So this post comes from my growing belief that Unions are worthless, hurtful, and costly to everyone. I continue to monitor the progressive trend that accompanies Chicago of budget deficits, in the government and citizens. Katie and I first vision of this craziness was trying to build a bathroom in our basement. So we had a few people come over to our house to give us quotes. Every company that came over was giving us quotes that were WAY beyond our expectations. Every time it was stated “Well we have to find someway to pay the plumbers, painters, electrician, and construction union workers”. Yes that’s right every single one of them are apart of a different union. So what this means is that each of them have a minimum wage they can work for by order of the respective union. Even when they are completely out of work. We went through a number of general contractors before we finally said yes. So here I am paying a lump sum to a general contractor and he has to work with each of the unions to try and get someone in to accomplish each piece of the work, in turn, causing the project to get a bathroom to extend over a month. Meanwhile the each union still receives their pay via union dues. And these union dues pay for some extravagant 3 story office complexes around the Chicagoland area. Can’t even tell you how nice these buildings are, and just to house the Union leaders. Leaders that are paid purely by union dues. So when the painters are hurting for work and nothing on the books these union leaders still have a nice 3 story building over their heads.
Get this each county in Chicagoland has these office complexes. So I will probably post pictures of these later, but you can imagine a nice 2 to 3 story office building for each trade: contractor, painter, plumber, electrician, concrete & brick, and other trades I don’t know of, in each county.
So to further wrap my head around it, and in turn hopefully yours. The unions delegates the standardized pricing for the services of their respective trades. So when you usually get a painter to paint a room for $100, the union states that instead in this county you will have to pay $450 for the same room. That’s because when you pay for a unionized worker, you pay for their future pension, union office space, some form of quality assurance, and filthy “piece of mind”. The other point I have to make is that there is not one union in this area that is not in debt because of the pension. Each of them have grossly miscalculated how much it would cost to retire each of these workers.
My example is the chicago public teacher’s union. Many estimations have the teacher’s union to be in the hole about $450 million next year alone. Yea who is going to pay for that? Well all I know is that my income taxes and property taxes will increase next year. And the state of IL bailed them out last year…
I just don’t think that unions are functional. They increase the price of salaries and services to the point that no one can actually pay for them. Then in turn they truly don’t offer anything back to the workers they were sworn to be servicing because they can’t properly manage their retirement or the politics.
Or maybe the politics in IL and Chicago are just that bad and corrupt.
So this is my rant from my personal review.. thanks for reading
