There’s nothing quite so satisfying as discovering that someone you don’t like politically has been holding themselves to a considerably lower standard than they demand from others.
About 20 years ago, during the debate over a Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, the NFL denied one state the opportunity to host the Super Bowl (I think it was Arizona or New Mexico) because the state had not passed the holiday. Someone did a little digging, and discovered that the NFL itself did not recognize the holiday, and did not give its employees the day off.
Personally, I have little truck with unions. They once were valuable institutions, and brought about many great changes — ones that benefited everyone.
But that was a long, long time ago. These days, most unions are essentially extensions of the Democratic Party, organized crime (sometimes the two are interchangeable), and tend to have little concern for their rank and file members. For example, union money has been spent heavily to back “immigrants’ rights” and other pro-illegal-alien measures, despite that it is the union’s members that tend to suffer most from the economic damage they wreak.
So it was with no little glee that I read Kevin’s piece about a union outsourcing its’ picketing duties.
It’s nothing new. A while ago, it was revealed that one union had hired temps to hired people to picket Wal-Mart — with the picketers working for far less than what Wal-Mart was offering, and what the union thought was unacceptable. And the conditions for the picketers were downright heinous.
At the time, I thought it would have been a brilliant PR coup for Wal-Mart to send an employee out to the picket line with job applications, offering the hired picketers more money and better working conditions if they quit working for the union and came to work for the giant, evil, monstrous conglomerate.
I don’t think I’d like to see it as an actual law, but I’d really, really like to see unions start living up to their own demands. Imagine what would happen if every union had to guarantee that every single one of its own employees — permanent, temporary, contractors, and anyone else working for the union — was treated at least as well as the lowest-paid union member. Same pay, same benefits, same everything.
In the case of the DC picketers, the homeless would have been paid as well as an apprentice union carpenter. And in the Wal-Mart case, the picketers would have been paid a bit more, given breaks, and allowed access to water while they marched back and forth all day outside a Las Vegas store.
It’s a pipe dream, I know. Unions are much like politicians — they demand high standards from others, but make damned certain that they exclude themselves from following them.
But it’s a fun one, nonetheless.
