Still shooting arrows at unions - the GOP and the Tea Party

There is a very nice game put out on the website of the world archery center or something like that. You can go play it here. It requires a system void of coffee jitters that is for sure.  One little blip and the arrow goes - well I know not where...an observation that brings me to the point of posting at 5am.

I woke from an interesting dream that had to do, I think more from watching an Indiana Jones movie last night than all this GOP stuff and the labor unions.  The subject of the dream was we were camping and heard this racket in the distance and as it grew closer, someone in the group I was in told us to climb up as high as possible on the adjacent hillside as a stampede was coming.  No! I'm not 7 years old and a wannabe cowboy.  This was a stampede with wagons, cattle, lots of people, trucks, you name it so we scrambled up this amazingly high hill to the top which was like a sunny Everest and we could see water - ocean really - in every direction. Realizing we needed help to get down (don't ask - I have no idea) we tied messages to arrows  and shot them toward where we thought we could see people.  With something so humdrum and weird of course I woke up, put the coffee on, tried the archery game, and decided to write instead.

The point is that the GOP is still hell bent on shooting arrows at unions and they are hitting all kinds of things along with the target.  A majority of folks (62% of all people) don't like the union bashing and come to think about it, it is a lot like the arrow sequence in my dream and certainly like this game. An arrow is shot and they know not where.

Not for nothing, taking away collective bargaining from whole groups of people is a huge time waster as no one seems to mention that teachers, for instance, can't bargain as a group and contracts made collectively are probably null and void and going forward - well it is one on one with the school board or the principal or the superintendent who will be spending almost all his/her time negotiating with individual teachers and if you think there is a stampede chaos now...well grab your bow and arrow. But just think about something like Wisconsin and the state employees - perhaps those kindly folks in the state income tax bureau.

They are probably a surely lot to begin with,  mad going to work and madder when they get there. Everyone hates them from the gitgo and it just gets worse when you have to actually interact with them. Since they are all union - even the administration usually, some higher authority is going to have to come in and go mano a mano and it won't be pretty.  Not pretty at all.

The unintended consequence of shooting this arrow in the air is what was uniform and predictable about labor costs is now out the window and a workplace skill, just as valuable as Excel or MS Word, will be negotiation skills in a job area that hasn't seen it except collectively for decades. Some might say that is a good thing but as those of us in the non-union world know, our workplace is full of jockeying for position, kissing up to administration, keeping off the blacklist and hoping that an arrow doesn't just fall out of the sky and end our job. 

Unions protect against whims and flukes of nature and arrows falling from we know not where and the Governor is visiting this chaos on workers who are now going to stampede and he and his GOP cronies who think ad hoc archery contests are a good thing better climb the highest hill they can find because no one on this earth is more vengeful than a worker who gets his life tossed around like a football after being shot at on the archery range.