Of the 27 amendments which have passed, only two, as far as I can see, have penalized or victimized American citizens. One of those two amendments has been repealed.
The two amendments are the 16th amendment, which introduced the income tax and the 18th amendment which was prohibition.
Prohibition was repealed.
There may be disagreement on a few of the other amendments, but, from where I stand, they appear as though they were passed to preserve, protect and defend the people of The United States just as it's the job of the government to preserve, protect and defend The Constitution, but it's The Constitution's job the preserve, protect and defend Americans.
Further proof that this opinion is still the prevailing opinion is a sampling of some of the amendments that were proposed, but didn't pass. Among these are:
Considering all of this, on whose part has the EFCA been proposed? Let's look at some facts which may help answer that question.
The letter writer, who begins to come across as a small business owner more than someone who worries about employees losing rights, may have a point. He states that, if the EFCA is passed, small businesses, I mean really, really small businesses, may be the entities caught in the middle which get nothing from the bill. Small businesses may be hurt if their employees join a union.
He says that, "We do our best to compensate them (employees) with wages and benefits that many others don't offer in our industry.
"If employees were required to have dues deducted from their paychecks and small businesses were forced to pay more for compensation and benefits", the costs would be passed on to the customers. One wonders, if this person was paying his employees "wages and benefits that many others don't offer in our industry", why his employees would even consider unionizing.
Our present economy demonstrates that it really doesn't matter to many customers what costs are or are not passed on to them. The so called customers are/were also employees and many of the so called customers can't afford what the letter writer is selling anyway. One reason for this is unions have been blown away by employers, whether large corporations, medium size businesses or even small businesses. Employees have been saying for a long time that "unions have outlived their usefulness" and do nothing but obstruct and impede otherwise successful businesses.
Admittedly, there came a time when unions were at least as demanding and corrupt as management. That was the fault of the rank and file, not the fault of the entity called a union. In my humble opinion, unions could never outlive their usefulness.
The day that all unions are tossed aside by their members will be the day when workers will begin to remember the usefulness of a union. Without the protection of unions, labor will cease to be a resource over which management competes. The idea that unions have outlived their usefulness is a major cause of the "race to the bottom". The fewer unions that exist, the more confidence employers gain to take liberties with labor. The capitalist operational engine called supply and demand takes hold and, as the supply of workers increases, the demand for them falls off and so does their worth. Employees have no support, no protection. Workers find themselves in the unenviable position in which they find themselves today.
One would think that people would rather pay a little more than to have no money at all with which to buy lower priced items. In fact, the more people we have paying union dues, the more people we'd have with a wage that allows them to spend money.
One of the letter writer's final concerns is that, if a workplace is unionized and bargaining sessions between labor and management stall, a federal bureaucrat will "fly in and dictate local decisions."
As it is now, the company decides whether or not talk about organizing is to be allowed on its property or during the hours for which the employees are being paid. This means that, instead of a government "bureaucrat" serving as a mediator, a corporate "bureaucrat", not the most impartial of people, controls labor relations.
I wrote above about open shops. These are workplaces in which some workers belong to a union and others do not. The truth is, especially in the case of large corporations, most employees work in open shops, whether there's a union involved or not.
