In the private sector, they only have about 8% of the workforce, actually less than they had in ’32 before passage of the National Labor Relations Act. All of those “legacy industries” either have a lot of government financed work, heavy public construction, a lot of government permitting, heavy private construction or they are heavily regulated by the government, e.g., health care, airlines, utilities, or they have the government as a primary customer, e.g., defense, aerospace, shipbuilding, See the commonality there? The union and the company actually work together to get more influence over and money from government.

The public is not an oppressive employer, so our workers don’t need to unionize to protect themselves against us.

Private employers can be oppressive, but they can’t oppress workers at other factories. Therefore, the union should only be allowed to represent the workers for that employer and no other.

There could be a UFW (for Ford), a UGMW (for GM), etc. but there couldn’t be any union representing the workers at competing companies.

Many Americans are uninitiated in all the ways that union bosses skim money and do other slimy things.

Now that we taxpayers are footing the bill for fixing problems that unions helped mightily to cause, I suspect that more and more Americans will demand explanations for shenanigans like this. Because we’re being asked to fund these shenanigans.

Practices like this can flourish outside of the public spotlight. I hope that Redstate does all it can to shine the bright lights on practices like these.

I suspect that lots of uniion bosses will do the same thing that rats do when the light shines on them…scurry for cover.

This is the stuff that has killed the automakers. They didn’t care what their labor costs so long as everybody was on the same pattern, so they agreed to all this crazy crap. No responsible employer would agree to pay a bunch of union officials who are openly and notoriously simply parasites, yet every unionized private employer does some of it and almost every unionized public employer does it.

While Alaska’s State workforce is mostly unionized, we have not been a particulary “union friendly” employer except for a while during the Knowles Administration. Even for an employer that tries to act like a responsible employer dealing with union reps is maddening at times because they have fairly strong legal protections. Linked is a memo setting out Alaska’s policies in dealing with them. I have no illusions that these policies are universally enforced and always assumed that the union reps could do pretty much anythign they wanted so long as nobody from headquaters is looking. Memo here: http://dop.state.ak.us/fileadmin/lr/pdf/representationrevised.pdf