I can’t tell you how sick I am of people talking about “worker’s rights” in connection to public employees unions. Taking away those “worker’s rights” is like taking away a bully’s “right” to punch you in the face with your own fist as he steals your lunch money.
“Worker” is a word being used to cause us to picture men trudging out of a coal mine covered with black soot and suffering black lung, or steel workers covered with sweat as their employer puts them in dangerous places and works them to the bone. The “workers” we’re talking about in Public Employee Unions (other than fire fighters and police) are the lazy, uncaring, robotic people that man the counters at the bureaucracies the government forces us to deal with. They’re the five people doing a job that it would take one person to do in the private sector. And they’re doing it in air conditioned comfort with absolutely no need to do anything efficiently or excellently. “It’s OK for government work” is a saying we use when something is done in as slipshod a way as one can get away with it. It’s the teachers unions protecting the worst teachers from having their performance assessed, and keeping the best teachers underpaid and underutilized.
These people are not oppressed. These people are coddled. The “rights” they want protected is the right to screw the taxpayer in an absurd system where the taxpayer is represented in negotiations by someone beholden to the union and its money, which is taken from the taxpayer in the first place.
What’s worse is that their incentive is to fail, because failure means their government agency gets more money next year in the vain hope (or is it self-deceptive hope) that more money will solve the problem. Having more unproductive people employed in government is a good thing for PEUs because more people means more dues, and more dues means more money to spend to elect people sympathetic to the unions (or at least beholden to their money).
The question isn’t whether or not we “protect workers rights,” it’s whether or not we protect the “rights” of the bully who steals our lunch money, then gives half of it to the principal who is in charge of meting out discipline.
Protecting the bully’s right to punch you in the face
I can’t tell you how sick I am of people talking about “worker’s rights” in connection to public employees unions. Taking away those “worker’s rights” is like taking away a bully’s “right” to punch you in the face with your own fist as he steals your lunch money.
“Worker” is a word being used to cause us to picture men trudging out of a coal mine covered with black soot and suffering black lung, or steel workers covered with sweat as their employer puts them in dangerous places and works them to the bone. The “workers” we’re talking about in Public Employee Unions (other than fire fighters and police) are the lazy, uncaring, robotic people that man the counters at the bureaucracies the government forces us to deal with. They’re the five people doing a job that it would take one person to do in the private sector. And they’re doing it in air conditioned comfort with absolutely no need to do anything efficiently or excellently. “It’s OK for government work” is a saying we use when something is done in as slipshod a way as one can get away with it. It’s the teachers unions protecting the worst teachers from having their performance assessed, and keeping the best teachers underpaid and underutilized.
These people are not oppressed. These people are coddled. The “rights” they want protected is the right to screw the taxpayer in an absurd system where the taxpayer is represented in negotiations by someone beholden to the union and its money, which is taken from the taxpayer in the first place.
What’s worse is that their incentive is to fail, because failure means their government agency gets more money next year in the vain hope (or is it self-deceptive hope) that more money will solve the problem. Having more unproductive people employed in government is a good thing for PEUs because more people means more dues, and more dues means more money to spend to elect people sympathetic to the unions (or at least beholden to their money).
The question isn’t whether or not we “protect workers rights,” it’s whether or not we protect the “rights” of the bully who steals our lunch money, then gives half of it to the principal who is in charge of meting out discipline.