Gangland USA: A tutorial on union colors...

Once upon a time, you're at one of your children's softball games and your cell phone rings.  You recognize your home number and you quickly realize it's an emergency call from your teenager whom you left home alone (doing God knows what).

You sense the sheer panic on the other end as you ask what is the matter.  At first you think the house must be on fire, or something worse...

Your teenager exclaims in a rather frightened voice that hundreds of people are on your front lawn demonstrating about something.

Random thoughts quickly enter your mind:  Did I pay the lawn service? Yes, you reassure yourself.

Your teenager stammers that the goons on your front lawn are like a gang of thugs.

"What sort of gang?" you ask, "what do they look like?"

Flashes of Sons of Anarchy pop through your brain.

"I don't know, dad, they're not flashing any gang symbols that I know of...

...but they're all in colored shirts."

Now, if you were the one to get that sort of call, instead of Greg Baer, perhaps it would help you to know in advance some of the colors of the various gangs unions, so that you could identify the goons activists for the police (not that they'd do anything anyway).

The following is a quick tutorial on the colors of some of today's major street thugs unions.

The Purple Behemoth.

The Color Purple is synonymous with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and is probably the most recognizable today.

Green with envy?

Green is the official color of SEIU competitor AFSCME (which stands for the American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees)

Seeing Red?

The Communications Workers of America have long been a red union (in a purely colorful form, of course).

Mellow Yellow.

Yellow is all-too-often the color for the United Food & Commercial Workers (UFCW).

Paint it Black (or whatever color they choose).

Never wanting to be dull, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters prefers black, but is happy in just about any color, as long as it bears two severed horses' heads.

Of course, the identification of marauding mobs of protesters by their shirt colors alone can get confusing if the mob is actually an astroturf organization of community activist like ACORN (red) or the NPA (a color combination).  If, however, you cannot tell whether it is a union or an astroturf organization (it is difficult, you know), just look for the union label.

We hope this short list helps you should you ever have unwelcome trespassers visitors on your front lawn.

__________________
“I bring reason to your ears, and, in language as plain as ABC, hold up truth to your eyes.”Thomas Paine, December 23, 1776

For more news and views on today’s unions, go to LaborUnionReport.com.

Cross-posted.



All Photos: Creative Commons