Again:

The workers, and the union that represents them, have the right to go after whatever wage they think they can get.

Their politics is your business if you're a member or if they decide to run someone for office in any of your districts.

As to the argument that they aren't asking for what they're worth, aren't you the one who says the market always works? They are worth what the market says they can get. They will push for as much as they can get because nobody is gonna give them anything out of the goodness of their hearts. That's market behavior too.

If they kill the goose, there will be no more golden eggs, and the market will readjust. That's market behavior too.

"Oh, the poor families of the PMA"? Well, that's market behavior too. I've been watching out-of-work laborers scramble for the better part of a year. (In economic downturns, the libraries get used harder, and people talk there.) Yeah, it's nasty, but hey -- if you're talking free market, nasty is what you get. People are pawns on the board. Some of them promote themselves to other pieces: they organize.

Management is organized too. That's why they have all those meetings, and hire lawyers, and all that. Management has met to figure out how to get the most out of their workers since the first group of overseers got together over some beer and flatbread to discuss the best method of moving all those big stones for Pharoah. What's sauce for the goose...

We pay grown men millions of dollars to chase balls around stadiums. If the market applies to them vis-a-vis the "usefulness" of their work (i.e., its irrelevance), then it applies here too, where there is real work going on.

Why should I care about the union? You implied it's because I have to take the party line. That's not it. The grandfather I told you about, lo these many moons ago, the one who was a Republican in a family full of Democrats, the one who thought that direct election of Senators was a grave mistake (he was around in 1913 for that amendment), the WWI vet who taught me to read and thought Father Coughlin was a great man -- he was a union man.

Regards--
Mary Anne