When the Going Gets Tough, Unions Protest

Mike Brownfield / February 03, 2011

What happens when the going gets tough for unions? They protest, even if they don’t have a legitimate reason to do it (other than an inability to compete and their plummeting membership rolls).

Take the Michigan Regional Council of Carpenters (MRCC), for example. As The Mackinac Center for Public Policy reports, the union has been protesting Ritsema Associates, a Michigan construction company since last summer – even though its members don’t work there. Why? The union claims that the company pays “substandard wages and fringe benefits,” but they don’t offer any evidence of their claim.

The protest is taking a highly visible form – protesters and banners at sites where the targeted company is doing work, on top of letters to the company’s customers asking them to kick the company off the job. The MRCC goes so far as to claim that the union has a labor dispute with the company, even though no such dispute exists. See the full story in the above video from the Mackinac Center. (more…)