While I agree in general with Beet here (shocking everyone) in that strong unions are an excellent check against sh**tty working conditions, strong unions are their own worst enemy. They don't care about the repercusions of their actions, they don't care about corruption inside their own organizations and the people in charge don't even care about their own members. I certainly don't want unions to die, I think they have their place in a free market system, but they need to be restrained less they kill the golden goose and make toilets out of the eggs.
No, corporations are the unions' worst enemy. You say you think strong unions are a check and have a place, but a 55% fall in membership in one year isn't restraint; it's disembowelment. Actually, I was pretty complacent about Walkerism until seeing this article Torie posted. I haven't always been the friendliest to unionism myself in the past. But this is shocking.
And all this is considering, as I said, unionism is already dead in the private sector. It's already dead in the south. Pretty much the only place it's still alive is in states like Wisconsin and in the public sector. And now, Walker will most likely win the recall leaving the unions totally eviscerated. The Democrats in the future will turn to the Koch Brothers to fund their campaigns.
Actually, the worst enemy of the unions is the government. When the government provides that there will be an eight-hour work-day and 40-hour work week, when unemployment insurance comes via the government rather than your craft union; when government mandated safety rules are in place, etc. then a lot of the impetus towards belonging to a union is gone. Unions have remained relevant in Germany because they made certain that they maintained a role in all of those things and more. In the United States, the unions got lazy and transferred to the government a number of the reasons why a worker would want to be in a union without keeping a hand in the benefits that were formerly secureable only via union membership.
