Funny how the Republicans are all libertarian until it comes to unions, ain’t it?

I will admit this amuses me.

Government’s that lovely nice cuddly thing which should take care of us all about nearly everything.

But the people who work for the government need a union to protect them from said government.

So why does anyone think that government is that lovely cuddly thing that should be doing nearly everything for us? Don;t we all need to be protected from it?

@ Tim W

Well yes, it IS amusing if you’re simplistic enough to boil all stories and implications into “government = perfect” or “government = the devil”. God forbid there should be such a thing as nuance.

So why does anyone think that government is that lovely cuddly thing that should be doing nearly everything for us? Don;t we all need to be protected from it?

Without agreeing with this position I don’t think it’s contradictory (unless you really mean “lovely cuddly thing” which no one actually believes, surely, outside – perhaps – of Compass). I light a fire so I don’t freeze to death. I put up a fireguard so I’m not burnt to death.

Timmy Rand spinning for his elite global masters again. It must get very smelly having your nose up the Koch brothers bottoms all the time.

Timmy just hates the middle class and won’t be happy until he and his mates have destroyed good living conditions for the vast majority of the people.

The unions that got us weekends off, 4 weeks paid holiday, decent pensions. Timmy won’t rest till he has helped piss it all away.

“The unions that got us weekends off, 4 weeks paid holiday, decent pensions.”

Gosh, that’s amazing Sally.

You do know that the Factory Acts started off while trades unions were still illegal, yes?

So they didn’t have much to do with it all?

@ 2 & 6 Tim Worstall

“So why does anyone think that government is that lovely cuddly thing that should be doing nearly everything for us? Don;t we all need to be protected from it?”

However jaundiced a view one might have of Unions, or indeed even if you accept that the state cannot and should not be the answer to all of life’s problems Tim, as history amply demonstrates employers and the political right have had to be dragged kicking and screaming into conceding decent working conditions for their employees.

The state has generally accepted and co-opted many things which organised labour spent decades fighting for because they realised that it was good for business, in much the same way as they realised that civil societies tend to outperform dictatorships.

I’m no fan of left wing nuttery, and militant trade unionism, but neither am I convinced that the free market and the Big Society is the answer to all our ills.
Trying to pretend that unions and organised labour had nothing to do with improving working and living conditions for workers isn’t just diningenuous, it’s historically ignorant.

“But the people who work for the government need a union to protect them from said government.”

Pretty much any case of monopsony. Unions have tended to be big in places where there is effectively one large local employer, and remain so today. Where there are lots of SMEs competing with each other unions don’t exist.

Is this a fight against unions (wrong) or a fight against union-enforced closed shops (which as a monopoly are wrong, so it is right to fight against them)?

Looking at the actual law (http://legis.wisconsin.gov/JR1SB-11.pdf) this is kind of difficult to tell really – there seems to be a determination to strip the right to collective bargaining from state employees, but there is also what seems to be justifiable – an end to the requirement for all state employees to have union dues paid from their wages and a requirement for collective representation to be confirmed by election.

Think I’d need to know a lot more about the US union movement and legislation to work out who (if anyone) is right or wrong in all this – initial reading is that this is both a restriction on free association and a grant of freedom to workers, take that how you will.

Pretty much any case of monopsony. Unions have tended to be big in places where there is effectively one large local employer, and remain so today. Where there are lots of SMEs competing with each other unions don’t exist.

Planeshift,

An indirect argument for allowing competition in government then? Assuming unions are only needed when workers can be exploited by monopolies anyway…

This is being pushed by the Koch brothers and the John Birch society. It was the millions of corporate money that got the governor elected.

Quite funny today a guy rang the governor pretending to be one of the Koch brothers, and Walker talked to him like an old friend for 20 minutes. How damming is that that Walker won’t talk to the unions members, but will take his backers call. (even though it turned out not to be his backer) It is all over the Liberal blogs today. No doubt the MSM will give it a miss, seeing who owns them.

And Conservative trolls always want to bang on about unions and Labour. The whole conservative movement is funded by the corporate elites. And they now want their pound of flesh.

@10

Assuming unions are only needed when workers can be exploited by monopolies anyway…

Unions are probably needed everywhere it’s just that they only form when there’s a big enough workforce. Plus, you don’t need a monopoly in order to exploit workers, just every employer following the same procedure when it comes to the hiring and firing of staff, rigging the system, so to speak.

@ 12 Cylux

“Plus, you don’t need a monopoly in order to exploit workers, just every employer following the same procedure when it comes to the hiring and firing of staff, rigging the system, so to speak.”

Exactly. Servants in the Victorian era were very often hired by individual families, for crying out loud, but were still subject to huge exploitation due to having no channel of redress if dismissed unfairly, and being hugely reliant on employer references.

Re the WISCONSIN protests, I would suggest reading Paul Krugman’s article in the New York Time of today :Shock Doctrine USA

Shades of facism, I hope they don’t have beerkellers there.

LEARN

I would like to remove the beerkeller comment

Re: the Wisconsin Union problems, Please read Paul Krugman’s article,
Shock Doctrine USA , the entire article,the government proposals, smacks of fascism and bears comparison to other power grabbing abuses in non-democratic countries, but this is the USA!.