THE END OF VOLUNTEERISM?

Do you volunteer? Be careful... union employees may soon set up a picket line at your next volunteer gig. Believe it or not, some organized unions are now saying that no one should volunteer for a job that a union employee could do for pay.

In Harford, Connecticut, because of a belief that volunteer firefighters are taking jobs away from paid firefighters, the city's paid firemen have been told by their chief that they can no longer volunteer to help out at volunteer fire departments. In San Diego, California, where the school district is so broke that it layed off its landscapers, parents and kids stepped in to fill the void by mowing grass and trimming hedges. As a result, a local landscapers' union complained to the school board that the volunteers were doing jobs that belonged to them, and now no one but union landscapers can do the mowing and trimming. And, in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, union officials are insisting that the work done by volunteers last October during a volunteer tire cleanup at a local park should have been offered first to the county's unionized public works employees. To push the matter beyond the philosophical, fourteen public works employees filed a grievance seeking close to $1,000.00 for the tire removal work done by the volunteers.

Granted, each of these situations probably includes details which I'm not totally aware of. Nonetheless, it's a disturbing trend to see unions -- or any group of employees for that matter -- so easily promote an agenda of entitlement.

I am from a small town just outside of Hartford and the local towns around are banding together to have a law passed that would prohibit other cities and unions from that practice. If our town is forced to have a professional fire department our mill rate is estimated to go up by 10 mills or even double.

But this is nothing new. When the company that I work for softball team played a game on a Sunday about ten years ago the field was littered with beer bottle and cans. So we picked them up before the game. Well the following week we got a letter from the parks department telling us to call them if that ever happen again and they would clean the field. It seems that the city had to pay four union workers and a supervisor double time for four hours ( minimum call up time and personnel on a Sunday. ) work that we did.

What this illustrates is an ongoing diffusion of repsonsibility by the federal governmen and our local governments, politicians, voters, and taxpayers. We institute and approve certain things (unions, increased funding for parks or libraries) and then when times are tight, we forget, abandon, or "zero" budget them. This is a lack of responsibility and lack of commitment and follow-through. The reason a lot of shcool districts and states are encountering such scenarios is because of "unfunded mandates" from the Republican Congress and Preident Bush and because of significant decreases in state and local aid from the federal government, at the behest of President Bush and his Republican cronies. Those monies are out there - they just aren't required to be paid in taxes anymore - the rich got a huge tax cut. Meanwhile, the citizenry (read mostly middle class)has such examples to confront. What a travesty.

I don't think this is a Republican issue. I think the unions for years have expected to be paid for things they don't do or don't want to do. There are so many stories of people sitting around on the job at Detroit Diesel Allison that were all Union Workers. They would get upset when somebody new would come in and actually work. They soon educated that person. Unions are one of the reasons our economy is so troubled. They put the price of manufacturing and everything else so high everything either went to Asia or south. And illegals are coming in doing the work our "union workers" don't want to do for a whole lot less and doing it better. This is not a republican issue. This has been going on for years, but now that most of their jobs are lost due to laziness and sloth, they are trying to collect from good samaritan volunteers. If I recall, the Democrats are backed by the large labor unions... or the unions who don't like to labor.

Right on, Cindra. Despite what liberals might choose to believe, not everything that's wrong in our country is the Republican's or Bush's fault!

Our problems run much deeper than Republican and Democrat. If people could drop their need to be right, along with their desire to make others wrong for who they are and what they believe in, this would be a drastically different world. Until we do so, blame -- not cooperation -- will rule the day.

Mikal, you seem to be fully agreeing w/ Cindra while saying at the same same time that problems are complicated. But Cindra is saying unions are solely to blame for our nations workers' problems. Obviously not a complicated answer. Of course unions have problems but so does management.
I admit I do lean towards Lee's sentiments. As troubled as labor may be the way our country is being run is a much larger problem.
I fully agree w/ your second paragraph though, Mikal. Too much of current discourse is yelling "your Fault!" with nothing constructive added.

F#