-By Warner Todd Huston
Now, this story is a bit confusing (he says tongue in cheek). We have our friend Mr. Jim Callaghan who works — or used to work, anyway — for the United Federation of Teachers, America’s biggest teachers union. Yet, this happy union organizer was fired by the UFT this week. Why was he fired? Because he was organizing a union.
Ah, but it’s not as cut and dried as it seems because Mr. Callaghan wasn’t just organizing any old union, he was trying to organize a new union comprised of the nonunion workers at the UFT headquarters.
So let’s get this straight. Mr. Callaghan was a union member working for the union at its headquarters and he was fired for trying to organize the nonunion workers that work at the union headquarters?
In the real world — one not connected with Democrats or unions — we call that hypocrisy.
Callaghan says he’s never gotten any bad reviews and was given no notice or reasons for his firing. But he notes that his firing did occur only two months after he informed his bosses that he was trying to help the nonunion workers organize their own little union.
Callaghan also reports that the union kept bullying him even after he was fired. He says that the cops were called on him as he was cleaning out his office because he wasn’t doing it fast enough.
In any case, it is quite interesting to note that one of the nation’s biggest, most powerful unions that have agitated for unionization in every corner of the nation is against a union forming in their own office.
Why would that be, one wonders? Why else but that the UFT understands that having to deal with a union makes everyone’s life miserable and drives costs through the roof. After all, the UFT has been doing that to schools and governments for decades, so they should know how bad unions are.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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