Malcolm Harris was unimpressed. The president ofthe Union of Union Representatives, which bargains for 210 SEIUorganizers and staffers nationwide said, “This union is supposed to beat the forefront of the progressive movement, but it can’t seem tofollow its own ideology.”
— Private companiesoften complain that union labor is too expensive. The Teamsters agree.When they constructed their 16,246-square-foot union hall in Houston,they didn’t use union workers because they were too costly. “There areserious solidarity issues here,” Richard Shaw of the Harris CountyAFL-CIO moaned to the Houston Chronicle.
— Not even big labour’smost basic activity — picketing — escapes union hypocrisy. Mirroring anM.C. Escher engraving, some unions hire non-union members to protestemployers for not hiring union members.
The Mid-Atlantic RegionalCouncil of Carpenters has paid the minimum wage to non-union protestersto slam Washington, D.C.’s McPherson Building for renovating withnon-union carpenters. How do these “activists for rent” regard thiscause?
“I could care less,”unemployed bike courier Billy Raye said in the July 16 Wall StreetJournal. “I am being paid to march around and sound off.”
This Labour Day, union bosses should skip the hypocritical speeches and go nap on the beach.