Should unions fight for retirement security and health security? Of course they should. But when unions take over the public sector, and they have, then our government allocates taxpayer wealth to create special retirement and health benefits for public employees that the rest of us will never enjoy, instead of sustainably improving these entitlements for everyone equally, public or private.

Unions would have far more credibility if they were to fight for one formula to apply to all workers - improve social security and medicare and offer these benefits to ALL workers. Merge CALPRS with the social security fund. Transfer health insurance funds for public employees into Medicare. This would make our corporations more competitive by removing health care and pension fund liabilities from their balance sheets, it would restore solvency to government by removing the obscene pension liabilities they currently carry for their own employees, and it would give ALL workers the same deal with respect to health and retirement security. And that would be fair. This is hardly a right-wing sentiment, by the way.

As for your comment about unionizing programmers because they have, after all, “baked the pie,” why don’t you start up your own company? If and when you do this, you may not appreciate it when the union bosses come calling as soon as you’ve made a few bucks. It isn’t as easy to be a successful entrepreneur as you may think, and unionizing Silicon Valley is NOT going to make America, or California, more competitive.

I work in Silicon Valley, in IT. Meritocracy? Maybe in the eyes of someone dazzled by Reaganomics. It operates on H1-B visas, which are a racket for suppressing the wages of American IT workers by forcing them to compete with indentured temporary workers. And in meritocracies, pay would be correlated with performance. This is seldom the case in any boardroom I’ve been in, where executive compensation is paid out even when the firm is going down the tubes.

The fact is that, no matter how hard they try, these corporations cannot do without American programmers, designers and engineers. It’s ignorant to assume that if we demand a bigger slice of the pie (which, after all, we have baked), Apple, HP or Oracle will up sticks and move to Bangalore. If they could do that, they already would have. And anyone who believes that someone like Ellison is only motivated because of the current ludicrously disproportionate level of executive compensation will have a hard time explaining every generation of American entrepreneurs in the past century other than this one, who paid their fair share in taxes and didn’t bring home billions they got by squeezing those who made them rich.

The worst problem with Detroit, by the way, is not the unions. It’s the arrogance and complacency of the management. I’ve done consulting work there, and for Japanese car makers. It’s the difference between Usain Bolt and a runner-up in a three-legged race at an Iowa family picnic. They should all be sacked. A randomly-selected population of college grads would do better.

Unions raise the standard for ALL workers, not just those who pay their union dues. Wages and benefits are better in the union sector because workers are skilled labor, trained through apprenticeship programs to do their job better than their non-union counterparts. Better-trained workers complete a job faster, saving the employer money in the long run. This article could have pointed out that the World Trade Center clean-up was completed ahead of schedule and under budget by Union Labor, but that would be a positive comment.

As for the Walmart comment: this company has taken advantage of Walmart employees for years. Lawsuits have been decided in favor of the employee against Walmart for a multitude of offenses. The company is notorious for not offering health care and decent wages, cheats the workers out of payment for worked breaks, forced them to work “off the clock”, and has suits filed against it for discrimination. Unions have tried to organize Walmart employees, but Walmart has engaged in illegal acts to discourage employees from voting for union representation. The employees must think that any job is better than no job at all, since Walmart has fired some for trying to join a union.

As for the carmakers being at the mercy of the unionized worker, I would rather ride in a union-made car than take a chance on catastrophic mechanical failure driving 70mph down the highway in a car made by unskilled workers.

Does your child go to school instead of a mill to work under slave conditions every day? Do you enjoy a 40-hour/5-day week instead of 6 or 7-day week without fair compensation? What about job safety? You can thank the UNION for all of those benefits.

All in all, this article is about the most anti-union propaganda I have read in a long time.