Letter: Unions’ work will never be finished

Posted 4/26/19

I am a proud public sector employee and have spent most of my adult life working in the field of labor law. I come from a family of public servants who, like me, were members of labor unions.

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Letter: Unions’ work will never be finished

Posted

I am a proud public sector employee and have spent most of my adult life working in the field of labor law. I come from a family of public servants who, like me, were members of labor unions.

Your editorial, Unions, take a bow (and then go away), April 18,” is insulting and arrogant.

Unions are far from obsolete, and their work far from finished.

Is the Phoenix really naïve enough to believe that, if unions took their bow and exited stage left, public sector employees would continue to enjoy the benefits they have worked so hard for? Those of us who actually work in the public sector — and in the public’s interest — know that the only reason we have good health insurance and decent pensions is that our unions are still fighting for them. If the unions go away, so, too, do the benefits.

As for being “very well compensated,” many of us in the public sector could be earning far more in the private sector, but believe that serving the public is worthwhile and noble. I am not even close to the middle of the pay scale in my industry. I have never received a raise of 12 to 15 percent, and have often gone for years at a time without a cost of living raise.

My health insurance benefits are decent, but more like a Ford Escort than a Cadillac. I have never been paid to work on my birthday, unless I took it as a vacation day, and know no one who has participated in a “scam” to make more money.

Please stop caricaturing us as grifters, scammers, and cheats: corruption thrives in the private sector as surely as it does in the public sector.

Finally, your comparison between public employees and private ones is disingenuous:  unionized private sector employees are far ahead of their non-union colleagues in wages, health insurance benefits, time off, and retirement.

The real message here is this one: unions across the workforce improve the lives of the employees they represent. In the private sector, they work to ensure that employees reap some of the benefits of their employers’ profits; in the public sector they fight for employees to get what they deserve in the face of continual pressure from governments and taxpayers.

Take the unions away and you take away any incentive for cities and towns, as well as state and federal governments, to treat their employees fairly.

As long as there is greed, incompetence and corruption in government and management, unions’ work will never be finished.

Elizabeth A. Vorro
Bristol

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