The New Hidden Unions

Yesterday's lead staff editorial in the Wall Street Journal conveyed a chilling fact. A fact which is displayed on the nearby chart which accompanied the article.

As of last year, US public union membership surpassed that of private unions.

A little-known act in JFK's brief presidency was allowing public, state and federal government workers to unionize. In a recent piece on that topic, the author noted that even FDR and LaGuardia opposed this, because they considered government workers honor-bound to serve the people, in exchange for their public-trough-sourced jobs.

It's taken nearly 50 years, but look at the damage JFK wrought.

Here's a good example. It's from the editorial,

"The political scientists Fred Siegel and Dan DiSalvo recently wrote in the Weekly Standard about the 2006 example of former New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine shouting to a rally of 10,000 public workers that "We will fight for a fair contract." Mr. Corzine was supposed to be on the other side of the bargaining table representing taxpayers, not labor."

In the past year, the largest growth segment for employment has been.....government! And the average salary in the sector has risen, as well.

That's right. In the midst of a deep recession, government workers have benefited with more money and more jobs.

Having so many government workers leads to them organizing for higher taxes to pay...themselves. And generally swelling the public sector at the expense of the rest of us who actually work for a living.

If for only this reason, this is why outsourcing as much government work as possible to the private sector, via contracting, is a good idea.

Instead, we now have a larger union bloc voting to expand government than we have private industry union members. By comparison, the private sector unions were a mere distraction.