The propagandists at Faux News cannot resist an opportunity to bash the working people of this nation who, unfortunately, comprise a large portion of their followers. Those people listen to the union bashing that they dish out and buy into it. You can ask any blue collar worker who religiously follows Rupert’s and Roger’s babbling idiots if they are supportive of labor unions and they will faithfully recite the talking points they have been fed by Fox.
They will gladly tell you how the “greedy” unions have driven all of the good jobs offshore. Really? How was it that those jobs became the “good jobs”? Those were good jobs due to the efforts of unions, which fought to get those benefits and rates of pay, they were not created by philanthropic manufacturers, they were demanded by organized labor.
In their latest round of union bashing, Eric Bolling and guests Wayne Rogers, Jonathan Hoenig and Sabrina Schaeffer raised the specter of the evil unions that “killed” Hostess once again. They completely disregard the facts of the Hostess bankruptcy to advance their case against unions. They claim, falsely that it was the greed of the union workers that caused Hostess to file for bankruptcy. Don’t bother to mention the fact that the unions had already made many concessions in benefits and pay and were once again being asked to make concessions, while the CEO saw his compensation package TRIPLE and other upper management saw as much as an 80% increase in wages. Why bring that up when you can blame the only people who suffered when the company shut down.
After Bolling asked if unions were “bad for workers” Hoenig responded that they were but that the recent attempts to organize in workplaces such as Walmart were necessary for the unions because they were “parasites” who need workers to feed off of. Schaeffer agreed saying that unions are, “no longer representing workers. They’re representing political views,” adding that they do “very, very little” on behalf of their members.
Apparently they see no contradiction between their stance on union activism in politics and their support of the treatment of the corporation as a “person” with the right to be politically active. From one side of their mouths they tell us that corporations are people and entitled to take a political stance while out of the other side referring to unions as a business which should not be taking a political position.
Unions leveled the playing field for the blue collar worker in this country and created the middle class and yet today those same workers have fallen under the thrall of Faux News, and the propaganda machine of the Koch brothers. They have no idea how much damage they are doing to themselves by accepting the lies they are being told.
Many studies have shown the benefits of unionization in areas such as equality of pay for women and minorities not to mention fringe benefits. Union workers are not, as is falsely claimed by the right less productive and less reliable than non-union workers, they actually tend to be more productive. The horror stories of lazy union workers who do not do their jobs and cannot be fired is also a false narrative. Anyone who has worked in a union shop can tell you about the lazy coworker who thought that way and found himself on the street after the union refused to fight to save his job when he did not perform as expected.
In short unions are not only not “vestigial” as Wayne Rogers says in the clip, they are in the current business climate, just as relevant as ever, if not more so.
Watch the video, courtesy of Media Matters:
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