Unions Are Wrongly Pilloried: Without Them Hard Work Would Fetch Peanuts

Psychologists say that if you repeat a lie over and over again it starts getting mistaken for the truth. One of the biggest falsehoods floating around in the country is that labor unions are a miserable lot.  It is a canard spread by anti-labor vocalists, misinformation spreaders and employers, who naturally have selfish interests in doing so.

Thanks to this coterie of self-serving groups, all unions, in the opinion of a majority of Americans are cesspits of self-indulgence, dishonesty and incompetence. That they are violent and vitriolic and the only purpose they serve is to prevent honest workers from working, whilst protecting the incompetent and useless worker and enriching their coffers by taking a share of the hard-earned money of the workers, under the guise of membership fees is a given. They are power hungry and that they are very difficult to reason and negotiate with is another canard that is bandied about with gay abandon.

It is rather unfortunate that most Americans’ are falling for such deliberate and malafide peddling of misinformation. The truth is that without unions, workers would be at the total mercy of their employers who would use every ruse in the book to rob them of their deserved earnings and fire them at their whim and fancy. Health benefits and retirement savings would be negligible and workers would be living in a constant state of dread and alarm.

What then is the real purpose of the unions? They have a simple agenda for their existence and its miles away from the fabricated draconian agenda that employers tell the world unions have. Unions just want to see that the employees get to live decently and that their standard of living continues to rise, along with their efforts.

What then is this “standard of living” that unions talk about? It just means that they should get fair wages, merited benefits and that their working conditions should be safe and that when it’s time for them to retire, they have a savings nest that can take care of them – this is something that even the government says are legitimate issues that can be resolved by collective negotiations.

There is no doubt that there is an element of militancy amongst union members and they threaten to strike or use strong-arm tactics when things don’t go their way. How else do hard-working dedicated workers, get their just demands met, when it is a case of David versus Goliath. You think the company’s would respond to meek requests for addressing problems. Oliver Twist timidly asked for a little more and what did the poor fellow get in return? Had he been protected by a union, the quality and the quantity of the food, both would have improved.

Only a strong and spirited union can stand up for hardworking workers – there is no other way to get the penny-pinching employers to open their purses or to write pro- worker policies in their worker handbooks.

If America became unions free, that would also signal the end of resistance from employees. They would lose all control over their working lives. They’d become puppets whose strings would be pulled by their management. Without bargaining power they’d become sheep, to be lead whichever way the employers wanted. The workplace would become an employer’s market.

Economists say that traditionally, market forces keep driving wages southwards. If there were no unions, to resist this gravitational downwards pull, the wages would continue to fall unabated and stop, only at the federally mandated $7.25 an hour. Had there been no official periphery for minimum wages, the free-fall would have breached that too.

Without unions commercial America would have the playground to itself. Every industry in the country, from small to big to very big have lobbyists advocating their welfare and concerns – who do the working men and women have? If Unions are gone, they will be left vulnerable, defenseless and at the mercy of their employers.