(Warner Todd Huston) – 17-year-old Kevin Anderson wanted to add another Eagle Scout badge to his well-earned collection and so spent some 200 hours over several weeks to clear a walking path along the river in east Allentown park in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
Little did young Mr. Anderson know it but he was about to prove once again that unions have a pernicious influence on governments everywhere. After Kevin’s good deed the city’s public employees union went gunning for the poor kid with threats and gyrations meant to shake down the city and scare off any citizen that might dare to imagine that they could perform any act of charity or community service for their fellows without the union getting its piece of the action.
In his best Sopranos impression, the thug president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Nicky Balzano began to issue his threats.
“We’ll be looking into the Cub Scout or Boy Scout who did the trails,” Balzano ominously warned the City Council.
As it happens, the city laid off some unnecessary union placeholders last July and this caused union thug Balzano to demand that no regular citizen like young Mr. Anderson be allowed to pick up a hoe, shovel or empty a garbage can. “There’s to be no volunteers,” Balzano threatened.
So, as far as this union ruffian is concerned citizens of Allentown should be barred from offering their services to their community. No citizen should be allowed to volunteer his time to clean up a park, weed a city flower bed, or empty an overflowing garbage can.
Citizens must NEVER volunteer for their community! After all, that’s what unions are for. You know, to get paid overgenerously by tax money that communities don’t have to do work that someone in the community just might wish to do for free? Yeah that kind.
In any case, Mr. Balzano will have none of this community spirit stuff from these buttinski citizens. Not while there is left a single useless union lout that can sleep in a truck cab or a recalcitrant union mope to lean on a rake or shovel somewhere, anyway.
The nerve of these lowly citizens, anyway! Sheese.
(Mr. Huston publishes The Union Label blog)