the money. They disgust me because they cannot make it on their own they have to FORCE themselves down people’s throats. If the leadership did not require so much money to peddle Democrat candidates the unions might actually work for their members but they won’t and they don’t nor do they want to!

“They can’t hide behind the robes they wear and exploit workers. That’s why the rat was there,” he fumed.

Yet, the union leaders can hide behind their brownshirts and physically intimidate dissenters from the groupthink.

Bullying for me, but not for thee.

Plain, simple, criminal looters.

I don’t think it’s fair to paint all unions with the same brush. I am a self-employed Technical Training Consultant. I work with several trade unions; Carpenters, Millwrights, Pile Drivers and Floor Layers. And, I have worked with manufacturing and service unions.

I can tell you that the former provide a valuable service to members, employers and customers by way of quality technical, skill, and safety training. You really do want these people building your stuff, as opposed to immigrant labor.

Manufacturing and service unions on the other hand, are parasites. In these industries, the training is specific to the individual business operation, and as such, must be provided by the manufacturer or service business. So, what practical or valuable purpose do the unions serve? None. There’s only so much money and so many benefits that you can squeeze out of an employer for an unskilled, and in many cases, illiterate worker. When they do over-reach as the UAW did with the big three, the whole house of cards comes crumbling down.

Manufacturing, service and government employee unions, should be abolished.

There is more than one type of Parasite. True, most do don’t kill the host in order to survive, however American unions would have to be classified as “facultative parasites”.

Facultative parasites are not obligated to be parasites, they do so not out of necessity but out of choice or ease. Since they are not obligated to be parasites and have the capacity to survive outside the host, they have no problem killing said host.

This is the same for Unions. Nobody is obligated to be in a union and union members will vote for things that will kill the host. See the state of American textile and manufacturing industries.

The Union Bosses however, they are simply parasites. They know how to keep a host (the union) alive, which is why you don’t see “The Bus Drivers Union” but instead see “The Bus Drivers, Secretaries, & Sanitation Workers United” type unions. They join forces to stay alive and keep the host alive, oftentimes even after an industry is dead.

I know it may seem far fetched, but consider “a person damaged in his business or property”, “blackmail” “extortion” or even “conspiracy. These come under the Racketeering Statute. Or maybe I just believe somewhere there must be a law against intimidation and bullying?

Do you really not know about this union tactic? You don’t know the half of it, then. Let me try to get you caught up.

We all know that AFL-CIO had a major split back in 2005 when several major subsidiary unions broke off in order to be “more aggressive” or something. [Insert your own opinions about the expected efficacy of MORE aggressive union tactics on membership enrollment and overall job security here.] One of the subsidiary unions was The United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, the parent union behind the protest you sited here.

This national carpenters union has adopted a nation-wide program that they amusingly refer to as “area standards campaigns.” It basically comes down to this: Whenever a union shop loses a bid on a construction project to a non-union shop — or, for that matter, loses an existing contract because a non-union shop underbid them — the local union affiliate organizes a daily protest until the non-union contract is complete on the pretense that the non-union shop pays sub-median wages. These protests are a marvel in and of themselves: They consist of a bunch of homeless people walking around in a picket line, screaming and shouting about “fair wages” for between 1.5 and 4 hours a day in front the site of the construction work. The “protesters” are then paid around $8 an hour for their services. It is truly a site to behold.

Let’s take a quick look at the ways in which this tactic shows moral failure:

1) When the union is not competitive, their response is to whine and complain, not to get MORE competitive.

2) The carpenters themselves can’t be bothered to protest on their own behalf. (I guess it’s beneath them.) They have to pay other people to do it for them.

2a) This cracks me up each time I think of it: “I’m getting paid $8 an hour so someone I’ve never met and never will meet can get paid $50 an hour instead of some other guy I’ve never met and never will meet who’s getting paid $25 an hour.”

3) They’re not protesting the actual non-union construction company, no matter what it says on the taped-on label on their sandwich boards. Oh no. If they cared about actually changing anything at these shops, they would be protesting at the actual company office, not not on a busy downtown street corner where the non-union workers couldn’t possibly hear them inside several floors up.

[PRO TIP: Most work of this type is actually done at night and on weekends so the construction noise will not disturb the rent-paying tenants. The workers are frequently not even in the building while the protest is going on.]

So let’s go back over this. What on earth is the union trying to accomplish here? They are throwing a STAGGERING amount of money into this program, but this tactic simply will not cause a non-union shop to decide to become union. (A non-union worker would reasonably say “The very reason I have a job at all right now is BECAUSE I am not union, and I’m supposed to vote to become union just so my dues can go to pay homeless people and I can lose my job to boot? No thank you.”)

The only reason I’ve been able to come up with is that this is pure and simply a protection racket. Nothing more: “You have a nice building here. Real nice. It would be a real shame if a whole bunch of dirty, smelly homeless people were to show up in front your nice building here and start protesting unfair labor practices, like what happened to the Tompkins building down the street fro the last three months. A real shame.”

For more information on this tactic (as well as just how similar this practice is across the country), you can look at the following links:

Washington, DC:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/23/AR2007072302011_pf.html

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16233482

Tulsa:

http://www.urbantulsa.com/gyrobase/PrintFriendly?oid=oid%3A24637

Atlanta:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9RgwnceSuE&NR=1

(Phew. This is a rant that’s been brewing for the last six months since we started having “carpenters” “protests” in front of my store almost daily since February.)