Labor Pains

Today's column for the Daily Banter focuses on Michigan governor Rick Snyder's fast-tracking of legislation that just turned the cradle of organized labor into a "right-to-work" state.

My take on it is personal -- and will probably draw at least a small amount of criticism from the hard-left -- while I hope being reasonable.

Here's an excerpt:

"My biggest issue when it came to the unions at KCBS was always this: workers weren’t really given a choice as to whether or not they wanted to be a part of them. I had been hired on as a 'senior producer,' a muscular-sounding title which belied the fact that the KCBS brain trust had basically just pulled it out of their asses. What they’d done, see, is label me a manager without actually giving me any of the authority of a manager — and they’d done it for no other reason than to ensure that, as a manager-in-name, I wouldn’t be obligated to join the Writers Guild of America, the union that oversaw the station’s producer corps. They likely considered the idea a stroke of inspired genius, but, as expected, the Guild saw through this bit of juvenile misdirection and filed grievance upon grievance against the station for attempting to game the system while simultaneously trying to pressure me to join up and pay them the required union dues. The station management ignored the Guild’s complaints; I threw the angry bi-weekly letters I got from it in the garbage.

Here’s what it came down to: I didn’t want to be forced into paying out part of my salary to a third-party. I had been hired by KCBS and as far as I was concerned, as shitty as it was, it was the only entity I had personally made an agreement with. I wanted the choice to not have any association whatsoever with the union.

I do, in fact, question the fairness of making workers submit, en masse, to the authority of a labor union... The counter-argument against a willingness to debate this is generally of the “well, no one’s forcing you to join, only to pay a diminished due” variety. Sorry, but that isn’t much of a salve for those who literally want nothing at all to do with the union where he or she works or is going to work. "

Read the Rest Here