*Yabby if only you knew.
It is about zero*

Hehe Belly. So you think that people like your Mr Howe have no
say in the Govt? Last time I checked, I'm pretty sure he even had
a say in getting rid of Rudd. Talk about the true believers!
They will believe anything lol.

*There has to be a balance and both the industry unions (eg. chambers of commerce and the like) and workers unions have a place in protecting the interests of their members*

Ah Pelican, you are so sweet :) Good to see you back, btw. I hope
that you missed us.

I was just thinking earlier, given that the world is full of gullible
people, I really could have had many career choices.

I could started a business and been honest, saying that I hoped to
make a profit, but as you are a consumer, you have a choice. Happy
customers usually return.

I could have started a church and sold you a ticket to heaven, telling
like the Catholics do, that you can take it with you, if you give it
to me :)

I could have been a trade union leader, telling you how downtrodden
you are and that you deserve better, as I pushed your emotional
buttons. If I worked for the HSU and others, I would have been paid
a huge salary and hugely generous expense account, by the sounds of
things. Just check what Williamson earned and what he spent on
his expense account.

Now explain to me why the honesty of the businessman is less honest
than the other two.

My business associate and I were discussing this today, he's never been in a union, he was disgusted to find out that even these lowliest of these grubs earn upwards of 100,000 a year while we self employed private contractors make, in a good year maybe half that.
He described them as workers blockading the sites, I corrected him, nope, they are not workers, they're unionists.
As for the criminal element..pfft..people have no idea, because I've always refused to join I've been threatened with violence, been subjected to violence and intimidation, been locked out of and locked inside sites...chased, pushed around, screamed at...
Why does so much stuff go missing on union sites, if you don't put your tools in the site box at smoko they're gone when you get back, sometimes the site boxes even get broken into..as for materials and expensive equipment...when I was a lowly labourer my boss once took delivery of a $6000 pump for a swim spa we were installing, it was gone when we came back from lunch.
Bikies, drug dealers and addicts, thieves, mental cases...on non union sites and private jobs you rarely run into "unsavoury" characters, they're all on commercial jobs....people have no idea what these "unionists" are like.

*earn upwards of 100,000 a year*

Well Belly is free to correct me, if I am wrong, but from memory,
the heads of the HSU were earning around 300k a year, plus expense
accounts. For that kind of money, I too could preach to you about
the poor workers, whilst I had my snout in the trough. As Pericles
has pointed out so wisely, when a bloke leads a so called charity
and earns hundreds of thousands, it ain't a charity, its a business!

Well in my first post in this thread I said it.
Yabby, not a bad bloke but all too willing to twist anything to his own use.
Well he is a farmer, bit of wire and he owns a tool box.
JOM, as is his normal lances the boil that never exists, all unionists.
Easy to forget, those unionists are the bloke next door or in Church, at the footy, SONS OF UNWED PARENTS!
Lets put the boot in.
We sit in this country on a lifestyle built for us, from the Tod puddle Marters to those who first said we are not cattle.
You do not own us.
See my warning this filth damages ALL UNIONS.
See the evidence from my mentioned posters.
$100.000? FOR WHAT? in civil construction the figure is more, there 12 hour days never less than 6 days maybe 7.
Gina wants us to work for less, these gentlemen want to expand this blame game to unions.
The dead dog willfully thrown on the lunch shed table HSU?
I could write ten pages, as an opening,about the worst of bosses, a few farmers who held mentally ill as nothing less than unpaid slaves.
But no, this thread is to address a union problem, from within the movement I know the claims are wrong.
But it is unions problem, every time, that folk think like that.
Forget growth, unless it comes with education, and service,unless we can without fear confront such as the CFMEU for undermining unionism.

Well Belly, what we can see is that the union business, is clearly
lucrative. I too could go shouting "Up the workers" and stir em
up, if you paid me 300 grand a year. Instead I decided to take
an honest job, like grow food. Silly me.