It would be very easy for unions to place their contracts on their web sites.
These contracts placed on union web sites should encourage the unorganized workers to join unions; right?
But, in spite of union officials giving lip service to how their unions are "rank-and-file" unions, union members have little say in what they want from their own union contracts.
In addition, most union "leaders" are ashamed making their contracts public because instead of winning improved wages and working conditions and benefits, each succeeding contract is worse than the previous one... the reason being union "leaders," especially those of the millionaire variety, want union members who are paying the dues as little involved as possible in the decision-making process of the union.
These millionaire labor "leaders" are often as undemocratic as the bosses.
Many union members can't even find out when their union meetings are.
Many union members who pay dues have no say in their own union. The only link many of the members have with their union is seeing how much is taken out of their paychecks for union dues; they don't know when union elections are and if they do find out when the elections are they don't find out in time to run for office themselves to be in compliance with union constitutions and by-laws.
Even many large local unions with a thousand members or more have fewer that what is required for a quorum show up for union meetings even if they raffle off a color television with all in attendance being eligible to have their names in the raffle.
Try to find a union official when you want to file a grievance; good luck.
In fact, few unions in this country today even have union stewards in each department.
Look on many union bulletin boards or web sites and you don't find the most basic information needed in order to participate fully in your own union but you will find all kinds of campaign materials for Democrats and big pictures of union leaders supporting these worthless Democrats.
It is no wonder union membership has hit an all time low with fewer and fewer workers joining unions.
Unions are much like anything else. When workers are happy with their unions they tell everyone. When workers have problems within their unions they also tell everyone.
Perhaps there is some truth that having any union is better than having no union but isn't this the same logic we get for voting for Democrats? That Democrats are better than Republicans even though more often than not they are equally as rotten.
Do we really have to be satisfied with what the sparrows leave behind when it comes to politics, economics and what is being passed off as "democracy" in our unions?
MADISON,
Wis. — For decades, states across the South, Great Plains and Rocky
Mountains enacted policies, known as “right to work,” that prevented
organized labor from forcing all workers to pay union dues or fees. But
the industrial Midwest resisted.
Those days are gone. After a wave of Republican victories across the region in 2010, Indiana and then Michigan
enacted right-to-work laws that supporters said strengthened those
states economically, but that labor leaders asserted left behind a trail
of weakened unions.
Now it is Wisconsin’s turn. On Monday, Gov. Scott Walker — who in 2011 succeeded in slashing collective bargaining rights for most public sector workers
— signed a private-sector right-to-work bill that makes his state the
25th to adopt the policy and has given new momentum to the business-led
movement, its supporters say.
“This
freedom-to-work legislation will give workers the freedom to choose
whether or not they want to join a union, and employers another
compelling reason to consider expanding or moving their business to
Wisconsin,” Mr. Walker said.
Even
before the Legislature passed the measure on Friday in a fast-tracked
process, Mr. Walker’s political fund-raisers were raising money on the
issue, saying of the right-to-work bill in an email pitch to donors:
“You know how it is: It threatens the power the Big Government Labor
Bosses crave and they are going to come after him with everything
they’ve got.”
Democrats
assert that Mr. Walker’s real motivation is more about politics than
job creation: breaking a dwindling union movement in Wisconsin and
boosting his standing as the conservative choice for the Republican
presidential nomination next year. And beyond Mr. Walker’s prospects,
they say the new laws throughout the region are intended to help
Republicans build a favorable electoral map for 2016, by weakening the
labor groups that have traditionally provided muscle and money to
Democratic candidates in crucial swing states.
“It’s designed to depress wages and to help them win elections in the future,” Michael Sargeant, executive director of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, said of passage of the measure, almost entirely on party lines, in Wisconsin. “That’s what this is about.”
Right-to-work
battles are also emerging in other states. Republican legislators in
Missouri and New Mexico are weighing similar measures. In Kentucky,
where a split Legislature and a Democratic governor pose obstacles to a
statewide bill, leaders in more than a dozen counties have approved or are weighing measures, officials there said on Saturday, and efforts in six other counties are awaiting final approval.
And
in Illinois, a long-held Democratic territory with Democratic
supermajorities in the Legislature, the new Republican governor, Bruce
Rauner, announced an executive order
barring state workers who opt out of unions from being forced to pay
fees based on a constitutional argument, offering a new model for states
where split partisan politics have slowed right-to-work policies.
Federal
law already permits workers not to join unions. But right-to-work laws
go further, permitting workers to not pay fees to them. Unions argue
that the fees are fair for nonunion members who still benefit from the
contracts they negotiate, and that without a requirement, their
membership, financial support and very existence are threatened.
The effects of right-to-work measures are fiercely debated and a matter of dueling experts and research papers.
In Michigan, the percentage of workers in unions has dropped
to 14.5 percent from 16.6 percent before the changes. Yet in Indiana,
the percentage of union members actually grew to 10.7 percent from 9.1
percent in 2012, a statistic some labor experts say shows how difficult
it is to gauge the effects of such measures given other factors at play.
In Wisconsin, the percentage of workers in unions has dropped to 11.7 percent in 2014 from 14.2 percent in 2010, before Mr. Walker took office.
Central to the new momentum behind the laws were sweeping Republican victories in state elections in 2010, when the party got full control — in the chambers and the governor’s office — of states that included Wisconsin, Michigan and Indiana. They made more gains in 2014, now controlling 68 of the 98 chambers around the country and the most state legislative seats since 1920. But it was the victories in 2010 that set off a new flood of right-to-work legislation in the Midwest, which had rarely seen it.
Soon
after taking office, Mr. Walker pressed for a bill that cut collective
bargaining for most public sector workers as well as removing
requirements that they pay fees if they chose not to join unions that
represented them, and Republicans elsewhere followed suit. But not all
of those measures flew through. Ohio, where Republicans had taken sole
control of state government, passed a measure limiting collective
bargaining, but it was rejected months later in a statewide ballot measure.
Then,
for right-to-work advocates, there came an even more memorable turning
point: In November 2012, voters in Indiana (where there had been a
right-to-work law until it was repealed in the 1960s) re-elected
majorities of Republicans to the statehouse even after labor leaders
pledged to defeat them for passing a right-to-work law earlier in the
year. On the same election night, voters in Michigan rejected a
labor-backed ballot measure to enshrine collective bargaining rights in
the State Constitution.
“The
combination sent a clear message to elected officials in the region:
You can end forced dues by passing right-to-work and voters will reward
you for it,” said Patrick Semmens, a spokesman for the National Right to
Work Committee, who keeps a copy of The Indianapolis Star outside his
office from the day after the law passed there.
A month after the 2012 election, the Republican-held Legislature in Michigan, a cradle of the American labor movement, passed a right-to-work measure, which was promptly signed by Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican who had previously said that the matter was not on his agenda.
“It’s
a concerted effort by the folks who have a lot of wealth and power to
get more wealth and power,” Lee Saunders, the president of the American
Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, said. “They’ve had
these plans a long time, and now they’ve come to fruition.”
In
Madison, politics have been nearly impossible to separate from the
debate over the policy in recent weeks. For many Democrats, the issue
became an intense, highly partisan battle over Mr. Walker, his
conservative policies since 2011, and his flirtation with a presidential
bid.
“This is about crushing unions,” Representative Chris Taylor, a Democrat, said during a debate that ran all night last week. At another point, Robin Vos, the Republican House speaker, accused the Democrats of suffering from “Walker Derangement Syndrome.”