All demands aren’t unreasonable

All demands aren’t unreasonable

Some of my friends have said that they intend to vote to retain Senate Bill 5. They cite cases in which unions have made unreasonable demands.

Yes, unions have been known to abuse power, and so have parents, spiritual leaders, and governments; human beings are fallible. Yet there are ways of managing power to prevent abuse and to redress abuses once they are identified. Let’s consider what collective bargaining can do when it is responsibly managed — and what our society might be like without it.

People who do not teach for a living often assume that to teach 50 students rather than 25, all you need is a larger classroom. Faced with the argument that each student requires a certain amount of personal attention from a teacher, the budget expert simply insists that teaching methods must be changed. Language teachers no longer need to listen to students’ pronunciation? Writing teachers no longer need to respond to their students’ ideas or criticize their argumentative strategies? What will our children learn if their teachers are overburdened and burnt out? But how can an individual teacher resist being exploited? That is when we need a union.

When a house fire breaks out, will there be enough fire-fighters to put it out? Will they have the safety equipment they need? If they are told that there is simply not enough money to hire an adequate staff and purchase the right equipment, what can they do? Individually, very little — but collectively they have some clout.

Ultimately, of course, the bucks will come from the taxpayer or the “consumer,” and that is the real reason my friends want to make sure the unions’ power remains curbed. Yet if we expect to enjoy the services of police, educators, all those public servants that constitute what is left of the middle class, then we must expect to pay for them. There are limits to how much more can be done with less, and it is the height of folly to prevent dispute on the matter by simply silencing one side of the debate. The health of a democracy depends on the lively interchange of opinions, the checks and balances of a system that respects different points of view. The alternative is tyranny, which may be efficient but which rarely achieves either truth or justice. Let our unions stand. Youngstown has a proud place in the history of labor. We should remember it.

Thomas A. Copeland, Ph.D., Youngstown

The writer is a professor emeritus of Youngstown State University.