Henwy, please excuse my ignorance, but would you kindly explain the first part of your post.
ROFL is an expression new to me.
I went back and read again the article you linked. Then I followed several other links and looked at the bigger picture.
The Union paradise you alluded to is current day France. And the struggle you were referencing is an ongoing battle between the French government and a large section of the French people. According to the various links I followed, the French government made agreements with Germany and several other European governments to bring the French working class closer to the standards of the rest of Europe. At issue is a package of retirement issues that include raising the official retirement age to 62. Again, according to the articles you linked to, the French people themselves consider it a near-sacred right to retire at 60. Hey, we are talking about the French. They should have a right to fight for their rights as they please.
The only major groups reported, in these links, to be supporting the people in this struggle are the various unions. That, in and of itself, does not make it a moral or legal crime. But it does bring up a question; to me anyway. Why would a union want its members to retire at 60 instead of 62? Which leads to other questions. Wouldn’t that be two years of union dues for every worker that the unions would never touch? Wouldn’t that be two years less of retirement funds they would not be able to get their hands on? If French workers were required to work two years longer the union numbers would swell, making the unions more numerous and therefore more powerful.
Wow, backing the citizens seems to be a net loss for the unions. Can someone help me with this?
Why would an organization that is as vile and self enriching as Henwy claims, take such actions? And not just one union, it seems to be all of the major unions in the country.
The basic facts gleaned from these links can easily be seen by anyone who can read and look at the situation without emotional paradigms distorting their judgments. In the final analysis of the French situation, all that is being hampered is that transportation has been sporadically snarled and many have been worried about reports of fuel runs at a few hundred gas stations. I think more traffic snarls are planned as the truckers intend to join the struggle on Tuesday. There was a video link that showed a burning car that was the result of high school students (obviously union provocateurs) rioting outside their schools when the police attempted to barricade them inside so they could not join in on the nationwide protests against the widely unpopular government plans. The video went on to show clips from other riots across the nation and did not fail to show a gas station without gas and a few stranded train passengers.
Henwy, it is obvious you have negative opinions of unions and their activities. And that is your right in America.
To have an opinion and to have the right to state it openly is among our most cherished rights. So I will exercise mine on this point you so graciously brought up.
It is human nature to attempt to control one’s environment. Man combines with others of a like mind to help these inborn drives. Groups are formed to push needs and agendas large and small. A few hundred years ago most societies had only three groups; the ‘legal’ rulers, their subjects, and outlaws. The subjects were downtrodden and outlaws were defined as anyone who opposed the rulers and were eliminated as quickly as possible. As our societies matured and evolved through centuries of moral and educational advancements, subjects have evolved into citizens with rights and voices that often run afoul of the legal and economic rulers of their day. The common man of today understands more of what he needs and more of the fallibility of these groups than his predecessors. As businesses and governments don’t tend to be accessible to the will of the people and the citizens evolve into more self-willed serfs, the citizens will strive to form groups that will oppose less than responsive heads of business and government. It is only natural that unions exist where governments are not felt to be “of the people, by the…” and where the governments are not oppressive enough to stamp them out. (But that practice leads to more revolutionary activities by those that feel oppressed.) The bottom line is that as the average intelligence of the masses increases, the various governments and businesses must become more responsive or face opposition from disgruntled subjects. If unions were stamped out today the people would find another way to oppose unfair treatment. If oppressed long and seriously enough, revolution will be the result.
Greed and the initiative to act upon it are mostly concentrated in those that spend their lives in pursuit of riches and power and those who are hungry and oppressed. Whenever there is no way for the common man to make their government and employers responsive to their needs, the number of the latter group increases as those in power get more of what they struggle for. When the number of oppressed gets large enough, they will rise up and try to take control of their environment, normally with dire and drastic consequences. Those of us who find ourselves in the middle should fear the destruction of the unions, for no good will come to us from unrestrained business and a government who is controlled by only the rich with no counterbalance for the people. Americans won’t stand for that.
Now to the specific points volleyed in my direction.
