Crush Liberalism

Income gap…between union bosses and dues-paying members

We always hear the left whine about the “income gap” in this country between the poor and the non-poor. I’m guessing they think that it’s the federal government’s job to dictate what people should be paid, so as to close this “gap”. Didn’t they try that in the Soviet Union? But I digress.

I wonder, though: will Democrat leaders find ways to address the income gap between union bosses and the dues-paying laymen who work for them? From Motown:

In the past five years, pink slips have descended upon tens of thousands of union workers in Michigan, while others have seen their health care and pension benefits gutted and wages frozen or cut.

But in many cases, labor’s pain stops at the union hall door.

During the toughest economic times for organized labor in decades, union leaders are more likely to keep their jobs and get raises than the members they serve. A Detroit News analysis of U.S. Department of Labor data revealed a growing pay divide between labor bosses and the rank and file who pay their salaries with their dues.

Michigan’s biggest unions represented 60,000 fewer workers in 2006 compared with 2002. While membership plummeted 14 percent, jobs at union halls remained safe, dropping less than 1 percent.

Workers who kept their jobs saw the disparity between their paychecks and those of their union bosses grow. The pay gap between the state’s 50 top-paid labor leaders and union workers has grown by $18,000 since 2002 — an economic chasm expanding by almost $10 a day. Records supplied to the Labor Department by the unions themselves show that the state’s 50 top-paid union officials now earn an average of $186,000. More than 1,000 labor officers and staffers in Michigan made more than $100,000 in 2006, more than twice as much as the average union worker.
…
In 2006, the highest-paid union official in Michigan was Grosse Pointe Park’s Walter “Ralph” Mabry, the former executive secretary-treasurer of the Michigan Regional Council of Carpenters. He was paid more than $410,000 last year — up $26,000 from the year before. That’s a 6.7 percent pay hike at a time when his union lost 5 percent of its members, records show.

“That’s silly,” said Peter Morici, a business professor at the University of Maryland, about Mabry’s pay. “Those are the kind of things that make them (union officials) look bad.” …

Unions, in many ways, are like our federal government: they frequently ignore economic reality, give the impression that they’re run by functional economic illiterates, and give themselves pay raises when times are tough for eveyone they allegedly “represent.” Whenever I see a union direct its members to strike, either during or right before their employer goes bankrupt, that kind of ignorance tells me all I need to know about the stupidity of unions.

By the way, whenever you see a liberal politician fighting for an increase in the minimum wage, don’t be stupid: they’re not doing it for the “little guy” or for “working families”, OK? They’re pandering to unions.

See, union contracts guarantee a minimum wage for their employees that is indexed with the federal minimum wage. For example, ABC Union has a contract with the ABC Company that says the employees of ABC Company cannot be paid less than 3x the federal minimum wage. When the federal minimum wage increases, so does the pay for union employees…and thus, the dues coming into ABC Union increases! Unions are always the ones who are front and center in screaming for an increase in the minimum wage, despite the fact that none of a union’s members make anywhere near the minimum wage. Remember that next time you hear calls for a minimum wage increase.

August 14, 2007 - Posted by crushliberalism | economic ignorance, unions