How are compulsatory union dues constitutional in America?

Philosophy Forums Society, Government, and Economics
1

It’s blatant theft… when I worked for Giant Eagle years back, the union thugs stole money every paycheck from me… I never wanted anything to do with those fat cat communists stealing from me when I was making 125 a week. I don’t see how this is different from the mo taking protection money from local businesses… the mafia should declare themselves a union and threaten businesses into union contract payments automatically deducted from their official bank accounts or fucking else.

Businesses have better protection under the law from the mob than workers do from predatory unions.

It’s one of those subjects almost certainly objected to repeatedly. I know the political roadblock in congress, the democrats need the union funding in order to maintain their political monopoly in several sections of the country… but the court system should be different, and their are always going be a court somewhere where the unions can’t bribe… but it’s never been successfully overturned. Why? On the federal level of the government… why is it that the individual worker can’t find peace and justice though the court system.

Secondly, what is the precedent in the common law system, either in america or in other common law systems of English descent… for the idea of collective union rights as a block independent of the individual, to have political control and rights? They are nor a corporation, they are trapped individuals stuck under a nucleus of control, claiming numbers and rights where I can’t grasp they exist. It’s the individual who has the vote, not the union. If the union claims 500,000 members, then let them vote 500,000 times. Not a few fatties living off the labor of others pushing agendas using the workers money for their own greedy, delusional, self perpetuating needs. They shouldn’t be allowed to coherse people into unions, and if they unionize- say HALF a school’s faculty, it shouldn’t have ANY INFLUENCE WHATSOEVER if the non union half wants to negotiate better contracts or effect the merit system in the non union half in getting promoted. The union should be a non-legal entity, non existent under the court system. It’s inherently non-merit based, a cancer of society looking to suck the life force out of those too weak to help themselves. We need special laws to promote the freedom of the individual from having to join a union. They are crude and twisted institutions out to bleed the worker of their money. Note, I don’t mine unions when they are voluntary, or spokesmen elected to represent a group of workers… but not this parasitism and involuntary joining and corralling and political campaigning. Most of all, I WANT MY STOLEN, INVOLUNTARY UNION DUES BACK!

2

Union fees are only taken from union members who have signed up to that union - seems unfair to do otherwise/paying for a service you didn’t sign up to.

3

In America, you can be forced into a union contract against your will for min. Wage jobs, meaning your making less than min. Wage.

4

Yeah, I’ve seen that happen in the movies :smiley:

it happens here too, but they can’t take any money until they get a signature, so it’s more bullying tactics than blatant stealing.

5

What the Hell does the United Steelworkers Union have to do with a grocery store, anyway?

(Also worked for a Giant Eagle when I was younger)

6

Well, you could say that the steel workers produce the steel used by the auto workers to produce the trucks that the teamsters use to deliver what the farm workers produce that the united grocers put on the shelves for the steel workers to buy.–Ooops–I forgot the oil refinery workers who take the crude that produces the gasoline needed to power the trucks, and the farm equipment–not to mention the power needed by the smelters–the miners–the electricity needed to light the shelves–and so on.

Are unions constitutional?

7

Who cares if something is constitutional?

You have this real constitutional fetishism/fundamentalism in the US. It’s really a strange phenomenon - all your truthers who bang on about how life in the Federal Reserve system is equivalent to the slavery of the 18th and 19th centuries, and who talk about how Freemasons run everything, they are largely behind constitutional fundmantalist Ron Paul. But the constitution was written by a bunch of slave owning Freemasons, which, aside from what it says about Ron Paul, suggests that a lot of these truthers are absolute cretins.

However, it goes so much further than that. The whole political debate in the US about, for example, the Patriot Act revolves around this question of whether it is constitutional. Not whether it is morally wrong for the state to extort taxes by force and then use those taxes to fund a spying campaign on millions of innocent people. Whether or not it is constitutional. It’s like the secularists Bible, because it is said it must be so.

Snap out of it, seriously. You people are ultimately letting the largest, most militaristic government the world has ever seen get away with mass murder, and systemic degradation of most of the world’s population. Not that I’m blind to the role my own country has played in doing the same, but seriously, fuck the constitution. It is just a piece of paper. There are more important standards to apply.

