Union thugs?
One of the proudest things in this writers life is the fact that he once belonged to a union!
I was in college and needed to work during the summers and the local laborers union provided a source for that employment. They knew that we represented the future of their society so they put a number of us to work on construction projects around Johnson County where we had lived and gone to grade and high school. I learned a number of valuable life lessons from my time with the union. Among them were not to bite off more than you could chew or to try to do something that you were not capable of doing because you did not have the training or the skills to pull it off. I also learned a lot about teamwork and how you often had to rely on others to help you to do a job. Coming from a family of self employed small business owners, this was valuable stuff for a young person on their way up in the world.
As we drive along the main corridor of southern Illinois these days, we pass by a training center for the southern Illinois Laborers Council and the memories of our time as a laborer usually always come to mind. It is good to see the advanced training that these valuable people get these days as compared to what we got during our time with the local in Vienna. We got what was known then as “on the job experience” but the times have greatly changed and some initial education in their chosen vocation cannot be a bad thing at all. Because laboring and helping other crafts is a vocation and we have known many of our old friends who have made a life out of union work and have drawn decent salaries for the efforts that they have put out. The union slogan that a union job is a job done correctly and well is not any form of a lie. No one in their right mind would attempt to do something like electrical contracting without the benefit of a union electrician to help them with the job. The apprenticeship for this type of skill can last as long as six or seven years before someone is declared fit to go and do this type of work on their own.
We bring all of this information to your attention because we are saddened to see the United Auto Workers and what happened to them as they attempted to unionize a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee in recent days. The state’s governor and one of its United States senators--Bob Corker--decided that they would circumvent National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) laws and regulations by making incorrect, threatening and inflammatory statements about what could happen to the workers at that plant if they voted for the union. That fact that both of these politicians were Republican was no surprise at all because the Republican party has been anti union since the beginning of time.
In point of fact, most all of the gains made by the working person in this nation have come on the back of union efforts to improve the working mans lot in life. One in particular that comes to mind in the employee person system that guaranteed that when a person had passed their useful working lifespan that they would have a dignified life with some pleasures in it for the remaining time that they are here upon this earth. Many corporations gave their employees pensions even though they were not unionized simply to make sure that unionization did not occur in their workplace. So, unions have made a difference for every working man, whether they ever belonged to a union or not.
The situation down in Chattanooga is particularly troubling because when politicians begin to interfere in union votes and there is no recourse anywhere, it opens a Pandora’s box to them doing this sort of thing all across the country. Many people are all too familiar with what some Republican governors such as Wisconsin‘s Scott Walker have done to public employees unions in their states. Union membership and the fringe benefits that they have so hard won over the years are threatened on almost every front now by crusading politicians who have either forgotten nor have never known what it was like for the average person who worked in this country before unions came along. When social security first came out in the thirties the average person only lived about eighteen months past age sixty five, if they even made it that far. Now, due to medical advances and people taking better care of themselves, the average person can look forward to living into their mid seventies or even far longer than that.
It is interesting to note that the wealthy in this country have taken advantage of the advanced medical accomplishments of this nation that would have never occurred if their had not been adequate broad based health insurance to allow the research arm of medicine to discover the things such as liver transplants and heart transplants and the like that have so greatly lengthened their lives. But now they want to deny the average person these things as they simply want them to accept the fact that when they get sick it is time for them to simply take an aspirin and go away and die. It is a form of limited immortality in which, in the future, the wealthy may very well live two to three times as long as the average person can hope to expect.
There is an ebb and flow to everything and unions are at the low tide of their existence in this nation at this time. We can only hope that the tide begins to turn but watching what happened in Tennessee last week leads us to believe that the Republican party has the game rigged which is a very troubling development indeed for the future of the common man.
IOVHO,
Regards,
Joe
To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.
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