I shoulda been working

As a staunchly anti-union liberal (sounds like a contradiction, its not) I wish I could have come into work yesterday. Labor day actually turned out to be my only day off the whole weekend. Admittedly I don't work very hard, especially in the physical sense, during the week so a little manual labor on the weekend is alright. Unfortunately it turned into a lot of manual labor for barely above minimum wage. Thats the kind of thing where I don't get angry, I'm not going to scream about it, but next time they ask for help I'll say no. I'm not "above" doing manual labor, actually it feels great to do it from time to time, but I am "above" spending my time off, using my vehicle to transport for minimum wage, its just not worth it.

I should do a nice little rant against unions in honor of labor day, but I've done it before and I just don't feel like doing it right now. So heres my old rant, from my old blog, which was a bit less angry than this one so it may not really invoke the disdain I feel towards unions, just remember I was holding back when I wrote this.

May Day

I never knew that May Day was a socialist holiday. Ok it's a much older holiday than that, like almost all holidays that people have fun at it goes back to an old Pagan holiday, those pagans must have really known how to throw a party. Now as someone with some socialist leaning that sounds interesting, unfortunately something that is so tied into socialism in this country is the Labor movement, now I'm all for power to the workers, yet I am unflinchingly anti-Union. This always sounds weird to people until I explain it, and actually my stance against unions comes from experience, and those same experiences are why I am socialist leaning and absolutely not a socialist. It has some great ideas but its not practical. And Unions are trying to be little socialist microcosms in a sea of capitalism which cannot work. I can't decide if I should go into another of my rants against unions.... hmmm...

Aw fuck it why not? It'll probably be relatively brief. So here we go again, why I am a super liberal semi-socialist that absolutely despises Unions. The most basic reason is the same reason why socialism will never work. People are greedy and lazy, not all obviously but over all most people fall into one of those categories, or both. So in a socialist society or a union you remove the punishment for being lazy, you basically cannot be fired, and you remove the reward for working harder, can't make more money than the lazy guy next to you. I want to bring people closer to equality but not absolute equality because, dammit we are NOT equal. Again some folks work hard, some don't why not allow those willing to work harder enjoy some advantages? Thats the idea of capitalism. But closer to equality in that every single person on earth should have at an absolute minimum, Food, Clean drinkable Water, Housing. Thats the absolute minimum, if that makes me a pinko because I think that since we have the ability to prevent children from starving to death, then we should do it, well then call me a commie and I'll call you a..... never mind. The next step would be education and medical care for everyone in the world. Ok so far I've talked about more equality from the view of raising up those at the very bottom of the bell curve, what about the other end? The super-rich. My question is, does anyone NEED a billion dollars? No. Does anyone deserve a billion dollars, now thats the real question. Does the CEO of Exxon Mobile really work a million times harder than the Malaysian person making sneakers for a dollar a day? I think not. If you work twice as hard sure, you should get twice as much, if your job is particularly critical to the welfare of the community, like a doctor, you should get more. Especially in the case of a doctor because not only are they saving lives but it takes a large amount of skill to be proficient at it. So yes some people deserve more. But would it be so wrong if the world minimum wage was say 10 bucks an hour, and the richest people made $250,000 a year? We are still talking about more than ten times the money, thats not bad. I know I know, how can you create a maximum wage without severely infringing on rights? I don't know. You obviously can't in a pure capitalist society, but then again generally those at the very top, the multi-millionaires, the billionaires, they don't work under true capitalism anyway. Every corporation with money to pay their top people like that are also pay many politicians, they are subsidized by the government in many different ways, so the biggest corporations are somewhat socialist. Kinda ironic that the peak of capitalism becomes socialist.

I don't have time to get into the part of unions that really pisses me off. Huge corporations, with politicians in tow have no trouble keeping the unions, which are just corporations in their own right anyway, out of their way. But the unions need to hang on so they are forced to go after the smaller business. Now you have a very large well financed corporation, the union, taking on a small struggling company and puts them out of business. If the union is a pride of lions roaming the safari then small businesses are gazelle, and the big ones are elephants. The lions don't stand a chance against a strong elephant so they don't bother. They take keep taking down the gazelle's until theres nothing left but elephants, then they starve to death. Along with the rest of the animals that needed to eat. I should have thought that metaphor through better, I coulda come up with something better, but no time at the moment. You get the idea, unions are killing small businesses, like the one that put a roof over my head growing up, our family business was destroyed because the union didn't get their cut. We payed our workers better, they had better health care, they had more vacation, despite all those extra expenses we still were much cheaper than the union shop because we didn't have to pay protection money to the union, also because we only kept people who were willing to work, we worked harder (I say we because I was in the back pounding duct-work from the age of 16) we got payed more. But the organized crime, I mean organized labor didn't like that so they took us to court where you can be deprived of property without a jury and sued us because we didn't hire people that weren't looking for jobs and who were over qualified. We lost the business, the house the cars everything. My father is the single hardest working person I have ever met. He came from nothing and with pure determination he built a reputation as a worker, started a business and it thrived because of his blood sweat and tears. He would go to work before 7 am and came home somewhere between 6 and 8 o'clock most nights, never stopping for lunch. On a good week he'd take Sunday off to do yard work. This went on for years until things were fairly well established and he was eventually able to reap the benefits. Then it was stolen by a few lawyers and a single judge. There was no jury of our peers, it was all just taken away. Our workers had to take lower paying jobs at the union shops, after voting down the union many times at their former place of employment.

