NH Union Leader newspaper:
City rejects union offer on 1 percent raise

American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Local 298 tried to strike a bargain with Manchester NH -- a city it knew was in a financial crisis.

The deal would have given up a 1 percent cost-of-living raise for the workers the union supposedly represented.

This wasn't an act of civic-minded self-sacrifice, wherein public employees would voluntarily freeze their own personal paychecks in order to help keep their city afloat.

Rather, it was a power-grab by the union bosses, who were hoping to use the city's financial position -- and the livelihoods of the relevant workers -- as leverage to claim coveted forced-dues authority over the workplace for themselves.

At the time, joining and funding the union was voluntary. And a majority of workers, ~180 out of 350, had apparently chosen not to. Of course, based on the union's revealed priorities, it's little surprise that so many workers had declined membership.

The union bosses sought to exploit the opportunity, seeking the power to extract dues money from everyone in the bargaining unit -- whether the workers were willing or not.

It would have been a financial "win" for the city, which would have saved money by avoiding paying out the 1% raises.

And it would have been a huge financial win for the union, which would have more than doubled its revenue. Even beyond the windfall of cash, the union would have secured its income stream -- it would no longer have to be quite as accountable, because workers would be forced to pay up no matter whether they liked what the union was doing or not.

The only losers would have been the few hundred city employees, who would have missed out on their expected cost-of-living raises. Never mind that they might have relied on that income to put food on the table, or that the individual workers probably would have preferred their own modest raises over giving the union bosses even more power.

The union was "representing" those workers, but only on paper. The union brass clearly tried to sell them out for its own gain. The good news is, city officials didn't go for it. 

However, unfortunately this sort of behavior is all too common. Despite what self-serving union bosses may claim, having union "representation" isn't always to a worker's benefit, and all-too-often directly to the worker's detriment.