Can you think of a more embarrassing sight, than what passes for a union leader these days? These guys are the most pathetic bunch of losers I've seen since my ninth-grade metal shop class.
I am convinced that hundreds of years from now, when anthropologists dig up the remnants of our culture and study our behavior, they will not be able to figure out, why most of the leaders of our major labor unions rolled over and let the company bosses destroy the lives of their members.
"Just how friggin' stupid were these guys?" the social scientists of the twenty-third century will wonder in amazement. Should future Americans run across a copy of this book, allow me to explain, just how stupid.
The leadership of the Communications Workers of America was so stupid that in 1992 they agreed to let AT&T start a "Workplace of the Future" program, in which labor and management would work "more closely together" in teams instead of in the traditional "confrontational" mode. The next year AT&T closed forty regional centers and eliminated 4,000 jobs. After six months of "cooperation" AT&T cut 15,000 more jobs. The union still didn't want to dissolve the "team" - and so a year later AT&T announced, it was firing another 40,000 employees! Only then did it dawn on the union leaders that AT&T was up to something.
Other union leaders have also stupidly fallen for this trend of "cooperation" with management called "Quality of Work Life". It is nothing more, than an effort to find new ways to eliminate jobs and bust unions.
Union leaders are so stupid that since the late seventies they have continually agreed to cut their members' wages and benefits,simply because the company asked them to! The companies have taken the newfound savings and instead of creating more jobs in the United States, they've built new plants overseas, resulting in the firing of the very American workers, who gave them that money!
- all thanks to the union.
So what happened to our union leaders? Why did they go soft? Did they get too accustomed to their $100,000-a-year jobs and plush offices forgetting, where they came from? Or did we as union members forget our responsibility to remain vigilant? Decades ago monthly meetings at the union halls were packed. By the mid-1980s you could barely get a quorum. Union people were too busy being stupid and voting for Reagan and Bush. Or maybe we were just enjoying all those creature comforts that our union paychecks bought that we forgot to put down the remote control to our big-screen TV, get off the couch and get down to the union meeting.
And this time, with so many white-collar workers and managers being downsized, we'll soon have the chance to see our former bosses marching with us in solidarity on the picket line. Whatever hardships we've all been going through lately, it will have been worth it, just to see that day!