Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

LETTER TO THE EDITOR:

Public employees and unions are a bad combination

Does any logically thinking person truly believe that in 2011, without unions, we would slip back into the labor practices of the early to mid-1900s? We have the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Occupational Safety and Health Administration and dozens, if not hundreds, of other government agencies monitoring labor practices. Does anyone believe that today’s companies or governments would try to do away with the 40-hour workweek, maternity leave, family leave, overtime, etc.?

I hold no ill will toward private unions. Companies their members work for have to look out for their workers and themselves. It is their business. Turn a profit or everybody loses.

But government employee unions? That is a different bird. Government union contracts make it next to impossible to reward excellent teachers or fire bad ones. Union officials bargain for and usually get, at taxpayer expense, outrageous and unsustainable benefit packages unheard of in today’s private sector — all from politicians they back during election time. This is corruption in its truest form.

Politicians aren’t paying these folks with their own money. They are paying them with taxpayer money — money that might have gone to a down-on-his-luck citizen in the form of a “hand-up,” instead of a bloated, extravagant benefits package.

“It is impossible to bargain collectively with the government,” said George Meany, former president of the AFL-CIO, in 1955. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the patron saint of the American labor movement, in a 1937 letter written to the president of the Nation Federation of Federal Employees, stated “the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.”

FDR was a man of unquestionable integrity and high moral character. He was also absolutely right.

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