Constant Conservative

Paul at PowerLine has a very good piece on the mentality which drives labor union leadership (which I touched on a bit with my post on Mr. Stern of the SEIU). Here’s an excerpt of the PowerLine piece, which is worth reading in its entirety:

In essence, Stern argues that a union election isn’t like the elections we have in the U.S. in which we choose, for example, the members of Congress. According to Stern, a union election is the equivalent of an election over whether we should have a Congress.

The question-begging nature of Stern’s argument is evident. Stern simply assumes that the desirability of having a particular union, no matter how thuggish or corrupt, represent a particular set of employees is as self-evident as the desirability of having Congress represent the people of the United States; therefore the issue need not be put to a proper vote. Under this absurd reasoning, it’s not clear why unions should even have to obtain authorization cards, and there’s little doubt that Stern would like them to be exempt from even this requirement.

Here in the US, unlike countries which have parliamentary systems with “shadow governments,” we do our best (well, some of us anyway) to stay away from parallel power structures. It would appear to me that Mr. Stern and others in authority within the SEIU, UAW, ETC would like to create/maintain parallel structures with existing US legal authorities. Of course, in such cases, the best we could hope for would be an oligarchy of the labor leadership, but more probably we would have a series of dictators.

I do not believe I am overstating the case here. Labor unions, broadly speaking, are well past trying to help the “little man” and well on their way towards that Western European goal of wielding quasi-governmental powers. There are a number of reasons  many of us left Europe, but this is one reason I have no desire that we become Far-Western Europe.