Should public sector employees be allowed to unionize? Tentatively, I'd have to say 'no' to that. It's easy for me sitting here in my comfortable little job with it's decent pay and good benefits to forget about the battles of the last century fought on my behalf by the labor movement. Things like a minimum wage, paid vacation, the 40 hour work week, benefits of any variety- all of them in some small way can probably be traced back to the work that the unions did in the early part of the 20th Century.
Only, what are they doing for me now? Maybe that's a typically selfish 'me me me' thing to say- and certainly my generation gets accused of being selfish and narcissistic on a semi-regular basis by the Baby Boomers (takes one to know one apparently)- but it's not an irrelevant question. What have you done for me lately? The answer is… well, not much. I show up on time, do my job to the best of my ability and it's not because I'm in a union. In my experience unions reward sloth over vigor, quantity over quality and insist on riding their white horses quixotically in defense of retirement pledges that are fiscally unsustainable in the long term yet are insisted upon by the older generation.
Yeah. And the Baby Boomers call my generation selfish… I don't know what's going to happen in the future- I don't know what the country's going to look like in ten years, but I do know that the good life of shuffleboard and canasta won't begin at 65 for the Boomers. The sooner they accept that, the better.
And that there is our biggest problem, kids: economic stability and fiscal security of this country be damned! The Boomers want their cushy retirement and they're going screw my generation six ways to Sunday to get it and then leave us with the bill. That's the challenge we're going to face and what to do about it- because really and truly, nothing is going to work perfectly. We can't AMEX our way into a progressive utopia (see: California, New York, Illinois) and unrestrained capitalism and ineffective regulation is what got us into this mess in the first place (see: nearly a decade of criminal negligence on the part of both parties in D.C. that gave away the farm to every grasping scum-sucking special interest group you could think of.)
What the actual solution to the myriad of problems facing us, I don't know- but when it comes to public sector unions, I voted with my feet, so to speak and I'll continue to do so. I won't piss away my money on an organization dedicated to ensuring the retirement of older workers at the expense of my own prosperity and my own retirement…
(I'm always up for a good discussion on things too, kids. If someone wants to make a pitch about the glories of unionism to me, I'll listen. Just know that it would have to be one hell of a pitch.)
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