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A friend in Florida sent this link.  I hadn’t seen Andrew Klavan before, but after watching this video I think he is pretty good! He really hits it on the head. I especially like the media quotes….

 

I must admit that I have never worked for a company that was unionized.  However, over the years I have had some experience with unions.  I have seen some unions that make sense, some that simply killed productivity, and some that are just downright evil.

My former Father-in-Law, Ben, was a member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, IBEW.   Ben was from Denmark and was an electronics technician over there.  He loved working on electronics, especially broadcast transmitters.  When he came to the states he found that he couldn’t make a decent living working in the broadcast industry.  Ben followed his brothers who had come to America before him and became a electrician.  In Denmark a broadcast engineer made more than an electrician but not in the states.  Here, even though it takes considerably more education to learn electronics, an electrician makes more money.  Probably because electricians are union and electronic techs are typically not.

The IBEW would be what I would classify as a good union.  I can see where unions make sense for the construction trades.  Ben would work on a project for one to three years, mostly building condos on Miami Beach.  Ben got his training from the union, coming up through the ranks as an apprentice electrician and working his way up to journeyman electrician.  Ben also got his unemployment, medical, and retirement benefits from the union, which in the construction trade worked very well.  If he had been an employee of each construction company or general contractor he had worked for his medical and retirement plan would have changed every couple of years.  But, built into the contracts with the Union was the cost of the medical and retirement for the electricians.  Ben also paid into the union in the form of dues, so he was like most of us, paying at least a portion of his benefits.  This way Ben had continuity with his benefits throughout his career.  When a project closed, he returned to the union and was assigned to another project.  In my opinion, the union provided a benefit to both the employer and the employee.

Many unions in the private sector aren’t that good.  I worked in field service for several years.  CPI, the company I worked for, sold data acquisition hardware that would be integrated with application software, a computer, instrumentation, and delivered to a third party customer as a turnkey automation system.  Part of my job in service was to go to a customer site and assist with a system start-up.  I would be on sight at the end customer’s facility with the system integrator, the customer, sometimes the computer supplier.  We would work together to get the system working and ready for acceptance by the end customer.

Unions can kill productivity.  When on sight our little team was motivated to get the system up and running so that we could go home and our companies could get paid.  However, when the end user company was a union shop, things often moved very slowly during start-up.  For instance, usually any power connections made to the system would require the company’s union electricians to do the connection.  I can’t tell you how many hours of my life I have wasted waiting on the union guys to show up and do their job.  Many times we would wait 30 minutes or an hour for them to come to the computer room, look at the task, then leave to go get tools.    So we would wait for another 30 minutes to an hour.  The electrician would finally arrive, do a 10 minute job and leave.  Two hours killed for a 10 minute job.

I remember having completed a system test at a Rohm & Hass Plexiglas manufacturing facility in Illinois.  We had one minor problem.  The teletype machine that was the system console (Yeah, that shows how many years ago that was!) had a minor problem on carriage return.  It was a simple adjustment of a damper on the type head.  We were not allowed to adjust the teletype because it had, at that point, been transferred to the possession of Rohm & Haas.    A union mechanic had to be called.  We waited, and waited, and waited.  Finally the mechanic shows up.  He didn’t know jack s–t about a teletype machine.  I had to give him instruction on how to remove the cover, and adjust the damper.  As hard as he tried he couldn’t get it work correctly.  I snatched the screwdriver out of his hand and in 10 seconds had it working perfectly.  What did the mechanic do?  He filed a grievance with the union because I did his job.

With union employees working for a private company, there is at least some actual negotiations to determine pay and benefits.  There are free market forces at work.  If the unions demand too much in compensation and make the company non-competitive in the market then the union members will suffer when the company tanks.   But public employees unions are all together different.

Public employee unions get their salary and benefits from the taxpayer. (that would be ME and YOU)  Their benefits usually include very good health care plans and big pensions.  I have heard stories of New York City employees retiring at 90 percent of their salaries with full medical benefits.  Many of the retirees double dip, get another job and still collect their full pension.

The unions collect dues from their members.  The union bosses take the dues and use the money for political contributions to candidates that will treat the unions favorably. The elected officials, because they are beholden to the unions for the campaign contributions, use their influence to make sure that union employees get high pay, good benefits, and excellent pensions.  These benefits and pensions are weighing down many state and local governments with unfunded liabilities that the simply have not chance of paying for without massive tax increases.  The full burden rests on the taxpayers shoulders!  There is no protection as there is with the free market, governments do have competition and they don’t chapter 11!

