Right now, North Carolina says police and firefighters can't form a union and negotiate with cities. Is that fair?

The best way to protect the interests of the police and firefighters is to help elect local officials who won't cut their funding at the first sight of resistance to their big spending ways.

It is the government trying to take over control of our workforce.

The poll is based on a false premise. Public employees in North Carolina can join unions. However, state law prohibits local governments from bargaining collectively with such unions. It's a subtle but significant difference.

There is so much wrong with this that it is hard to comment on all of it. In the first place, it is grossly unconstitutional for the federal government to tell anyone, but specifically to tell units of state and local government, how to run their business. See Amendments 9 and 10, which specifically prohibit such legislation.

Unions continue to exist only because of government support from Democrats. Democrats in government support unions, allowing them to collect above-market wages and benefits while delivering below-average productivity. In exchange, the unions pour millions of dollars and hours of support into the campaigns of those democrats, who repay the favor with more pro-union laws, which are repaid with more campaign contributions, . . .

In the private sector, unions are constrained by the fact that their excessive wages and benefits, and productivity destroying work rules, raise costs in unionized companies higher than the market will bear, which puts these companies, or sometimes entire industries, out of business.

Government unions, by contrast, need not fear increased costs or poor productivity, since their liberal politician friends can always just raise taxes. Government cares little for productivity, efficiency, or low costs, which is why the only place that unions continue to flourish is in government.

The result is a spiral of increasing cost to taxpayers, who find themselves financing the campaigns of politicians who pander to the union bosses, who insure they get elected so they can continue to fleece the taxpayers to pander to the unions, . . . This is commonly called corruption.

Sure unions have worked well in other areas of the country, if you define "working well" as enriching the unions and their leaders at the expense of taxpayers. The inevitable results can be seen in California, where entire municipalities have been bankrupted when payments to unions exceeded their ability to increase taxes; and in the northeast, where businesses can no longer provide employment, resulting in people leaving these states by the thousands.

As an aside, Al Gardner either needs to get an opinion show of his own, or change the name of this show to "Charlotte's Morning Liberal Opinion with Appropriately Slanted News". Report the news without your bad facts, worse economics, and poorly formed "progressive" opinions, or go get yourself an opinion show, bound to be short-lived.

Thanks for changing the wording of the poll.

I find it criminal we can't fund the wages of police and fire fighters or agree on reasonable work rules without their needing a union to represent them. However when the union gets enough signatures, check off should not be negotiable. Let the union collect its own fees.

The wording of this poll is very biased. First option is an "oh, the poor police and firefighters need to be protected". The implication is they and we can't be relied on to take care of them.
The second is "unionization will cost us more and we don't want to pay for their services".
If you choose opotion one you are a bleeding heart liberal. If you choose option two you are a cruel and evil conservative. The poll requires no thought and is written to elicit knee jerk reactions.
Don't know why I bothered to read it or write this opinion.

Rick has nicely summed up the downside of unions. In addition, consider the question of "fairness" in the context of public safety workers bargaining with local governments. What is "fair" about imposing the inevitable higher costs of unionization on local taxpayers? The police and firefighters will bargain for higher wages, more benefits, reduced working hours, new work rules that will limit their productivity. The local governments will have to hire more staff, and more lawyers. Unions "protect" their members by generating imaginary grievances that require time and money to resolve. Look to the teachers unions, where it is virtually impossible to fire a bad teacher, and where some jurisdictions simply pay bad teachers to stay out of the classroom. Unions have been in decline for years.....

Which is exactly why unions have found a friend in BHO, the ultimate liberal "fair-minded" guy. He has rewarded his union supporters with a role in governing GM, he has place union leaders in key roles in his administration (Ellen Moran of the ALF-CIO was White House communications director, {atrick Gaspard of SEIU is WH Director of Political Affairs, Richard Trumka, head of the AFL-CIO, is on the Economic Recovery Advisory Board, etc). BHO has implemented rules that require stimulus projects to go to union shops, he has appointed hard core union radical Wilma Liebman to he NLRB, and he is continuing to push for the passage of the fraudulently named "Employee Free Choice Act."

It's all part of the BHO plan to ruin the economic engine that made this county great. More unions means less productivity, higher costs, slower project completions, more paperwork. But, BHO will have wrecked the economy and insured union dues for Democrats in perpetuity. What a guy.

Rick is right on the money with his explanation of the "benefits" of unions....

Democrats have been empowering unions for decades and reaping coffers full of booty for their loyalty. The new problem is that the democrats always want to make "collective bargaining" an uneven playing field. They want to put their hands on the scale on the side of unions to make it impossible for true bargaining to even occur.

Clinton tried to outlaw the management side hiring temporary workers to replace the union laborers. The new "Card Check" legislation is designed so that if a union can hold out on strike for 90 days then it automatically goes to binding arbitration where some bureaucrats will tell the managment and union exactly the terms of the new contract.

Unions have indeed outlived their usefulness and have become a pariah on society. They create an unholy alliance with politicians that perpetuates its own growth on the backs of taxpayers and those who buy products.

the biggest problem is that the american worker has gotten too greedy for their own good.just because a company makes a profit doesn't mean that the employees should automatically make more money and be less productive at the same time.the reason that the demoncrats like unions is that they grow bigger than the companies,alot like the government has grown larger than the people that it's supposed to represent.take a look at what unions and government subsidies have done to europe.in the united states take a look at michigan,new york and california to name a few.in all of the places in the world where there have been government subsidies and the large presence of unions productivity has dropped and prices have increased.it's called socialism,or in the case of this country,fascism.unions are no longer needed,and neither is big government.

The idea that police, firefighters, teachers, or other public employees are in some way under-compensated for their work is nonsense. If this were true, then they would quit and get a position that compensated them fairly. The government would not be able to fill the positions if the compensation were not adequate. In fact, people are lined up to become police, firefighters, and teachers. If there is an inability to fill the other available government positions, I have not heard of it.

I would suggest that anyone in government who feels that they are underpaid should publish their qualifications, job description, and total compensation package; and offer to give up their job to any qualified individual that wants it. I bet they would have multiple qualified applicants in no time.

Arguably, if the government pays one dollar more than required to fill its positions with qualified applicants, then they are wasting taxpayer dollars. The issue is not that any of these "public servants" are underpaid, but how much of the government's total payroll expense is being wasted by over-paying marginally capable employees.

Well said Rick.

The biggest problem with unions is that they foster the belief that "my first loyalty is to my union" to the detriment of the organization that is actually paying the salaries. And when that occurs employers either fail or move the work elsewhere. Well municipalities cannot move so failure is the final option. The Federal Government props them up with OUR money – let them fail and see if we cannot change some minds – alas I don’t think we have any politicians – Republican or Democrats – with the guts.

Detroit? LA? NYC? Philadelphia? Baltimore?

But then I'm just an old man that has seen it all before, sadly more than once.

Unions are nothing but another arm of the democratic party, they will use anything and anyone to get control of everything.

Every employee should have the right to get together with other employees and try to bargain for the best benefits possible. If they ask for too much, they get replaced by less expensive employees, domestic or offshore. If they ask for too little, they need to wise up and properly assess their fair market value.

On another note: Thank you Senator Snow for your support to bring about health care reform!

Kathy is still a Dem wonk I see.

I wonder if she'll be that happy when her health insurance premiums go UP by $4000/year which is what the CBO estimates (That is optimistic I'm sure).

May God save this country from the crowd in Washington!

OldMan, my premiums are going up more than that under my current employer's plan, so I will be better off with an increase of only $4K.