Starve A Union Save A Teacher - Granite Grok

Starve A Union Save A Teacher

SEIU Union ThuggeryThe state has no right to come between the union and its workers right?  Well I think I agree, because we now know how that works out.

Wisconsin Teachers no longer have their union dues deducted from their pay checks.  They have to either sign up for automatic payments through their bank or write a check to the union each month.  Given how the anti-Walker protests went, or at least how they were portrayed, this should not have been a problem for the union.  You know, workers unite and all that Jazz?  Well reality is quite a bit different from the media adaption of the Union talking points we saw on television.  The Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC), the state education union, is laying off 40% of its staff in response to dwindling revenue.  But why?  What happened to workers unite?  Where did all the union protesters go?  Home to their own states is my guess.

Given the "choice" to support the Wisconsin education unions activities, many teachers have stopped paying dues and union staff have been laid off as a result.  So Wisconsin’s teachers just gave 42 state union employees their walking papers because they would rather keep the money for themsleves than give it to the WEAC.

The union is blaming Governor Walker and the Republicans but for what?  There’s no law against paying dues and the state is no longer coming between the union and its workers.  Kyle Olson at Big Government brings home the bacon…

If the union has anyone to blame, it has to be its rank-and-file members. Teachers have apparently been slow to provide WEAC with bank account information for direct dues payments, despite the teams of “home visitors” that have been dispatched to pressure members over the summer.

That situation says more about the union than it does about Walker or state government. If teachers really supported their union, they would pay their dues. If they don’t support their union, should they be forced to be members and pay dues?

(…)The suspicion is that WEAC is really nothing more than a small group of radical leaders who have been forcing captive members to finance their agenda for years.

Big protest, and we had one similar in New Hampshire, but what were they really protesting?

If you look at the crowd outside the New Hampshire state House pictured in that image the left loves to wave around, they claim they were New Hampshire workers protesting against Right to Work. But who are they really? Odds are they are no different than the protesters in Madison.   Remember Madison? Large crowds, doctors writing sick notes, teachers on illegal walk-outs, students and children used as props, people camped out in the State house, even breaking in to wreak havoc, intimidation and threats…and democrat legislators running away for weeks to try and stop the vote; after all that, after everyone went home, the actual teachers who work in Wisconsin are not really all that  interested in funding their own union.

So it looks like a small group of radical leaders are forcing captive members to finance their agenda. it’s no different in New Hampshire. The taxpayers of our state are paying public employee union dues laundered through the checks of public employees.  We are financing the unions, and odds are good the public employees would rather we not.   And I bet, if given the choice, New Hampshire’s public workers–the union brothers and sisters of those Wisconsin’s teachers who are not interested in funding their union–would vote with their checkbooks and wallets in exactly the same way.

That means New Hampshire can pass Right to Work for New Hampshire.  Give the employees the option to choose for themselves.  Give them the choice, the option, the freedom, to decide themselves. 

And if that doesn’t work out, then pass a separate bill that removes the state and every town from the collection process of public employee union dues.  The state has no business being between the union and its members, right?  So let’s give them what they really want.

Will the results be the same?   Will Granite State public employees choose to keep their money?  Will they prefer to donate to a candidate, a union, or a cause of their choosing, even if it is none of the above?  Are they smart enough to know what’s really good for them, or are the unions going to insist on telling them how and where to spend their money? It’s a conversation I’d like to see. Call it an intervention. Take away automatic deductions of union dues, then let the unions and the workers “work it out.”

 

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