For months now, the new, much-wanted and long-awaited City Grocer store in downtown Tacoma has had a parade of four to six sign-carrying picketers in front telling all passers-by and potential customers to shop elsewhere. The large signs complain that the employees are not members of a trade union.

The disproportionately large, intimidating labor union presence on the sidewalk of this new grocery store shouts the message that unless you hire union labor, new business, even if it provides needed services, is not welcome. Any prospective new business owner walking down the street would be discouraged by this show of …

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Re: “Don’t blame public employee unions” (letter, 2-28).

I concur with the writer that all public employees deserve living wages and benefits. Where the letter writer and I may disagree does not involve this issue.

It involves the ability of public employee unions to support political candidates financially and with campaign labor and to then sit across from these same, now elected and now beholden, lawmakers and negotiate wages and benefits.

In the Jimmy Hoffa Teamster days, these were known as “sweetheart contracts.” I fail to see any public benefit from this arrangement.

Re: “Easier to give away that to take back” (letter, 2-20).

I take issue with the claim that public employee unions and politicians who support them are a main contributor toward bankruptcy at all levels of government. This is another version of placing blame on public employees for government budget woes.

I am a member of a public employee union (Washington Education Association), and I make no apology for my pay or benefits. Public employee unions have supported living wages and benefits for all public workers – teachers, police, firefighters, nurses, social workers and others. I don’t understand why …

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The Boeing Company has rung up a huge sales program. They have, and will have, a heavy production volume. The governor and others in the state are attempting to encourage the company to conduct a large portion of that production work at the Northwest Boeing properties.

Spending money to demonstrate why Boeing should stay in the state of Washington, rather than elsewhere, revolves around one key issue – the unions.

Negative outcomes resulting from strikes and labor demands in Washington state are much higher than Boeing will experience elsewhere, and it will cause the company to move unless the union …

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Teamsters president James Hoffa asserts (TNT, 9-9) that there is a war on workers. But I submit that when longshoremen shut down West Coast ports in sympathy with crowbar-wielding hooligan strikers in Longview, it is a war on the public.

As one who has spent 35 years in the stevedoring business, managing ILWU labor on behalf of shippers, I was disappointed by the thinness of economic rationale in your editorial, “Strange sympathy for Longshore lawlessness” (TNT, 9-9).

I doubt you meant it as such, but your pause – “hold your breath” – prior to detailing ILWU earnings leans a bit to the snide side when you overlook the fact that longshoring is both dangerous work and essentially day labor. Members work at the whim of ship schedules and must take work as it comes or not at all. To …

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I read the paper Friday, and my heart weeps for the poor, unfairly treated members of the ILWU, the UFCW and the Tacoma Education Association.

How dare a company open up shop and not offer the job to the members of the longshore workers’ union? It is appalling that a company would make any decisions without consulting the ILWU first; it’s only the proper thing to do.

I feel such agony for the men and women working in our ports, making those measly wages and benefits. It’s so unfair. Now it seems that members have taken to …

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Re: “Anti-Boeing action reflects Obama’s anti-business stance” (George Will column, 5-15).

Will’s anti-union rant is not because he’s trying to show his concern for America; it’s because he wants his disdain for the unions and the president to be well known. He starts out by blaming the National Labor Relations Board for all the ills in the country and then segues, in a very clumsy way, to blame the president for union activities.

He continues on with such hyperbole as “the Obama administration is trying to debilitate the largest aerospace corporation,” knowing full well that the president has bent over …

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