A veteran autoworker, and union member, launched a reform effort in order to break the UAW’s tyrannical control over workers. Unsurprisingly, the Union is using dishonest an underhanded tactics to silence this would-be reformer.
Terry Bowman, a line worker at Ford who spent decades as a dues-pending member of the United Auto Workers (UAW), has criticized the labor organization for its hyper-partisan, and one sided political activities. He is now attempting to take the same criticism nationwide with the group called the Moving Unions Forward.
Bowman says that the organization aims to move these unions toward in a direction focused on the employees and memberships, rather than the organization’s own influence.
“As a longtime union member, I understand the pitfalls of union representation better than most,” Bowman said. “The UAW’s 20th-century organizing model has failed to gain traction with employees because they understand that the union’s agenda is often not their agenda.”
The UAW has made slow but steady gains in the membership after massive bailouts during the Great Recession were funneled into the Unions, in order to keep the Democratic piggy bank full. The UAW claims to represent the interests of 416,000 workers in year 2016, according to the federal labor filings, up from 355,000 in 2009.
To counter the fall in membership, and it’s dwindling relevance int he modern workplace, the Union has launched aggressive intimidation campaigns in shops across Right to Work states. Thankfully, those cynical power grabs and campaigns of worker harassment have utterly failed. Workers at the Chattanooga, Tenn., Volkswagen plant and the Canton, Miss., Nissan factory voted against the joining of the unions both in years 2014 and 2017, respectively.
Moving Unions Forward Cofounder, Vincent Vernuccio said that these losses reflect the workers’ opposition to the traditional union models. The group is not just targeted at the UAW but all of organized labors. Vernuccio had said workers are resistant to the winner-takes-all model of organizing such campaigns and are very skeptical of being forced to the pay dues for representation that they may have opposed.
“A lot of these unions are stuck in the 20th century business model that is more about the union and less about the worker,” Vernuccio had said in an interview. “The main problem they’re having today is compulsion.”
“We want unions to be professional service organization that workers want to join, that workers want to voluntarily pay for representation they actually want,” he said. “Our target audience is unions. We are trying to get them to reform their ways and adopt a business model that has the workers’ interest as paramount, rather than that of the union.”
The bottom line is this: Unions are banks and money funnels for the Democratic party, and radical progressive causes. With one hand, the Unions are seen to give workers increased wages and benefits, while with the other hand, they jack up dues and silence worker’s rights to political speech – cynically treating the blue collar workers they claim to represent as nothing more than an ATM for radical progressive causes.
