Public Sector Unions…Taxpayers Bend Over
Reading through the Saturday morning daily reads I came across Zip’s article about the American Teachers Federation, or AFT, has hired a Socialist, Shaun Richman, who is also a Truther and Osama bin Laden apologist. Then shot over to the Big’s and another article about a very real concern for parents with children in New York City public schools, where 14 teachers of highly dubious character have been reinstated to the classroom – and two others have been given “desk duty” – thanks to appeals by their powerful teachers union, the United Federation of Teachers.
NYDailyNews.com reports that 16 teachers “kept their jobs after being brought up on egregious charges, some sexual, some involving excessive personal familiarity with students.”
The numerous reports of teachers abusing students and are allowed to continue teaching because of powerful unions that let them keep their jobs, even after they have been proven guilty of said abuse, is staggering. How did we become slaves to these unions? How do we allow them to back perverse teachers? How do we allow them to retire on massive pensions plans that would make Bernie Madoff blush?
Well the answer is easy, At the federal level, government unions came to being as a result of President Kennedy’s 1962 Executive Order 10988. Unions in the federal government were created not by law but by Executive Order.
Throughout American history — and as recently as the 1950s — there were no unions for government workers. Public-sector employees were expected to earn a bit less than their private-sector equivalents. The reasons they did so included an interest in public service, job security and reasonable benefits.
But that changed in the late fifties with New York City Mayor Robert Wagner’s cynical appeal to the votes of city workers. He signed an executive order authorizing them to unionize, and soon other local and state Democrat legislators around the country followed his lead.
These efforts culminated in 1962, when President John F. Kennedy granted federal employees the right to collectively bargain. Since then, public sector union membership has skyrocketed while, in the private sector, unions have fallen out of favor.
In 2009, private sector union members were outnumbered for the first time by their public sector counterparts.