The State of Labor
I originally wrote this back in February while the General Assembly was in the middle of the right-to-work debate. However, since Monday is Labor Day, I thought it was still pretty timely so I decided to re-post it. And I did get my wife’s permission to take a few moments from this weekend and post this.
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Sometime this week you will turn on your television and see thousands of people taking to the streets making demands on their governments. If you’re watching Al-Jazeera the demonstrators will be demanding change. If you’re watching an Indiana news channel, the protesters are demanding the status quo.
Starting today hundreds of union activists and their supporters are expected to show up at the Statehouse in Indianapolis to protest what they call “anti-worker” legislation. There are a number of bills in the Indiana General Assembly that unions claim would hurt workers by limiting collective bargaining rights.
The two big items are a right to work bill that would eliminate joining a union or paying union dues as a condition of employment. The second bill would limit teacher contracts to wages and benefits. Apparently, unions and their supporters find these things as offensive as I do watching a Vanilla Ice special on Black Entertainment Television. However, where I get lost in the translation is why unions are afraid of this legislation that to me comes across as common sense? Maybe I see things differently than they do because I’m not a member of a union. And looking at recent figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, neither are a lot of other people.
- Union membership went down in 2010 from 12.3 to 10.9 percent. That number was more than 20 percent in 1983.
- The union membership rate was 36.2 percent in the public sector as opposed to 6.9 percent in the private sector.
- Local government workers have the highest union membership rate; 42 percent.
- Blacks were more likely to be members of a union than whites and older workers tended to be more likely to be part of a union than younger workers.
- The median income of union workers was $917 a week, while those of non-union employees were $717, although non-union employees don’t have union dues taken out of their paychecks.
- If a union member has a college degree or better, they more likely to be employed in the public sector than the private sector.
From a global perspective, if you are union leader, right to work legislation should not bother you. The premise is very simple, if you are providing good service to your members they won’t mind paying for it. If you are responding to your members’ needs they should glad to give you a portion of their paychecks and to pay for quality service you provide them. You’re numbers are already shrinking so I doubt if right to work will make it worse.
And as far as public employee unions go, I don’t know if you’ve been keeping up on current events, but there isn’t a whole lot of money running around these days. If the rest of us have to tighten our belts, you should too. And while you’re getting mad at different Governors from across the state, you may want to save some of that anger for the Obama administration and the stimulus package passed a couple years ago. As some of us tried to tell you, spending money on people instead of infrastructure was a bad idea because when the money runs out, you are back in the same boat. When I spend money on a road, I’ve got an asset that’s going to be around for a while; people, not so much.
