By "negotiate" for them, you mean get better deals on health care, pensions, and wage rates.
I think a lot of people have come to see that unions are anti-labor to the extreme. But in the past, higher wage rates only cost jobs for non-union members. Today, union members are losing jobs to higher wage rates, and many union members now understand this. So, the ability to negotiate higher wage rates is very limited at this point.
As public-sector unions have taken over a larger portion of the total, and public-sector pensions have become a huge problem nationwide, I think the counter-productivity in having unions negotiate pensions has become apparent. If you worked for the City of Detroit, you'd rather have had a small pension that what you're going to end up with. The same fate is playing out in innumerable cities across the country where unions were able to negotiate "sweet" pension deals that turned out to be not-so-sweet.
So, at the end of the day, health benefits is all they will get from the union. The unions recognize this and are scared shitless of what Obamacare does to that.
Soon, only public sector unions will remain. That is a big problem, and they must be eliminated, but hopefully, the failures of cities with heavy union influence will help kill them off. |
