Jan 15 2009
The Unions in California
For those of you who do not know, there are unions in California. Most public employees (not me) belong to one. The unions represent the correctional officers, peace officers, wardens, custodial staff, medical staff and many others who work for the state.
One of the most powerful unions is the teacher’s union (CTA) who doesn’t represent people who work for the state (neccesarily) but does represent teachers - who are employed by public education.
Currently the unions are saying that they do not support Prop. 8 and went on record with their non-support for the case in front of the California Supreme Court. Their claim, as to how they are affected by a gay-marriage issue, is that if the voters can take away a right like marriage, maybe the right to organize will be next.
A few things - the courts do not rule on hypotheticals. They cannot. In order to have standing to a case, the issue must be “ripe.” Which means there must be actual harm. In order for this claim by the unions to be true, the right to organize would actually have to be taken away.
I could only wish it would.
Before people rail on me for being anti-union (I am) think about the points below.
Unions were created in a time of massive and wide-spread worker abuse. Times when jobs were not portable, upward and cross-training was rarely available, media was more local and people had less access to media. Those conditions are not in place anymore.
If you think unions are still needed to prevent worker abuse, think about the case of WalMart. WalMArt was exposed, through a series of stories by various news outlets, to be treating their employees “badly.” They didn’t offer health insurance, or it was bad when offered at all. They paid their employees badly, and had horrible vacation and compensation packages when compared with other retailers. So what happened? Public pressure increased on WalMart to the point that they had to repair their relations with their employees. In fact, WalMart now offers $5 generic drugs - which is a direct result of trying to fix their public image.
This happened in today’s world.
Now think of what the unions do. They spend money to lobby. The unions cause contracts with the state to be bound up in millions and billions of dollars. Instead of working with the state to fix conditions under which their employees work, the unions simply say “give us more money and fix conditions.” The CCPOA (correctional officer’s union) has been in contract negotiations with the state. One of the problems with correctional officers is that they don’t have enough, because they cannot do the background checks and get them through the academy fast enough. It isn’t a pay issue. They have more applications for correctional officers than there are spaces. But the union insists it is a pay issue, and demands more money with no concessions on anything to the state. That’s not negotiation, that is hostage taking. So they continue to cost the state a lot of money.
Unions don’t do anything anymore. They don’t protect their workers. They lobby.
Do we really need that in California?
