UNION DUES

Dues Paid to Union Fat Cats Could Have Funded 265,447 Workers For A Year

 By Warner Todd Huston  

Leftists and union supporters love to point to the salaries of corporate bosses and claim them an excess in order to goad regular people into fits of envy and hatred, stirring that class warfare that leftists love so much. But the folks at LaborUnionReport.com thought it might be interesting to turn the tables and calculate what could have been done with all that money were it not wasted on union dues.

LUR notes that with 14.7 million union members nation wide, that is a “substantial amount of dues money flowing to unions.” It is, indeed.

Before we get to LUR’s calculations, though, we should note that most dues money goes to fund the excessive lifestyles of union bosses who routinely make well over $200,000 a year, dues go to shore up the bloated staffs of union offices, and let us not forget that millions go into the pockets of compliant Democrat politicians to help them get elected over and over again. Many millions more go to create political issue advocacy efforts, like moves to raise our taxes so that union members can get even more of our tax money.

Now let’s take a look at LUR’s calculations:
If we were to use a conservative figure of $50 per month for union dues, in 2010, unions collected $735,000,000 per month in union dues from America’s unionized workers. Multiply $735,000,000 by 12 months and you get a whopping $8,820,000,000 that was collected in union dues in 2010.
   
That is a lot of cash, indeed. Now let’s see what could have been done with all that money:
  Divide $8,820,000,000 by $33,227 and you’ll find that if unions did not take union dues from workers in 2010, 265,447 workers’ jobs could have been supported.

But don’t forget, government union bosses think you are selfish for not wanting to give them millions to allow their members to retire in their fifties (unlike the rest of us), to have better healthcare than the rest of us, and to have generous pensions that we have to pay for through our taxes.

Still, it is interesting how unions want to point to the salaries of industry executives claiming they are somehow illicit yet the dues they’ve stolen from millions of workers could pay the salaries of so many thousands of Americans who are now out of work.

Which is excessive again? The salaries of people actually creating wealth and job or those simply stealing it for union thuggery?