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Cherith CutestoryHamilton Nolan
7/01/15 12:35pm
While I agree 100%, the Supreme Court will side against the unions with the Citizens United majority deciding. Kennedy writing.

What I don’t understand is how anyone in a public union could want out of it. I understand how it can be difficult to form unions in non-unionized work places (you don’t want to be the agitator). I understand how unions can sometimes be unpopular in formerly non-unionized work places if there isn’t really a shared sense of purpose. I understand many critiques of public unions from outside the union (look at the police union).

But how can anyone in a public union who only has jobs that are solid middle class jobs because of those unions really want out? Their jobs only have the minimal protection they do because of them. They are taking this to the Supreme Court to fight for their right to be irrational? It doesn’t make sense.
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  DL ThurstonCherith Cutestory
  7/01/15 12:40pm
  I’m going to have to respectfully disagree. Scalia will write the opinion. The rest I sadly agree on.
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  Emerald D.V.Cherith Cutestory
  7/01/15 12:41pm
  Americans have a strong tradition of both voting against and fighting against their own interests, and given how the 2014 elections went, it sure isn’t going away. It doesn’t make sense, but we’re stuck with it.
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MattHamilton Nolan
7/01/15 1:00pm
I say split the kitty: Have right to work and allow people to opt out of unions, but then have it to where they don’t get to work under the union contract. See how long before people start joining unions when their coworkers get better pay and benefits for the same job.

“Why does Jack get 10 more vacation days a year and makes $5 more an hour? We came on at the same time and we do the same job?”

“He's part of the union. They have an excellent contract. Bet you wish you'd paid that $20 a month".
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  Hamilton NolanMatt
  7/01/15 1:14pm
  The problem with this, obviously, is it incentivizes management to hire only employees who don’t want to be in the union and to get rid of all the employees in the union. That’s why you need the entire work force unionized together.
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  MattHamilton Nolan
  7/01/15 1:17pm
  Honestly, I didn't really suggest that as a workable solution. I'm sure that it would flop for both the reasons you listed as well as others.
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thisisnotaseriousaccountHamilton Nolan
7/01/15 12:37pm
Hello,

I live in NJ. I have a very very small house and piece of land. I am lower middle-class. I pay, and this is no joke... $550 a month in property taxes, which go up at a rate greater than inflation each year.

Whoa! You say? That’s alot!!! Yes, yes it is too much. I get a statement each year from the town. $100 is for my town, and the rest? The school. Which has less and less students each year. It’s because of the local teacher’s pension payments etc...

I’m really, really sick and tired of this. I simply can no longer raise my family here OR I don’t know maybe put some money into my own retirement or future.

NOPE, I fall behind on these taxes, they take my fucking house.

So fuck public unions. Anyone with half a brain should know they are a terrible idea. The people who actually pay them aren’t the people who have any control over them.

Live in NJ and be subject to them, and then we’ll see how you feel about public unions.

Government is not a jobs program for the incompetent.
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  thisisnotaseriousaccountthisisnotaseriousaccount
  7/01/15 12:41pm
  OH! and get this. If I were rich? Oh I could grow a few pine trees, call it an XMAS tree farm, and pay almost no taxes.
  
  I’m getting fucked by both the lower classes and the upper classes.
  
  Don’t move to NJ.
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  Emerald D.V.thisisnotaseriousaccount
  7/01/15 12:43pm
  How is it the union’s fault that school funding is based on property taxes?
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PeteRRHamilton Nolan
7/01/15 12:33pm
Public unions are organized...against us, the taxpayers. They bargain with politicians who accept campaign contributions from the unions and then are long gone when the public pension promises they made come due.
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  aa96PeteRR
  7/01/15 12:38pm
  Thanks Scott Walker. Let’s take a look at Wisconsin. Before Walker, it had some of the highest public sector union density in the nation. It’s pension plan was and is doing fine. Now look at South Carolina. It has the second lowest public sector union density. It’s pension plan is a huge mess. So stop bashing unions. This is nothing but a GOP effort to cripple the one force that speaks out for workers.
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  PeteRRaa96
  7/01/15 12:41pm
  Wisconsin’s pension plans are fine because the Germans are a tidy and prudent people, even the ones living in the US. Illinois’ pension plans are a nightmare and it would be hard to find a more pro-union state.
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SparrowmintHamilton Nolan
7/01/15 12:32pm
The California teachers who are trying to destroy their union (what an intelligent thing to do) should feel free to move to the areas in the country without teacher unions. You know, the ones with the much higher turnover, lower salaries, shittier benefits, and teachers being fired for lesson content that the locals or administrators don’t like, or that find reasons to fire teachers when they’re older and can be replaced by younger graduates. Or get jobs at charter schools where teachers are at will, the turnover and job conditions are lovely there too.