I don’t know or care what you imagine about the old Robber Barons or the arms dealers. I have no problem keeping a straight face when stating obvious facts and seriously held opinions. And I would imagine you know more about propagandist mouthpieces than I do but we do agree about part of your next sentence; unions exist to enrich themselves.
Yes they do. The leaders of most unions do it because of their salaries and fringe benefits, but don’t all executives and politicians? So, I guess you can say that the union leaders do what they do to enrich themselves, but what is out of line about that? The union members do their jobs to enrich themselves also. I know that my dad certainly felt enriched when he took his family out of that barn in Texas and put us in a real house. It had beds and windows and running water. We all felt enriched. And so did millions of Americans that suddenly found themselves in a new class, no longer poor but certainly not rich, but somewhere in the middle.
Yes sometimes unions get greedy and graspy, but no more than powerful business leaders and politicians. But things do balance out. The major strength of unions of years past in America are muzzled and bridled compared to what they were a few decades ago. Greed led to less demand for their services, a natural balancing factor. I don’t think that unions ever really dominated things in America, perhaps a few industries, but not the majority of the nation. And with the decline of their power and numbers in recent decades, I really don’t get where you are coming from with the ‘union domination’ reference. You might have been or still are in an abused frame of mind because of your personal life situations, but the majority of Americans don’t feel overly concerned or even slightly frightened about unions.
I find it telling that you use the Captains of Industry as the Robber Barons were often called as a comparison to the peoples’ movement that opposed them and eventually brought up the standard of living in this country that resulted in the rise of the middle class of modern America. And when you seem to tire of beating that horse you try to draw comparisons to extremely radical and opposing combatants in the civil rights movements in much later decades. As if attempting to stir emotions with boogey men and sweeping comments on American history and mass ‘innoculations’ of thought followed by generalized and unsubstantiated statements about how the unions are dominating and destroying the fabric of our society.
Actually the differences between the Robber Barons of yesteryear and unions today are monumental. It’s like trying to compare apples to transmissions. The Barons were ruthless power mongers who amassed massive fortunes by mercilessly squeezing out all they could from anyone they could. They were extremely powerful individuals, always few in numbers, who were at or near the pinnacle of their orb of influence. They were often world scale players. They cannot be compared to modern organizations that help millions, perhaps billions worldwide to have a better living. Even if you ignore the help they have done for the average man and only focus on the less than moral and unscrupulous leaders of unions, you are still only talking about medium sized potatoes on the national scenes. Certainly not shakers and movers like the Barons of old.
You’ll have to post some more links to back up your generalizations because what you have posted so far doesn’t seem to back up the doom and gloom scenarios you paint. What you already posted said that the French people seriously disliked the government’s plans to change their retirement laws. Now you claim polls that say they don’t? Henwy, even I wouldn’t trust a French poll any more than the polls put out by political groups. Would you really believe any hogwash that tended to support your side of an argument?
Henwy, the real gist of the union story is that they grew into existence because of the injustices done to the masses by the rich and powerful. This was the true and prevailing condition of man for most of his existence. The union movement only came into existence after mass communication of ideas appeared and the various governments became more tolerant of the voice of the people. The rise of the unions gave more balance in the distribution of wealth and allowed the rise of a middle class. The middle class did not exist as we know it before unions and it will disappear after unions do because the unscrupulous rich will regain the powers that once existed for their class of people. There will be no opposition to the powerful who will influence laws and regulations for their own ends. We will revert to a system where the average person has no recourse against the abuses by those in power.
But today, the unions and businesses are not the ogres they once were. That is not to say that they are not lumbering behemoths that never cause harm. They do, but mostly due to greed; on both sides.
Many people have been hurt in the struggle between unions and the powerful entities they deal with, unfortunate, but a fact of life. However, that number is dwarfed compared to the damage done by those uncaring Barons that existed before unions. And also dwarfed by the numbers and the manners in which they have helped.
In the end, I think in today’s America the union versus business struggle takes up little time in the minds of most people. And that delegates the issue to one of less than monumental importance.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity! (Luckily I'm only half.)
