LETTER: Resident discusses downfalls of union jobs and benefits
Join the union, and lose your job and your hard-earned benefits!
While union bosses have fattened their own wallets, the membership has been losing jobs and benefits in masses.
The most recent example is the loss of 18,000 jobs at “Hostess” due to union unwillingness to compromise on anything that might have allowed the company to stay competitive.
Hostess’ unions, as an example, would not permit Twinkies and white bread to be delivered to stores on the same truck.
They had to be delivered by different trucks, driving right behind each other.
You may also have heard of what happened to airline employees at all of the big carriers, except Southwest Airlines.
Over the last 10 years, they have all been in and out of bankruptcy, at least once. Some twice! The unions couldn’t quite understand that paying a senior pilot $275,000 annually for working eight days a month just wasn’t sustainable.
As part of the bankruptcy process, pensions for airline personnel, from first pilot to flight attendant, were transferred to the government-sponsored “Pension Benefit Guarantee Corp,” or PBGC that protects the retirement incomes of more than 44 million American workers.
So, thanks to the efforts of the union movement, thousands of airline employees lost their jobs, the rest saw their incomes reduced by 25 percent to 50 percent, and all lost two-thirds of their pensions. One-third is all that PBGC covers.
When was the last time an automaker built a new plant in Michigan or in Illinois, where skilled autoworkers, by the hundreds of thousands, go unemployed?
No, instead foreign and domestic carmakers build plants in “right to work states,” like Alabama, South Carolina and Indiana, where union membership is voluntary.
When Caterpillar recently closed a locomotive plant in Ontario, following a dispute with its union, it moved the production to Indiana, and not to Illinois, where most of Caterpillar’s production is concentrated.
It’s not only the American workers who suffer from the abuse of unions; it’s also our kids.
Within the last 12 months, the mayors of our three largest cities — Michael Bloomberg of New York, Rahm Emanuel of Chicago and Antonio Villaraigosa of Los Angeles — have all said that the biggest obstacle to better education in this country is the teacher’s union.
Yes unions brought us the 40-hour workweek!
Alleluia!
These days, people are lucky to be working 40 hours a week!
And I could go on…
Karsten Malmos
