Why the 2016 GOP race may be all about taking down unions
By Thomas Geoghegan
May 6, 2015
blogs.reuters.com
excerpt:
Alas, there are plenty of Americans who may be driving freight for minimum wage — or less if they are owner-operators — and are full of resentment for Teamsters making $33 an hour driving for United Parcel Service Inc. One Teamster local officer put it this way: “You’d think instead of saying, ‘It’s outrageous that UPS drivers make $33 an hour,’ they’d be saying, ‘Hey, what can I do to make $33 an hour?’ ” But right-to-work laws have spread to 26 states — and the federal government — because most Americans aren’t in unions and don’t see what stake they have in them.
Yet in many ways, all Americans are freeloading off the few people left paying union dues. The Las Vegas hotel maids who kick in their dues are paying for labor to defend their wages and also to defend programs like Social Security that provide much greater benefits to you and me. But we’re not paying labor for this fight; the maids are. Indeed, there is virtually no one in Washington except labor to fight for these programs — even AARP has waffled. It gave ground on Social Security benefit cuts, for example, during a tough deficit battle in 2011.
So it’s bad for all Americans if organized labor is not just down to representing 6.6 percent of workers in the private sector — but not even getting dues from everyone in that 6.6 percent. Still, I don’t want to exaggerate the falloff. In Indiana, a union representative said to me: “In our larger shops, very few people stop paying. They understand what they’re getting.”
But where people are getting $17 an hour instead of $33, it’s different. “Of course they still want you to represent them,” the union rep said. They’re anything but anti-union. They might contribute if they could. But it’s tough to feed the kids even on $17 an hour.
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