Last Work Day of the Month

I read with some interest something of an "op-ed" this morning in the Wall Street Journal - now the FauxNoise of print - by Nikki Haley who was governor of the State of South Carolina. She is putting on her best Donald Trump face and "demanding" answers from then President Obama regarding Boeing needing to be in a right to work state or not to produce airplanes. It seems Nikki considers this a constitutional affront to those who value free choice and that Mr. Obama has come down on the side of unions rather than corporate management. One seems ok to concede to - the other not.

Against this backdrop rests all the claptrap in Wisconsin, Indiana and Ohio and a bunch of other states that are hacking at unions in one way or another. It has to do with villainy - deciding on whom the mantle of "bad actor" will fall.

In the flatiron district of New York, a century ago, a group of women were burned alive at work - literally burned alive - because management, for fear of work-breaks and therefore lost time, locked them in their workroom. The building caught fire and they couldn't get out. In the 20s and 30s, there was a fear of unions partly because some employers like Ford and a national sentiment against communism which was/is somewhat associated with the union worker movement was turning Europe inside out and the fear of it spread here.

There is also, in these modern United States, any number of statewide movements that oppose any decisions made generally on the Federal level - this dating to the very birth of the nation and manifested in the civil war as one example. There is also a certain owner/slave mentality as well as the stereotypical union thug characterization that in some cases rightly is born out. Unions have the organized crime thing but then again I do see a fair number of management types heading headlong into the justice system.

The point is that the balance between the need for unions to protect against the extremes of management is fairly easy to argue The other side of the coin is that unions have grabbed everything on the table and then some and now those salad days are over and a more moderate and compromising stance is needed.

Hissy-fits and "calling out the President" alla La Donald contribute nothing to anything. Screaming about a pattern of abuse and favoritism against one person for treatment of one group over another is, in itself, picking favorites - one group over another and you can call the pig a dog but in the end it is a pig. That is to say, you can scream to high heaven about free choice but what that really is cloaking is my free choice wins over your free choice.

Anyway, the wedding just ended - a union blessed by God - and it is the end of the 5 day workweek although few of us have the luxury of only 5 days working for others - and we turn now back to the politicians who are screaming about unions while Congress took 2 weeks off for Good Friday. Point noted.