Imagine living in California, where the cost of living (obviously varying) is generally high compared to much of the midwest or the South, and then wanting to further fuck yourself on your own salary, benefits, and general job conditions. These are clearly not the brightest minds at work.
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  CheeseSandwichSparrowmint
  7/01/15 12:38pm
  Thats what I don’t get, surely they’d be pissed off if they didn’t get their next cost of living increase or what ever. So they basically want to enjoy the union with out paying for the union.
  
  These people are assholes.
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  Jerry-NetherlandSparrowmint
  7/01/15 1:01pm
  And neither are these litigants in any way representative of the majority of California teachers, nor any other segment of California’s civil service employees. The few who are bringing this case are pawns of the AEI, Heritage Foundation, ALEC, etc. Follow the money.
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ThePriceofEggsinMaltaHamilton Nolan
7/01/15 1:02pm
Husband of a high-school (science—chem and bio) teacher. I have such a love-hate relationship with the teacher’s union, it’s not funny.

I’ve seen how unions value seniority over competence. I watched my wife be let go from a school during a budget cut, simply because she was the shortest-tenured teacher in her department, in spite of the fact that her students’ state final exam and AP test scores were the highest among the department for two years running... while retaining a teacher who had been relegated to teaching the equivalent of “Why the Sky is Blue” because of a consistent track record of uselessness, simply because she’d been there longer, and those were the union rules. I’ve seen unions basically milk money from taxpayers for utterly useless shit, as in the district where we actually live, where the union had such sway over the district in their last contract negotiations, they actually got cosmetic surgery included in their healthcare coverage. I actually met a school administrator with breasts that our tax money bought.

On the flip side, I’ve watched as my wife took a job at a very expensive and prestigious private school for a year without the protection of a union. There, she taught three AP courses plus a general course, coached a varsity sports team... and earned (no joke) about what she’d have earned bagging groceries full-time at our local supermarket, with such godawfully useless benefits they may have well just handed out boxes of band-aids and called it “health coverage.” If I didn’t have a job that paid well and provided good benefits, and if she wasn’t excellent at saving money, she’d have been unable to afford to pay her bills during her time there.

TL;DR—we need to save public unions, but Christ on a bicycle, they need to be reformed. They need to protect the good workers without providing a safe haven for the lazy and incompetent. They need to guarantee people providing vital services to our communities are compensated fairly, without lavishing them with unearned and unnecessary perks. How the hell we go about doing that, I don’t know.

But as with so many other oversimplified debates in this country, I wish the discussion was “how do we fix this?” not “should we keep everything as it is or get rid of the whole system altogether?”

Apropos of nothing: when I first saw this headline, I read it as “choose life for public unicorns,” which I think is something we can all get behind.
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  DeliriumThePriceofEggsinMalta
  7/01/15 1:29pm
  Apropos of nothing: when I first saw this headline, I read it as “choose life for public unicorns,” which I think is something we can all get behind.
  
  I thought I was the only one!
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  DomicileThePriceofEggsinMalta
  7/01/15 1:33pm
  As a person who is in a public sector union (in Canada), the seniority thing sucks but it’s fair. If they try to base it off merit/performance, it becomes a guessing game. All of a sudden it’s who management or the union likes that gets to stay (and it doesn’t mean those people are the most qualified/best performers). By doing it based of seniority, you know from the day you’re hired where you stand. I know right now that if layoffs happened to us, I can bump 5 people before I go. I also know that if I do get laid off, I get recalled based on my seniority and job qualifications.
  
  Seniority sucks unless you’re senior but it’s a fair system in comparison to any others which are easily manipulated and abused.
  
  Unions have their problems, just like any group, but they are a huge net positive for the workers.
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TRUMP DELENDUS EST (fka Chatham Harrison)Hamilton Nolan
7/01/15 1:00pm
Unions, whether public or private, are an unequivocally good idea. If capital can organize into corporations for its own benefit, it’s only logical that labor ought to be able to do the same. The destruction of unions is the wholesale abdication of market power to capital. It is against the interests of every working person in the United States, and the fact that unions are slowly failing is one of the worst perversities of American society.

