Chris Stigall: Unions Need To Change Their Ways
By Chris Stigall
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) – Chris Stigall opened this morning on Talk Radio 1210 WPHT with a series of issues affecting unions and the need to for union leaders to change their objectives and practices.
Regarding the Paycheck Protection Act, which would halt the automatic collection of union dues by the commonwealth and is near the top of the Republican legislature's agenda, Stigall stated, "It should be a no-brainer. The state of Pennsylvania ought not to be in the business of collecting union dues and handing them over to union bosses to fund the Democratic party machine. Everybody's trying to make the Paycheck Protection Act to be anti-union, it has nothing to do with the existence of unions or trying to alter the existence of unions."
He also discussed a failed effort by the United Auto Workers to unionize a Volkswagen plant in Tennessee.
"Union leaders have got to change their ways. They got to give up on the social causes that have nothing to do with their workers and their member's immediate environs, wages and work," Stigall said explaining that workers in the South do not share the same worldview and political agenda as traditional Northeastern union members.
Organized labor has been one of the leading advocates for raising the minimum wage, and a prerogative of President Obama and Democratic leaders, but Stigall thinks their argument is falling on deaf ears.
"Unions are all about raising the minimum wage because they think that's going to raise the floor on their own wages. And the people in Tennessee said 'tell your story walking, we nothing to do with you,'" he said.