The Arrogance of Public Employee Union Members

(Warner Todd Huston/The Union Label) – In a recent story detailing the efforts of 3,000 postal employee union members marching against USPS management in Detroit, one quote by a union member stuck me as wholly emblematic of the arrogance of government employee union members and it shows the disconnect between the real world and the cushy world of government workers.

As the 3,000 postal workers marched against proposed cuts in the U.S. Post office, tucked at the bottom of the Detroit Free Press piece was a quote by post office employee Kim Sauceda, of Tallevast, Florida.

“People have gone from being very confident and sure that this is a lifetime career to now not being so sure.”

Notice how this government employee imagined that her position with the USPS is supposed to be a never ending, permanent job? This shocking sense of entitlement does not exist outside of public employees unions.

Certainly people in the private sector imagine that their career might be one they might one day retire from. But no one in the real world outside of government imagines that their particular job is permanent, no one in the private sector imagines that they will never lose their job. In fact, few in the private sector have the luxury of staying with the same job for years on end.

Jobs come and jobs go in the real world. People move from company to company as some fold and go out of business or as employees find better opportunities elsewhere. Practically no one in the private sector imagines that they’ll get “a” job and then hold it for 30 years, and then retire from it with a fat pension.

But that is precisely what government employees think of their jobs, work paid for at the expense of the taxpayers.

However, it must be quite a shock to government employees all across the country that are actually losing their cushy jobs, those positions that they imagined were theirs forever. With the reality of the massive overspending by Democrats spurred by union leaders the consequences of which are finally coming home to roost, these union members that for so many decades felt entitled to their jobs are losing them.

Union members are aghast that this could happen to them. The uncertainty of life should never have happened to them like it happens to the suckers we call taxpayers, they feel.

But it shows the arrogance of government workers. After all, why should government workers be free of the uncertainty in life that normal people have lived through since the cave men decided to step out of their caves and embark on their first adventure?

What makes government workers think they should be treated like royalty like this?

There is an answer to this question, of course. Democrats have played to the feeling of union entitlement so that unions would return fat contributions to campaign funds. This has worked well for fifty years. But the parasitic relationship of unions to politics has reached its logical conclusion: a corrupt end.

Now that unions are becoming universally understood as having a pernicious effect on good government we need now to begin to move the discussion toward eliminating public employees unions altogether.