Some more good commentary about Wisconsin’s recall election.
If unions just represented workers rights from the excesses of the worst employers they would be much more palatable to most people to join. Instead we get a bunch of unpleasant, arrogant, holier than thou class warriors who fight battles lost years and years ago.
It is little wonder the Labour Party is getting its share of the vote gobbled up by the Greens. Moroney, Fenton, Little, Mallard and other union hacks go into God Mode and send people looking for a viable left wing alternative, which the low rat cunning of Russel Norman is providing.
The second harbinger was the plunge in public-employee union membership. The most important of Walker’s reforms, the change Big Labor had fought most bitterly, was ending the automatic withholding of union dues. That made union membership a matter of choice, not compulsion — and tens of thousands of government workers chose to toss their union cards. More than one-third of the Wisconsin members of the American Federation of Teachers quit,reported The Wall Street Journal. At the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, one of the state’s largest unions, the hemorrhaging was worse: AFSCME’s Wisconsin rolls shrank by more than 34,000 over the past year, a 55 percent nose-dive.
Did government workers tear up their union cards solely because the union had lost its right to bargain collectively on their behalf? That’s doubtful: Even under the new law, unions still negotiate over salaries. More likely, public-sector employees ditched their unions for the same reasons so many employees in the private sector — which is now less than 7 percent unionized— have done so: Many never wanted to join a union in the first place. Others were repelled by the authoritarian,
belligerent, and left-wing political culture that entrenched unionism so often embodies.
