Union legislation destroys jobs for retarded.

Trade unions could be a good thing. Usually they aren’t. They are run by ignorant power-mad bureaucrats looking to use state power to establish rules for life which favor their members over all other members of society no matter who gets hurt in the process.

One of the little tricks the unions have been using is state initiatives to allow the voters to set wage contracts for all private businesses in the state. The majority of voters in a referendum decide what wages will have to be offered for the work other people do. For most workers the law makes no difference. For some it will raise their wages -- maybe. And for others it will mean unemployment. The union doesn’t give a shit about those they unemployed.

Consider a minimum wage law which Arizona voters stupidly passed. Now the public discovers that several thousand disabled workers may become unemployed as a result of the law. The union-made law does not allow workers who are less capable of working to be paid less. It says a retarded worker who can do 2 units of work must be paid the same amount as the average worker who might be able to do 10 units of work.

Randy Gray is executive director of the Marc Center which works with the mentally and physically disabled. He said: “Why would someone want to hire someone who works at 10 percent and pay them 100 percent?”

Rebekah Friend (who is no friend of the disabled) is the president the state AFL-CIO affiliate. She dismissed the problem. “Whether they’re disabled or not, they’re workers.”

Showing she is economically uninformed she said: “What do we value? Someone who gets up and, against those odds, goes to work every day, deserves the minimum wage, which is not a living wage.”

Rot woman, rot. She just pushed the Marxist labor theory of value. She just argued that merely showing up at work gives one financial value. What gives labor value is not labor but what it produces. Trade unions refuse to acknowledge this and continued on with the antiquated theory of value that Marx was erroneously pushing almost two hundred years ago.

Gray says that with this new law in place he has no choice but to stop their activities on January 1st when the law goes into effect. Bev Harmon of the Arizona Association of Providers for People with Disabilities said that the union-back legislation could destroy job opportunities for some 3,500 to 5,000 mentally disabled workers. Harmon says that her organization will be dismissing the lower-paid workers as well.