Unions And Compassion

A couple of years ago, I worked at the polls.  As you might imagine for an off-year, local-stuff-only contest, turnout was thin.  Almost the only folks present were poll workers – us Democrats, and our Republican colleagues.

I got into a discussion about unions with one of the latter; the conversation centered on public employee unions.  The exchange came to a screeching halt when the gentleman in question responded to my statement that unions aren’t selfish, but rather simply being reasonable in looking out for their members’ interests, by declaring that the two are one and the same. 

How can we contest this?  Let us count the ways. 

Semantically, this opinion holds not so much as a drop of water.  According to Merriam-Webster, synonyms for selfish include: egoistic, egomaniacal, egotistic, narcissistic, self-absorbed,  self-obsessed, self-oriented, and our personal favorite,  solipsistic.  Protecting the interests of workers cannot be considered any of these.  Rather, the conduct of unions can be better described  by a synonym for reasonable, such as commonsense, firm, informed, justified, sensible, sober, solid, valid, and well-founded.  

Today, in his latest tweet storm, Donald Trump outdid those locals by light-years.  In what Josh Marshall of talkingpointsmemo.com called the primary text of Trumpism, and a true moment of national disgrace, Trump said:

The Mayor of San Juan, who was very complimentary only a few days ago, has now been told by the Democrats that you must be nasty to Trump. Such poor leadership ability by the Mayor of San Juan, and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers to help. They want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort. 10,000 Federal workers now on Island doing a fantastic job. 

I only hope that the Republican poll-worker who thought unions selfish sees that groups like the Teamsters are doing as much if not more than the Trump administration to help the victims of Hurricane Maria.