8

Constitutionalism is an originally Roman thing. Instead of common law, they opted to explicitly state what was legal and what wasn’t. The ideal was to force people into being proper family men.

9

Constitutionalism rose several times, we can trace the western tradition to three greek islands… sparta being one of them.

The adherence to the constitution kept NIRA from going full Fascist. It’s more than a paper when men have died in every generation for it. The United States is always described as a young civilization, but technically were one of the oldest continious free independently ran countries on the planet. England traces its foundation to the Dutch invasion… same contimious government, so its a little older. Vatican is older. San Marino isolder. Etc… Prople have cars older than the current french republic.

We do things a certain way. When we started off,people treated us like a little bitch. We held to our ways. They just arnt any way ad hoc shit out on a napkin… our founding fathers were mostly brilliant men, several worthy of being called philosophers… John Adams especially… and our presidential papers of every president since have been preserved and studied. Our laziest and worst presidents have been great thinkers, our supreme court justices a continious source of enlightenment and self reflection… men like Senator Robert Byrd who has several youtube video series was a modern day Cicero.

The world has Delusions of Grandure in thinking mere numbers make them right. It doesnt. Race doesnt, denomination, nor faction. Its the living worth and passion of a people to soul search and reflect. Americans… for all their ridicule, are not passive beasts that are to be told to do what is right… we openly discuss and ponder this together, in the greatest philosophical exchange the human race has ever seen, continious for over 200 years. Tocquerville noted even the most remote and poorest pioneer was more refined, literate, and in touch with current events that its European counterpart… having even when impoverished a few newspapers from afar to keep track of events. Its deeply engrained in us that we are not beasts, we are free men, proud, and diverse… and were not going back to the stupid ways and peer pressure of our home countries.

This paper…the constitution, is a central aspectof who we are. We made it, we bled for it, if you came after it with overwhelming force, we would hide it and preserve it at all cost. It is theteason why we are the dominant civilization on this planet now. It is why in time America will be remembered always along woth Rome, even in the most distant of ages. They will look back at us and see so much of them in us. As to you, ephemeral… dust in thewind. You see only paper, and will at the ti.e of crisis eventually fail with that mindset. The stuffof slaves and cannon fodder is made of.

10

Indeed…

But who knows, frined? Maybe things will go differently this cycle around.

11

People dying for something doesn’t make it anything more than what it already was. People have died ‘for’ fascism, that doesn’t redeem fascism. People have died due to the psychopathy of monarchs, that doesn’t redeem the psychopathy of monarchs.

Nonetheless, France as a nation is much older than the US. I don’t really know what you’re trying to prove here.

Your country was founded on slavery, genocide and environmental destruction. There is nothing good about those origins. This pathetic revisionism where you talk about the Founding Fathers as some kind of benevolent philosophers is just bullshit propaganda. They were party to the slavery, genocide and environmental destruction, and it is no surprise that it has continued to this very day.

Three words: Ronald Wilson Reagan.

Are you being sarcastic?

Are you being sarcastic? Most modern day Americans don’t participate in any kind of philosophical discussion whatsoever, and are possibly the most ignorant, easily controlled, easily corralled people on earth.

Are you being sarcastic? Americans are the most prepped, conditioned, officially educated people on the planet. You are incredibly easy to control and manipulate, because you have been bred that way.

“None are so hopelessly enslaved, as those who falsely believe they are free”

Realistically, Americans are the most insular, stupid and easily-controlled people on the planet. Your ridiculous patriotism (assuming it is not sarcastic) on this thread only reinforces that conclusion. There’s a reason everyone else in the world thinks Americans are dumb and just believe what they are told in school, by government and by mainstream media - it’s because Americans are dumb and just believe what they are told in school, by government and by mainstream media. Everything you’ve said on this thread is something you’ve been taught by someone else, and it is all plainly false. The US is not a beacon for freedom in the world. It began as a colonisation project and has morphed into the means for colonisation projects elsewhere. The abject denial of this fact by most Americans only shows how successful the methods of propaganda have been.

I strongly suggest you read Edward Bernays.