The problem, as it has been from nearly the beginning in America, is that the moment labor gets any traction, capital starts fighting it tooth and nail, and they never stop. Even in the 1950s and 60s, when union membership was high and things were just peachy, that undercurrent was still there, festering on the far right. Capital’s eternal committment to the destruction of unions made unions rationally insular and defensive. Unions aren’t blind, and they know that if they want to keep their share of negotiating power, they have to fight back. The problem is, outsourcing allowed unions to become isolated from the general community. Now, all conservatives have to do is point to these unions and say “why do we want these insular, defensive, isolated institutions determining how the government spends our tax dollars?” and Americans, with their abstract love of openness and transparency, have happily followed that Pied Piper. To the average non-union American, unions are a unfamiliar, unwelcome leech on good, God-fearing patriots.

Labor as it exists in America is unpopular, and in a democracy that is a death sentence. Until unions can find a way to recast themselves in America’s eyes as organizations of, by, and for the people, as organizations that fight for the basic rights of all workers rather than the special entitlements of certain privileged professions, America will happily kill its unions.
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  ElfInBrooklynTRUMP DELENDUS EST (fka Chatham Harrison)
  7/01/15 1:11pm
  
  GIF
  
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  DolemiteTRUMP DELENDUS EST (fka Chatham Harrison)
  7/01/15 1:47pm
  Heck yeah.
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nopunin10didHamilton Nolan
7/01/15 1:06pm
They benefit everyone. And everyone shares the costs.

In scenarios in which Union membership is not compulsory, why not simply advocate only for benefits for its paying members?

Maybe even have a system in which someone is “vested” in a union if they pay X months worth of dues, with that period being shorter for new hires?

I’m not totally against compulsory union membership, but it seems to me that if a union falls apart simply because it becomes voluntary, then maybe the people in it weren’t seeing that much value to it.

Unions are the soul of democracy: they exist if most workers want them.

I wouldn’t say they are the soul of democracy, but rather that they are run with a soul of democracy. If they’re a public sector union, then they potentially hold power outside the constitutionally recognized governmental power structure. That puts them at odds with the greater democracy, even if they are internally democratic.

This is not to say that it’s an entirely bad thing, but public sector unions place the power of protest higher than the power of votes. It’s easy to side with the union when the employer is some rich person or corporation, but if the people of a nation or state deliberately elect representatives to dismantle the unions, then that’s ultimately what the people want.

It might not be what they need, and it might be worse in the long run, but it’s disingenuous to say that the union represents the people when official votes say otherwise.
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  festivusazilinopunin10did
  7/01/15 1:16pm
  Why not simply advocate only for benefits for its paying members? Because the union has a statutory duty to advocate for all members, even those who refuse to pay. At least that is the way it works for most public sector unions.
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  nopunin10didfestivusazili
  7/01/15 1:18pm
  the union has a statutory duty to advocate for all members, even those who refuse to pay
  
  This is the first thing that should change if union membership becomes non-compulsory.
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╰(　´◔　ω　◔ `)╯< Woke and BokeHamilton Nolan
7/01/15 12:32pm
Before anyone says “but...cops,” remember that they will maintain union membership the same way they maintain the blue code.
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  LtCmndHipster╰(　´◔　ω　◔ `)╯< Woke and Boke
  7/01/15 12:41pm
  Beatings?
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  ╰(　´◔　ω　◔ `)╯< Woke and BokeLtCmndHipster
  7/01/15 12:55pm
  And also “it’d be a shame”s.
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benjaminalloverHamilton Nolan
7/01/15 12:43pm
Scott Walker’s terrifying successful campaign to destroy Wisconsin’s public worker unions has proven that the utter decimation of organized labor is not only theoretically, but actually, possible.

Ya speaking of that;

the Wisconsin 2015 right to work bill is a virtual carbon copy of a model bill framed by the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec). The council acts as a form of dating agency between major US corporations and state-level Republican lawmakers, bringing them together to frame new legislation favorable to big business interests.
The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), which monitors the activities of Alec, has compared the Alec model bill and the new Wisconsin proposal andfound them to be nearly identical.

This is purchased legislation. You’d think even some republicans might raise an eyebrow when lobbyists can simply write their own bills.
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