Public employees across America are growing weary of unions that do not represent their interests, says Elisabeth Kines, the national executive director of Americans for Fair Treatment.
Kines helps public sector employees, such as teachers, to understand their First Amendment rights and to stand up to union pressure. She says conservatives used to be the only ones reaching out for help. Now, she receives lots of calls from politically liberal individuals who have been abused or bullied by their union and are asking for help.
Kines joins “The Daily Signal Podcast,” to explain how unions have come to yield the power they do and what Americans for Fair Treatment is doing to serve the needs of public sector employees.
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Blake Patterson
Please don’t blame ‘The Unions’. It is their members who enable them. Be they government employees, teachers, electrical workers, teamsters, or any of the myriad labor organizations formed to balance the power of corporate oligarchs, including municipal elected officials, at some point they will learn what the vast majority of private small business owners have learned for centuries. That no matter what anyone tells you, you will be held responsible for your actions as an individual sooner or later.
These attempts to mitigate personal risk under the guise of the collective (e.g. “we’re all in this together”) always has the same outcome – bankruptcy. It’s inevitably a question of balance. Corporate oligarchs have their place, as long as they understand that it is the mutual success of their employees and their customers that increase our standard of living. The same holds for corporate Unions and Government corporations. In the final analysis, its’ not the organization that’s at fault, it’s the individual people in it. Pure greed may prevail over the short term. But in a free market, the marketplace, as governed and protected the rule of law (e.g. The U.S. Constitution) always balances power sooner or later.
As Fredrich Nietzsche said: “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster… for when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”
Come on now! Without Public Employee’s Unions, it never would have been possible to construct “The Deep State”, for Pete’s sake!