According to the US Debt Clock, Federal pensions now total almost $202 Billion.  California has a $90 Billion pension debt and Ohio is facing $64 Billion in unfunded pension liability.  These figures are just simply out of control.  The politicians have promised and promised but they have no way to pay for these union employees pensions and health care other than “robbing” the tax payers!

Sometimes these big number start to lose their effect.  Bringing it down to the family level, the “Red Mass Group” reports:

“A typical homeowner in Worcester (MA) may have to come up with as much as $50,000 over the next 30 years to support city obligations for city worker retirement health care benefits, while the burden on Boston homeowners over the same period could be $100,000, according to a study highlighting growing unfunded liabilities from municipal retirement benefits.”

That amounts to $1,667 each year from each household in Worcester to go toward retired public employee health benefits.  That doesn’t even include the pension payments!

According to the Department of Labor most union members today work for a local, state, or the federal government. Almost 40% of government workers are unionized.  If you are running for office you are going to have the government employee’s vote to have a chance at being elected.  So, as a candidate you are going to promise them what they want.  Once elected you are going to give them what you promised in order to stay in office.  If that isn’t illegal it should be!

With the economic turn down the local, state, and federal governments don’t have the revenue they had three years ago.  They are not able to pay the salary and benefits for the workers because the money simply isn’t there.  The public employee unions are clamoring for their benefits and they don’t really care who has to pay the bill.  They just want their “Stuff.”  The states just don’t have any choice, in order to balance their budgets they have to cut back on employee benefits, pensions, and salaries.

Michael Moore is at it again.  A couple of weeks ago he was in the news for filing a lawsuit to get more money from the producers of his 9/11 movie.  (article) Now he is saying that the country isn’t broke, Wisconsin isn’t broke, there’s a ton of cash in this country.   It is just in the wrong people’s hands!  Check out this video of MM’s interview on GRITv.

Rich people need to see these jobs as something that we collectively own as Americans?  “They” can’t steal OUR jobs and take them someplace else?  What is this whack job talking about?  This guy is just a communist, out and out!  This is the same guy who redefines the term Greedy?  I wonder sometimes if these “Progressives” actually start to believe their own B. S.

Give me a freaking break!

For years I have held the Associated Press in high regard.  I thought that the AP was less biased than many of the major news outlets.  However, this morning after reading an AP account of Governor Mike Huckabee’s gaff on Obama I have to change that opinion.

When I log out of my Yahoo email I am dumped to Yahoo News page.  I don’t normally go to Yahoo for my news, but sometimes there is a headline that catches my eye and I will read it.  This morning there was a news item there titled, “FACT CHECK: Huckabee claims Obama grew up in Kenya.”  Governor Huckabee made a statement in a radio interview saying, that since Obama was raised in Kenya his view of the British was very different than the average American.  About mid article there is a reference to Obama’s removing the bronze bust of Churchill from the Oval Office and returning it to the Brits. The author of the piece, Phillip Elliot, went on to say;

“He failed to note that Obama replaced the Oval Office fixture with a bust of one of his American heroes, President Abraham Lincoln, and moved the Churchill bust to the White House residence.”

I remembered reading an article some time ago about Obama returning the bust in the Telegraph so I went searching for it.  Mr. Elliot should check his facts.  According to an article in the Telegraph, Mr. Obama did in fact return the bust to the possession of the UK.  According to the Telegraph the bronze bust now resides in the residence of the British Ambassador Sir Nigel Sheinwald in Washington, just down the street from the Vice President’s residence.

Governor Huckabee may be wrong on where Obama was raised,  (maybe) but his point about the President’s attitude toward the British is pretty well right on.  I have read several articles about President Obama being influenced by his Kenyan father’s anti-colonial feeling toward the British.  Surely that has a lot to do with Obama returning the bust of Churchill to the British, not to mention his less that warm relations with the UK.

Dinesh D’Souza explains Obama’s motivation very well in this book The Roots of Obama’s Rage.  Mr. D’Souza states that,  “Obama is motivated by inherited rage — an often masked, but profound rage that comes from his African father; an anticolonialist rage against Western dominance, and most especially against the wealth and power of the very nation Barack Obama now leads.”

My point?  It is now very difficult to tell “News” from “Opinion” in the media.  When you read something that sounds like news, it may be flavored with opinion, so do your own research.