Heh.

I appreciate my union when it sticks to its business of contract arbitration, when it comes to politics, I won’t drink the purple Kool-Aid.

Unions, public and private, are quasi-government entities with the power to “tax.” They get what they want and make other people pay for it, ignoring the long term consequences. The “tax payers” eventually revolt and find a way around paying. In this case, getting goods from overseas.

The government should run some things. Emergency services is one of them. In colonial times, Ben Franklin started the first Fire Company which you paid to belong to. If your house was burning, they came with the wagon, looked for the company symbol hanging on the wall and, if they didn’t see it, went away. We can say that is the cost of not being self-reliant. However, your neighbor should not have to risk losing his house in a fire because you are not self-reliant.

Properly supervised, the government can run some things. I don’t want them running my healthcare, but I’m ok with fire and police.

Like sdillard said, it would be one thing if SEIU only stuck with negotiating contracts and helping individual employees with any work-related problems not being properly addressed. But SEIU is a political organization more than anything else, throwing its power around Sacramento, supporting everything I’m against, and opposing everything I’m for. I’d gladly negotiate my own salary and benefits like everybody in the private sector does. Why should I even give them $1200 a year in agency fees to do it for me, when all we get as it is from SEIU are peanuts.

On January 4th, 2008 at 12:39 am, derel3433 said:
As Reagan said firefighter: government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.

Your services should be contracted out to a private company that can provide fire fighting more efficiently and cost effectively.

I’m not so sure that works for ememergency services. I recall forest firefighting that once was the realm of the US Forestry Service has been farmed out to private contractors as a so-called money saver.

I think at least once, in Oregon, some immigrants were snatched up for fire fighting duty at low pay. There were dire result such as injury or death at some point due miscommunication because of lack of englsh speaking skills and some being poorly trained by the contractor. Maybe somebody can clarify what I recall in this instance of using private contractors.

Being “cost-effective” in firefighting and other emergencies may not be any more efficient using private contractors (who’s desire for maximum profit may conflict with efficient and effective service) than government employees.

Can we trust the government to be responsible for oversight of private contractors who would provide firefighting, police, and other emergency services?

(fingers….too…fast…)
(must…..slow….down…)

Just pay the firefighters, Police and Emts a reasonable wage and cut out some of the duplicated/triplicated paper pushers that every level of government suffers from.

The sooner we get our heads around how long we will actually have a presence in Iraq (you know, the way we have been in Germany for the past 50 years) the better.

I have no problem with employees having a union to bargain for wages and benefits.

But SEIU here spends most of its time trying to buy politicians to pass more laws requiring more unionized workers and restricting what we can do in our jobs so that more workers will have to be hired to do what we do now. They also take over $1100 a year from me in “agency fees” to administer a contract that runs for three years. That means I’m paying over $3000 in three years to “administer” what, exactly?

SEIU also agitates against the war, in favor of abortion, illegal immigrants, etc. I support none of their positions, so why should I have to fund them?

I worked with some terrific contractors who were very serious about the services they provided. And I’ve worked with some who weren’t worth powder and shot to blow them to Hades

That is very true, over time in Iraq I’ve seen the quality of service that contractors provide drop drastically. For example most of the generators we use are “contracted” and require them to be serviced by KB&R. Weeks later you might get them serviced. Keep in mind that these generators power all of our fancy high tech comm gear which allows us to get MEDEVACS onto the scene within minutes if needed. More than once I’ve had to break out the old stuff and imporovise to get comm to higher due to no generators. We ususally set our units up to relay because of this. Anyways I think too much has been given to government contractors. Ironically our “green gear” is better, there just isn’t enough.

That said, I never could understand why the union’s think that the party that wants to take ever larger chunks of my paycheck to give to people who don’t work is the “party for the working man.” The union to which my wife used to belong (United Auto Workers) used to talk about gun control. What does that have to do with workers rights?