JOHN VAN DOORN - For the North County Times

Oceanside's City Council has made a mistake by deciding not to put three Fire Department slots back in the budget.

First of all, you just don't slash budgets in the public-safety arena.

Fire-fighters and cops take to the barricades every day of their lives to protect us, which puts their jobs on the far north side of essential.

Second, two unions thought they had worked out a deal with the city, agreeing to reduce some of their memberships' pay in order to help fund the positions.

The vote in council was 3-2. The three -- Jack Feller, Jerry Kern and Rocky Chavez -- said they thought such a deal might not be wise because of the economy.

Also, it was said, the state may take another chunk of Oceanside revenues to bolster its own shaky finances, so this is not the time to add budget lines, but to subtract some.

Council members Esther Sanchez and Mayor Jim Wood were the two who believed the fire positions should be reinstated; they were the "dissenting" votes.

Said Sanchez: "What the firefighters did was dig deep into their pockets." But to no avail.

Oceanside's is the just the latest of assorted squabbles in North County (indeed, in all of San Diego, and then the state and nation) in which critics have taken the opportunity to attack not merely individual unions, but the institution of unionism itself.

It has become fashionable to blame unions for everything wrong in the economy and the culture.

For a while, even the shocking collapse of Detroit's carmaking behemoths was laid at the feet of the autoworkers union, instead of on the desks of inept, greedy and arrogant management, where by all the evidence it belonged.

Also, it is only fair to remember that on every labor agreement ever drawn, the unions are only half the signatories on the documents. The other half represents management.

It is only just to recall that without unions, this country would be a very different place. We would not live as we do -- "lifestyle" would not be half so stylish among the workers and their families. It would be a poorer society.

But the men and women of fairly recent ancestry got together and organized because they so often were badly misused and were always underpaid while ownership and management got rich at the top and lived well in the upper middle.

In some segment of just about every industry one can think of -- coal mines and baseball, for examples -- the union movement gave workers the strength to demand a fairer share of the take, because it was on their backs that goods and services were produced.

All things change; we know that. Unions may not in all cases be what they once were. Management and ownership certainly are not (although outrageous greed seems to have survived intact).

The complexity of the economy often threatens to overcome both. It regularly chips away at what once was, if contentious and ugly, quite noble: the insistence on negotiated equality.

But "unionism" is not a curse word. In rational discourse it never was.

The great lawyer and civil libertarian Clarence Darrow, who died in 1938, once wrote: "With all their faults, trade unions have done more for humanity than any other organization of men that ever existed. They have done more for decency, for honesty, for education, for the betterment of the race, for the developing of character in man, than any other association of men."

Partly, one senses, because "union" is these days flung around as an epithet, Oceanside has voted not to reinstate the three fire department slots.

That is an error.

Greg deAvila, president of the Oceanside Firefighters Association, said after the vote: "They voted to weaken the city; that's really what just happened." Wood and Sanchez were right. Oceanside must retain those slots.

John Van Doorn is a freelance editor and writer. Contact him at jc.vandoorn@gmail.com.