LABOR DAY -- ARE UNIONS EVIL?

Many people seem to believe that unions are evil.

Lately, I hear people use the word 'union' as if they were saying a bad word.

Did you know that many Assistant District Attorneys belong to a union? You do know that police officers and firefighters belong to unions? Yet everyone seems to believe that prosecutors, police officers and firefighters are good people. So why do they belong to a union?

In jobs where a mistake is costly, it is easy for management to fire a designated patsy. (Pasty is slang for an innocent person who takes the blame.) Unions provide protection from unproven allegations against its members.

Because police officers and firefighters are paid with your taxes, those who want to pay less tax often try to pay the police and fire persons less money. If these people are in a union, they can negotiate from a position of strength.

Before unions, we had child labor and workers being killed without compensation. There was little or no workplace safety. Many families had to have their children work or they could not afford to feed the children.

Corporations are always trying to save money on wages. They especially want to save money on the people who do blue collar jobs. (Blue collar jobs are jobs where the people work with their hands, such as plumbing, cleaning, construction. White collar jobs are jobs where people can wear a white shirt to work because the white shirt will not get dirty.)

Sometimes I think that corporations want to encourage illegal immigration in order to keep the labor costs down.

I am not saying that all unions are perfect. But without unions, workers would have no voice at all in how they are paid or what kind of working conditions they have.