Labor unions in America are dying.
As more and more states are running out of the time and money necessary to feed the unions, they are rejecting them outright. The unions themselves have felt the pain, with memberships at all-time lows, and are now turning to an unlikely source in a last-ditch effort to save themselves from extinction — the environment.
Big labor unions, specifically the AFL-CIO, are trying to partner with “green” organizations such as the Sierra Club as well as “populist” movements like Occupy Wall Street.
Usually when one thinks of unions helping the environment, they think of Detroit. But the unions in Detroit ran the city out of business, and now nature is literally reclaiming the city. Score one for Mother Earth and Jimmy Hoffa.
Big unions have taken some hard blows over the last couple of years, with union strongholds like Wisconsin and Michigan enacting laws that have been damaging to union control over jobs in those states. Wisconsin voted to cease public, or government union membership dues. Michigan passed right-to-work legislation in March.
The unions are flocking to where they think the money is. With Obama giving sizable funding to green-tech companies and planning to push green initiatives through executive orders, there is a new market for the groups and an opportunity to increase members — especially for those whose numbers have been on the decline for the last 30 years and whose membership is down 80 percent over the last 50 years.
It’s not surprising unions would choose to align themselves with groups that are infamous protesters. It seems that labor-union members these days do more protesting than actual labor. What is surprising is that as more and more states consider Right to Work legislation because of bankruptcy worries, other already-economically-insolvent areas, including Chicago and major cities in California, continue to beat the dying union horse.
There is a serious flaw in this seemingly kumbaya marriage, however. When the unions aren’t performing their main task of protesting, they need actual work to do. This work mostly involves some type of construction. Environmentalists are not too thrilled about construction unless of course it’s for one of Obama’s ingenious investments. There is also the small matter of several unions leaving the AFL-CIO because of a growing concern over social issues, which are not popular with all union members.
Take, for example, the Keystone Pipeline. Just the mention of it makes unions drool and environmentalists dry-heave. Whether the two will be able to come to a compromise is yet to be seen.
But what can be plainly seen is that this possible merger is the death-rattle of the labor-union in America. It’s simply two fringe groups in a desperate attempt to grab some political clout and maybe a few bucks before they inevitably disappear into the annals of history textbooks and the forgotten exhibits of dusty museums.