Fuck International Workers Day.

hr800/ union rant ( I put effort into this so read it)

I'm a bit late with this seeing as it has already passed in the house but there is still the senate.
Here is the first of what will probably be many articles that I read on the subject.

This is the one "issue" where I completely disagree with most of my fellow liberals and with the democratic party. I'll admit that I have a personal grievance against the unions. So you could look at what I say as being biased from the start, or it could be the views of someone who has a fairly unique perspective of unions in general. I'm a proud liberal, I want people to at least be close to equal and for everyone to have their basic needs meet, basic needs meaning food, clothing, shelter, education and if your country can afford it health care (BTW the USA Can afford it). So whats this rant about specifically. Well the Dems are moving forward they are pushing through some legislation that they had promised, which is good at least they aren't sitting on their asses anymore. Unfortunately from the limited information I have on this bill it seems like they have stood up and pushed through a heavily flawed bill. So lets more on to specifics.

The biggest and most blatant flaw is the removal of the secret ballot. Theres a good reason we use secret ballots for every thing, how you vote is your business and the total is the only thing that matters to the group as a whole. If both the employees and the the employers know how each individual voted it makes it possible for the company to try to force people to vote against the union, but the bill has provisions for severe penalties if they do that. But what penalties are their if the union tries to pressure workers to vote union? What repercussions are there in that very very plausible case? Unions are corporations with a different title, the only difference is that they don't produce a product. They protect the jobs of those who should be fired and hold back those able to earn more without them. They have been a part of why it is no longer viable to manufacture anything in this country, so by protecting the jobs of a few, they have destroyed the jobs for many. Sorry thats a side topic, this post is not simply about why unions are relic of a former age that do provide a service, but a service that could be provided in more economically viable ways. No thats not what I am here to talk about, I am here to talk about HR 800.

As with anything today you cannot find a moderate response, I hear the typical liberal democrat stance saying how this will save the middle class and bring about social equality and the typical conservative republican stance of how this will ruin businesses and how only godless commies could be for it. Of course the fact that I seem to be finding only opinion pieces on it does tend to lead to that situation.

Here was one that at least had a good quote in it so here's this.

On August 29, 2001, sixteen Democratic members of Congress (led by Miller, but joined by Barney Frank, Pete Stark, Dennis Kucinich, Bernie Sanders, and others) wrote to the Mexican government about private-ballot rights for Mexican workers. In the letter, they state, “We feel that the secret ballot is absolutely necessary in order to ensure that workers are not intimidated into voting for a union that they might not otherwise choose.” In other words, a federally supervised, private ballot election is needed to make sure that workers can make a free choice. Opening up worker choices to public card-check campaigns doesn’t “ensure that workers are not intimidated.”

Those of us opposed to H.R. 800 could not agree more. We just wish that George Miller wanted to preserve American workers’ private-ballot rights as much as he wants to preserve it for Mexican workers.

This is an important issue, I am NOT at all in favor of large corporations, I hate the fact that this country is controlled by money. I hate that corporations have far more influence over our government than the people. But unions are just another corporation that has no right to influence my, or anyone else's, political will. This law just seems ill conceived. I'm not a socialist, I'm not a capitalist, there needs to be a system in between the two that allows those who are willing to work hard to succeed and gain advantages for their efforts, but no one should be without anything, and even those who work hard do not deserve hundreds of times what the average person get. If they work twice as hard they get twice the money, or maybe even quadruple the money, but not 400 times, thats simply obscene. Which is why Im going to include this segment of an atricle that I could hardly read because the entire beginning is some religious mumbo jumbo and I really wasn't concerned with how Hammurabi's code dealt with this issue.

The average salary of CEO's has gone from 25 times the average of employee salaries (at which it remains in much of Europe and Asia) to up to 550 times the average employee salary. That is a shameful drain on employees, especially in light of recent "give-Backs" which have further eroded the income, health and welfare of America's working classes. Moreover, the multi-million dollar executive compensation packages, exorbitant Executive retirement plans and "Golden Parachutes" for executives have short-changed investors and taxpayers, as well.

This may have something to do with why European countries that may have similar GDP per capita have higher quality of life than the US. If the sum is the same and the top .01% are making that kind of money then the people in the middle of the bell curve have less, which lowers the quality of life, of course for the extreme minority the quality of life is a bit better, but at some point the exact number in your bank account is irrelevant when you can buy anything you see. I want social justice not social equality, I think I actually mean not economic equality, justice means that if you work harder you you get more, you work less you get less, but everyone has an equal chance. The wealth of your parents should not determine what you are able to achieve. It is not possible to have an elite hereditary ruling class and call yourself a democracy at the same time.

I could go on but you get the point, I love my liberals but this is one place where I draw the line. Unions cannot save this country, they are large corporations just like wal-mart and should be vilified to a fitting degree.