It was a grey, drizzly, crappy day this Friday morning. Looking outside should make one for a moment of those hardworking Canadians, serving their fellow citizen and doing a job for the government by making sure you get your mail delivered on time.
To get that job, the mail sorters, the carriers, the truck drivers, the front line workers manning the post offices were all forced to join a union, The Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW).
If you are a postal worker who doesn't like what the union does, it doesn't matter, you had to join. If you think union politics are insidious, it doesn't matter, you had to join. If you don't want union dues deducted from every one of your paychecks, it doesn't matter, it gets taken from you and you have no say over it.
I've worked in unionized environments. For the government. the vast majority of union members are decent, hardworking people. They do their job, cash their cheques, and for the most part, their only involvement with the union is getting a free calendar from them once a year and the odd notice for a union barbecue or holiday party. Not much in return for the hundreds of dollars culled from each employee over the course of each year from their weekly salaries.
Union employees and representatives are another mater. With few exceptions, the ones intimately involved with the union are the
worst, most inept employees, and are prone to pettiness and sleaziness. They focus on the union as a way of protecting their ability to be inept and sleazy in the workplace.
The union bosses, who make big salaries and don't even work in your workplace, are the worst of the lot. They run their operations like Stalinist fiefdoms. They live lavishly while pretending to be regular Joes. They travel the country and beyond with large expense accounts and little concern for how the money is spent. Because for them the cash keeps coming and coming, every week, out of the workers' dues.
Think of the history of the long and intricate involvement between unions and organized crime and that tells you much about union "ethics."
Union bosses love playing the big shot, taking money from regular working people to pay for their depraved, insidious political goals. The Canadian Union of Public Employees regularly sends its bosses on "solidarity missions" to the communist dictatorship in Cuba or to prostrate themselves at the feet of authoritarian buffoon Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. All this on the dime of union members, who are never told how much it costs.
Public service unions in Canada do not pay taxes nor do they disclose their spending.
For the guy and gal postal worker out there in the cold today, doing the hard job to let those union bosses live it up, the worst part is, they don't even get to be told by the unions how their money is spent. The union bosses want to keep it that way for a very logical reason. They know out much disgust and outrage they would face from their own membership upon seeing how their money funds the waste and malfeasance of the high-living bosses.
The current example is the all-expenses excursion CUPW is sending six "delegates" to in Brazil for a
"Let's Destroy Israel" conference. In a facade of trasparency, the union is letting anyone from its membership apply to go. But the twist is that, "
Priority will be given to members who have experience with issues and activities related to this trip.." In other words, their cronies who share the hateful, politicized fanaticism of the union bosses get the largesse dispensed to them. While the average postie who isn't interested in
destroying Israel is left to pick up the tab.
Union members have a right to expect their dues to be used to support workplace safety, fairness and collective bargaining; not the pet Jew-hate or communist cheerleading projects of the union kings.
Bill C-377, which has passed its Second Reading and has gone to the House of Commons Finance Committee, has the union commissars
in a full-blown panic. It will force unions to disclose their spending on items over $5000. The unions are apoplectic with fear of having to tell the people whose money they squander exactly how they are doing it.
The unions have become so enraged, one of their stooges, a CUPE organizer named Humberto da Silva, who makes videos for the union-financed website rabble.ca, produced a video in which
he compared Prime Minister Stephen Harper to Adolf Hitler because of the introduction of the spending transparency Bill.
Transparency wasn't actually big on Hitler's to-do list. Like CUPW's bosses, making life bad for Jews was. If CUPW and some of the other union honchos want to find Hitler comparisons, they need not point all the way to the Prime Minister's office in Ottawa. The nearest mirror would do much better.
But they offer lessons on how to dance like a sociopathic mass murderer!
