While the increased activities of unions in North Carolina has elicited a weak response from most of the business community, there is movement against adding collective bargaining for public employees amongst the states human resources professionals. The same people that do the hiring, paying and firing of employees in the private sector view public unions as an added threat to the private workforce.
For the 2nd year in a row, the aforementioned HR pros, along with representatives from North Carolina's cities, counties, sheriffs, chiefs of police, school principals and administrators held an early morning breakfast meeting at the legislature to let lawmakers know how much harder all their jobs would become by adding unions to North Carolina's public sector.
One school superintendent, formerly from New York, told legislators that 45% of his time was spent dealing with collective bargaining with as many as 11 different unions at one time.
A chief of police, also formerly of New York, gave the view from the union side; he was a union negotiator. In his example he told lawmakers that the union had tough contract dealings with the sheriff's department for 2 years which resulted in a one time bonus of $600 (which was eaten in half by taxes) and a 6 month contract. They fought for 2 years for, effectively, $300 and 6 months of peace, at the end of which, they started all over again.
The bipartisan group of Senators and Representatives, that included some senior members of the leadership, listened attentively to the presentations.
Time will tell this session if the union movement has the necessary IOU's from financing election campaigns to pull off collective bargaining. Its still early in the process, but business has let the unions have a free hand in Raleigh for too long. It's about time business and taxpayers took notice of what the union bosses have planned for us.
Taxpayers should be extremely concerned if G.S. 95-98 is repealed in that the right to work as we know it now will probably be gone forever. It doesn’t take long to find a site that exposes the reality of union activity that borders on criminality. Just look at Illinois where there are allegations that a high ranking SEIU union official appears to have agreed to run the traps for Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s attempt to sell off President Obama’s Senate seat. And in Washington, it appears again that SEIU has effectively bought off the Democratic party in an effort to pass the deceptively named Employee Free Choice Act (Card Chekc), which would eliminate a employees’ right to vote in private on whether to join a union.
And this is the same union that a Dana Cope hand-picked group of District Chairmen and Officers of the State Employees Association of North Carolina signed an affiliation contract with.
It has been and always will be a matter of making millions of dollars more for SEIU or any other union acronym and the Copes of this state.
As you said, time will tell and the lambs have been silent. Is anyone out there listening?