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Labor unions have dramatically declined as a percentage of the American workforce over the last 30 years. A new proposal from presidential candidate Bernie Sanders seeks to double union ranks, City Journal senior editor Steven Malanga reports, which would mean adding nearly 15 million new members.
Malanga joins associate editor Seth Barron to discuss Senator Sanders’s proposal, which would put new restraints on employers, limit workers’ rights to opt-out of union membership, and make other changes to U.S. labor law. The Sanders plan would also give federal workers the right to strike and force states to allow government workers to unionize.
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Bernie is determined to roll back the clock to a time when people still believed Soviet communism could work. Now, if we could only eliminate computers, most technology invented after 1955 and only make things in large factories with a unionized workforce and no foreign competition (or markets)…
Unions are disappearing because they won. Minimum wage, the 40-hour week, no child labor, occupational heath and safety, workmen’s comp and routine packages of health and retirement benefits–nobody has to join a union to get the benefit of legislative victories won by organized labor. Now unions are a cost, an impediment and a threat to the viability of employers and a monthly fee paid by workers just to support the lifestyles of lobbyists, union leaders and connected politicians. Idiot union bosses endorsed Obamacare which (1) effectively labelled hard-won medical plans as taxable “cadillac” plans and (2) provided one more reason why no one has to join a union to get full value from employment.
Sanders is a ridiculous man.