Keanen Tregaskis Devils Advocate

It is Time to Get Rid of The Union

Photo by Don Harder

For too long, workers have been able to rely on their union for their job security. There are many times where the average worker has been able to take advantage of their union and use it as an opportunity to often show up late, take longer breaks or work slowly and fail to complete their tasks in the time frame given to them. This is what the union fights for. 

Although when first invented, the union established workplace laws that allowed the working person to have basic rights. These rights were simple, the worker was not to be forced to work 16-18 hours of the day, while also allowing the worker to have fair wages. Since then, they have given the worker a shield that allows them to get away with anything. An Article by Derek Thompson of The Atlantic explains the grave contrasts between the employees and employers. He mentions how easy it is for a worker to refuse to do a job and also how difficult it is for an employer to fire any worker due to the numerous termination restrictions. This shows how unions are promoting lazy working while simultaneously forcing employers to work through a maze of restriction to terminate workers. 

To make matters worse, the union will sometimes also go ahead and completely contradict everything that they believe in. John Lott of Fox News writes an article that describes how when "demands for higher wages or benefits" are imposed upon the union, "unionized workers would be fired," to accommodate these demands. Instead of trying to find a way to work through this patch and allow their unionized workers to all continue working or all earn the raise that has been demanded. The difference the union shows in these situations is exactly why unions have become ineffective.

Workers have also been able to manipulate the union. The workers who understand what the union does for them will begin to make their work days easier. These workers will be able to bend the rules and extend their breaks by maybe 5-10 minutes, knowing that this is not a fireable offence in the eyes of the union until committed several times and even then, nothing ever really happens. One would think this would force management to step up but with the amount of restrictions in place to protect the worker, there is not much they can do anymore.

Although there is still a plethora of unions, the number of unions is going down and that is for a good thing. Richard Epstein, in a Hoover institution Article mentions how the number of unions is gradually lowering in the recent years. This will force workers to start putting forth effort in their work and quit relying on their safety blanket of a union. If this number continues to lower, the amount of productivity will rise as workers are to be forced to do their job and cannot refuse work so easily.

With the continued protection of the union, workers will continue to slack off to their best ability while on the clock while making their managers job a nightmare. These workers are the reason you cannot find anything in a disorganized store or wait an excessive amount of time for a simple product that you asked for on a quiet day. With the hopeful decline of unions, workers will be forced to put as much effort as they can forth into their job if they expect to earn money, receive hours and receive raises. All of those can be simply given to a worker and not earned under a union.

I believe that my blog post is search engine optimized due to the comparison's that I performed on Google Trends. Firstly, I compared the words "union" and "alliance", as those two words are both used when considering the topic that I am arguing in this post. I found that the word "union" appears about 50 times more than the word "alliance", so I easily decided upon using the word "union". The other comparison that I did was to compare the words, "abolish" and "get rid of". Before doing this search, I preferred to use the word "abolish" as I felt it better described what we were doing to the union but after searching and finding that "get rid of" shows up 78 times more than the word "abolish", I decided to use "get rid of", so the article could reach a much wider range of viewers.