The notion that unions drive businesses into the ground is just bullshit. I've known a lot of union members and union officials from almost 3 decades of working both sides of the union/management divide. The idea the GOP tries to forward is that union officials are just dumb workers who don't understand business and drive companies into the ground. The obvious response to this is, if we are to believe unions are so stupid and companies are so smart, how did they manage to do this in the first place? Contracts require two sets of signatures. What I found was that union officials are typically smarter than the managers they are up against. Any union contract negotiator worth his salt knows what a company makes and what their profit margins are. For publicly traded corporations, this is public information. The union contract negotiators then try to leverage the company to insure workers get a bigger piece of the pie. It's also important to remember that as far as this piece of the pie goes, it was management who was doing the cutting. So the assertion that it's the fault of a union for a company going under is laughable. It just doesn't work that way. Furthermore unions are almost solely responsible for the rise in the middle class in this country. Without the middle class you don't have consumers, and in a country where 70% of the economy is based on consumer spending, without consumers you have no economy. The Koch brothers should publicly kiss the ass of Richard Trumka as a gesture of appreciation for all union members. Without unions you would have far less wealthy people in this country.
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