Jimmy Hoffa must be doing somersaults in his grave. Wherever it is. The hard guys who took their lumps in the brutal battles with company goons would be pole axed if they knew their crusade would give birth to the mutant union of crybaby baseball players.

        The men who led autoworkers, miners and truckers against the coldhearted corporations of the past were blue-collar guys. They didn't have a posse of lawyers and media managers in suits.

        They just wanted simple things like health insurance, lunch breaks and a reasonable wage for mindless jobs that used up their bodies, day by 16-hour day.

        The battles they won benefited us all. But union growth today is mainly among public employees who shuffle paper for all of us taxpayers. They have found the ultimate deep pocket, and lost the moral high ground. Unions that fought for Joe Time Clock now strike against Joe Taxpayer.

        And as unions wandered into the government swamp, they got stuck in liberal quicksand. They have become a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party - or is it the other way around?

        Unions used to support Democrats because Republicans backed the bosses. Now they blindly support Democrats because they are the big-spender bosses who pad the public payroll and hand out raises and benefits - with other people's money.

        It's a cozy, symbiotic relationship: Union dues are fed to the Democrats, and the Democrats feed tax dollars to union members.

        But it's bad for government, and worse for unions, which are increasingly out of touch, even with their own members.

        Unions begin to look like institutionalized whining - a refuge for slackers, malcontents and “headless nails” that are impossible to remove from the public payroll.

        The biggest teachers' union, the NEA, came up with the boneheaded idea of teaching kids that the 9-11 attacks were really our fault. And they used their muscle to block vouchers and trap millions of kids in failing schools - although school choice is popular with most parents, including teachers who put their kids in private schools.

        The local AFL-CIO is wrestling with the same conflict between serving liberal politics or its own members.

        The union was pressured to move its annual dinner, as the NAACP did, to boycott downtown in support of “civil rights.” But downtown hotels are staffed by union members who are “starving to death” because of the boycotts, according to AFL-CIO President Dan Radford. “A majority are African-Americans and many are single heads of household,” he said.

        Mr. Radford has refused to budge. Good for him. He has more grit than the bosses at Federated, who caved in to sponsor the NAACP dinner, giving their moral support to the boycott.

        The old union guys who fought in the streets would give Mr. Radford a pat on the back.

        And then they might take an ax-handle to the baseball players union and the NEA.

        E-mail: pbronson@enquirer.com. Past columns at Enquirer.com/columns/bronson

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