One of Pennsylvania’s premier political media outlets, City & State PA, reports that a state-based progressive think tank called the Keystone Research Center recently released a blueprint titled “State of Working Pennsylvania” it purports will make the Commonwealth more worker-friendly.
As is true of most leftist pseudo-science, however, the study conflates workers with the unions to which they pay dues, asserting what’s good for one must be good for the other.
In fact, what’s good for the union usually has little or no benefit to those whose dues keep it alive. Not that the union cares, you understand.
The report outlines more big government programs to grow union power at the expense of everyday Pennsylvanians, including creating a new task force designed to force unionization on more government employees, thereby bringing in more member dues money.
The report screams of the same failed policies being advanced by the Biden Administration and seconded by media talking heads that got us this high inflation, high taxes, and government waste in the first place.
Unless you happen to be a union official or a politician slavering for union dollars, the study’s irresponsible recommendations, if put into practice, could only plunge the Keystone State deeper into debt and destroy jobs and small businesses in the process.
Pennsylvania’s economy only has a surplus because it is flush with federal COVID-19 dollars.
The report even insists workers are clamoring for more unions. And yet it concedes, “To date, however, the aggregate numbers on unions do not show trend increases. The overall unionization rate in Pennsylvania has been flat since 2014, fluctuating around 14 percent while the national rate has fallen from about 13 percent to about 12 percent in the same period.”
At the Freedom Foundation, we’re doing our best to continue that trend by exposing to union members what their hard-earned dues dollars actually fund.
When you grow government, it means more dues-paying workers whose paychecks the unions can plunder. In turn, that means more money to corrupt greedy politicians, who pass laws making the whole enterprise even easier.
As long as government keeps getting bigger, the cycle never ends
The only way to ensure real prosperity for Pennsylvania is for workers to leave their unions, taking their dues with them and spending it to improve their own lives rather than lining the pockets of union leaders and politicians who see them only as a piggy bank to be cracked open.
The more public-sector employees the Freedom Foundation helps opt out of their union and stop paying dues, the less money the unions have to buy out their radical candidates and, in turn, create a fairer, more limited government through individual liberty and free enterprise.
