Unions Aren't the Villains

Unions Aren’t the Villains
Once again transit workers in a major city are striking for better wages and benefits. Once again they are portrayed as the villains because others have been inconvenienced.
While the average worker in America earns 200-300 times less than the best paid CEO’s of multinational corporations they still allow themselves to think management has their best interests in mind.
Management, along with big media, demonizes the worker simply trying to live a better life with a living wage whenever the worker challenges the status quo. Other workers, inconvenienced from taking a bus to the baseball game or work, curse and complain about unions being the villains.
They also bitch and moan about the ridiculous money baseball players receive as they pay the inflated prices for tickets, beer, food and soft drinks.
The same typical American worker goes to work day after day with little protection from being dismissed at the whim of the management.
They will find as they spend years at the same job they’ll become dispensable when they are nearer to retirement.
They’ll find their pensions thought to be a sure thing may be reduced or lost because management has broken the trust.
Healthcare benefits rise until many workers can no longer afford to stay enrolled. The worker becomes one major illness or accident from becoming destitute. Management is no where to be found when it happens.
Skilled workers with years of education lose employment to companies deciding the only way to “compete” is to outsource their work to a foreign land’s workers. Management always talks about competition but fails to mention the large profit made by paying the foreign worker half or less than they paid their loyal employees dismissed.
The question seems to always be why doesn’t America make anything anymore? Check the clothes racks, the shoe stores and even the good old traditional baseball used in the “national pastime” and see where the product is made.
Poor immigrants stream into this country to find work to simply better the life of their family. They take employment at far less than management would pay an American worker because even the lesser wage is much more than they could ever find in their homelands.
So, who does the typical American worker vilify in these cases of lost employment? They blame the poor workers of foreign lands or the immigrants for taking away their work.
They continuously miss the fact management manipulates them and abuses the poor to make larger profits.
They continuously fail to recognize that only when united workers challenge the greed of large and smaller corporations and public employers will the workers gain the comfort of a living wage with benefits.
Today we have a group of transit workers in Denver’s Regional Transportation District rejecting a contract offer of a yearly 60 cents a hour raise each year for three years, a one-time bonus of 250.00 and an undisclosed increase in health benefits.
The transit workers have had their wages frozen for the last 3 ½ years. During that same time RTD managers have given themselves an average raise of 25 percent. Some of the managers gave themselves a full 47 percent in one single raise.
The media doesn’t put those inequities in their headlines, however. Instead they headline the union “throws commuters, baseball into turmoil” and “Some riders have no easy alternative”.
Instead they list a “Strike survival guide” which isn’t about union members surviving without pay for the first three weeks they would be on strike. The survival guide is how to “survive” the inconvenience.
The media coverage begs the question of fair reporting and editing. Instead of a headline about the sacrifice and courage of workers challenging inequity and disparate pay for workers in comparison with managers, the media quotes a disgruntled union member accusing union leaders of having personal vendettas against the RTD.
Could the media do any better job to demonize and attempt to divide union members? Could their coverage be any more blatantly unfair?
And yet, the average American worker will turn against their peers in the American work force and believe the lies and manipulations of management.
They’ll look the other way when corporate executives lay off a third of their workforce, steal over a third of their pension and give themselves bonuses embarrassingly more than a worker could make in ten years.
These examples of greed and malicious disregard for workers have become common place in American life. And still it’s the unions working for better worker conditions, pay and benefits that are accused of villainous behaviors.
Until we realize those transit workers walking the picket lines today represent all the typical American employees, management will gloat and gleefully continue to exploit labor’s divisiveness.
Until we struggle to unite workers around the world to demand fairness, greedy managers will continue to get the rewards for the hard work of the average employees. They’ll continue to receive obscene bonuses while they steal from their workers’ future and hard-earned wages.

Wm. Terry Leichner, RN
Vietnam Veterans Against the War
Combat veteran – Vietnam 1967-69 (USMC)