Labor Unions = Mini Terror Outfits

We know how individuals in the guise of "helping our fellow men" can make themselves into mini-gods and wield bully-power.  Cue ... Labor bosses and their hatchet men. 

Peter Gumbel writing at Reuters:
....In France, taking a person hostage or sequestering them against their will is a crime punishable by up to 20 years in jail. It also happens to be a very effective weapon in French labor disputes. Since 2009, there have been 15 incidents of “boss-napping” and only one resulted in sanctions: 11 postal workers who were fined $2,000 apiece for locking up their managers during a dispute over a change in how the mail is delivered.

Most of the time, it’s the unions who win. That’s certainly the case in the most recent incident, involving a bitter struggle over job losses at a Goodyear tire plant in Amiens. Earlier this month, union officials occupied the factory and sequestered the production manager and head of human resources for 30 hours. After the government intervened, the battle finally ended last week when the company agreed to triple the severance it had offered. Union leader Mickaël Wamen didn’t hide his triumph. “It was a grand and beautiful struggle,” he wrote in a blog post on Jan. 24, announcing details of the settlement.

This type of labor militancy is the exception in Europe today; union power has taken a battering along with the economy in crisis-ridden nations such as Greece and Spain, which were once bastions of organized labor. But it’s not the only characteristic of the French labor scene that is exceptional. Although only 8 percent of French workers actually belong to a union — a tiny proportion by international standards –  French unions wield enormous political clout over the national economy...........

.......... In an affront to unions — and a move critics in his Socialist Party are calling a shift to the right — Hollande is advocating a new “responsibility pact,” under which companies would see their high social security costs reduced in exchange for creating jobs. Labor unions dislike the initiative because they believe it will mean cuts to social spending, which they oppose, and they don’t trust employers to create jobs in return. Even the more moderate unions that are prepared to accept some sort of a deal are insisting on a formal list of obligations that employers must fulfill — and are calling for a new state body to ensure that these obligations are actually met.

So far it’s just an announced intention, and the details need to be worked out. ...........