Pages
Stay In Touch
More
© 2011 The Union Label Blog & Grassfire Nation
The United Food and Commercial Workers union (UFCW) has engaged in a guerilla war to destroy Arizona based Bashas’ Food Stores and the grocer has about had it with the lies and underhanded attacks. So, this week Bashas sent out a mailer to the citizens of the metro Phoenix area to try to re-direct the PR war to a more equal footing.
The union has engaged a war to the hilt strategy against the grocer even to the extent of surreptitiously placing expired products on store shelves and then calling authorities as if it was the store chain itself allowing those expired items to stay on sale. The union has also filed dozens of harassing and false lawsuits as well as opening uncounted EEOC investigations attempting to force the business to acquiesce to union demands.
The food store chain owns 153 stores out of which only eight are unionized. These eight stores were unionized before the chain bought out those locations. Bashas’ workers in he 145 some other stores have consistently resisted union advances to join the union, as well.
Proving that what workers want is of no interest to unions, rejection by employees is not good enough for the UFCW, however. The food workers union has used every weapon at its disposal to tear down the food chain and force its own will on workers and business alike.
The auto workers get control of Chrysler and GM. Can they make a profit?
By PAUL INGRASSIA, The Wall Street Journal
The latest developments in Washington’s restructuring of the auto industry amount to this irony: Having burdened the Detroit companies for decades with restrictive work rules, enormous health-care obligations and generous retiree benefits, the United Auto Workers union will now end up controlling two of them. Specifically, the UAW will own 55% of Chrysler and 39% of General Motors, where only the government will have a larger ownership interest.
Assuming that negotiations over the next few days or weeks don’t change things, it’s hard to know whether this outcome is perversity or poetic justice. The UAW finally will end up having a direct stake in the survival and prosperity of General Motors and Chrysler — even though the union’s shares in the companies will be held by special trust funds instead of by the UAW itself.
Whether the union’s rank and file will recognize its interest in the companies and act accordingly is another matter. Consider that one of the terms of Chrysler’s pending deal with the union is that workers won’t receive overtime pay until they work more than 40 hours in any given week.
One might well ask: Wasn’t it always that way? Well, no. Often enough, the union negotiated production quotas in local plant contracts that workers could fill in five or six hours a day — after which any work they did qualified for overtime pay. Now you understand one key reason why Detroit has arrived at this unhappy juncture.
Read the rest at the Wall Street Journal.
OK, why did the corruption plagued Association for Community Activists for Reform Now (ACORN) suddenly and quietly delete from its website its ties with the corruption plagued Service Employees International Union (SEIU)?
The American Spectator’s Matthew Vadum found the strange deletion of a photo showing SEIU president Andy Stern standing in support of ACORN from February of 2002. The ACORN site was also scrubbed of any mention of two SEIU locals that used to have a prominent place on the ACORN site.
The two SEIU locals, Local 880 and Local 100, have been a part of ACORN’s site for years, but as of this month were scrubbed. Speculation is that the unions don’t want ties to ACORN too well advertised as the unions fight to get the Employee Free Choice Act passed through Congress.
With all the many and varied legal troubles, embezzlement charges and convictions on voter fraud that the community organizer has been plagued with of late, it is thought that the unions want to distance themselves from ACORN to avoid that birds-of-a-feather sort of accusation that would be such a natural during this delicate political time for the unions.
But, regardless of the scrubbing, there is no denying that the SEIU has intimate and on-going ties to the corrupt ACORN organization. They can try to hide the proof and re-write history in Stalinesque fashion, but the truth is the truth.
Ed Morrissey of HotAir.com has an outrageous find today. Apparently, the unions are now equating passage of the Employee Free choice Act (EFCA) to a religious cause. In doing so, they use quotes from the Koran, the Bible and the Torah.
Ed ridicules this effort and finds that the union dolts didn’t even get the proper reference right when quoting the Bible.
Unfortunately, they prove themselves just as adept at religious analysis as they do at politics in connection with Card Check. “Our true wealth is the good we do in this world” isn’t an argument for higher wages, but a call to disregard the material over the spiritual. Did they even read that before sticking it on a representation of the Dead Sea Scrolls — which, by the way, had nothing at all to do with Islam? Only the middle quote, James 5:4, has anything to do with wages and payment — and even that was a parable. Jesus was not the “first community organizer,” and He didn’t die on the cross in order to get management to talk to labor.
Morrissey does a great job make fools of those who made fools of themselves.
Well, we can’t say no one saw this one coming, but Obama has turned back rules that had been put in place to force unions to be more transparent in their financial reporting. These rules were meant to stop union fraud, theft, and embezzlement but in an effort to pay back his supporters, Obama has turned these rules back so that unions can find it easier to hide illicit financial transactions.
Naturally, one of the chief opponents to union transparency that fought the Bush administration, Deborah Greenfield, is now in the Obama administration. It was Greenfield that fought the financial reporting rules when she was a lawyer for the AFL-CIO. She was against forcing unions to account for all their illicit cash and secret accounts then. Now that she is in charge of implementing such rules she has been a major part of eliminating them so that unions could more easily hide their financial dealings from union members and the government.
The Washington Times reports this expected turning back of transparency rules.
So, what we see here is the Obama administration making more efforts to payback his supporters from the campaign. What could be a better gift than eliminating rules that keeps union criminality at a minimum?
*Press Release*
3,000 Construction Firms Warn Against Employee Free Choice Act
Today, Associated Builders and Contractors released a copy of a letter sent to elected officials and signed by an amazing amount — more than 3,000 — employers in construction and related fields. The simple message: The Employee Free Choice Act is bad for employees, employers, and the free enterprise system. Click here for a copy of the letter.
Dear Member of Congress:
We, the more than 3,000 undersigned construction companies and related firms, are writing to express our strong opposition to the deceptively named “Employee Free Choice Act” (H.R.1409 and S.560). The key provisions in this legislation represent egregious attempts to limit the rights of employees and employers and will severely diminish the ability of our firms to succeed in our globally competitive market.
It is also our intention to make clear that there is no room for compromise on this piece of legislation. Our firms stand together in stating that there is nothing that can be done to make this legislation more palatable and that Congress should vote down this bill in all forms.
The economic hardships facing our nation have acutely impacted the construction industry. Our industry has seen historic highs in job losses over the last year, with over 126,000 jobs lost in our industry in March 2009, and over 1.3 million jobs lost since January 2007. Overall, construction workers account for one-fifth of the job loss in our country and the construction industry can not shoulder the additional burden this legislation would impose.
A recent study by Dr. Anne Layne-Farrar, a highly regarded economist from the non?partisan firm LECG Consulting, titled “An Empirical Assessment of the Employee Free Choice Act: The Economic Implications,” finds that if this legislation were signed into law it would likely increase the unemployment rate and decrease job creation substantially. In fact, Dr. Layne-Farrar predicts that the “Employee Free Choice Act” being signed into law will cost the U.S. economy 600,000 lost jobs in the year 2010 alone. This is not what the construction industry needs in this time of massive layoffs and economic unrest.
As the unemployment rate is climbing and construction jobs are disappearing, the “Employee Free Act Choice Act” will only further aggravate the economy and make these trying times worse. For all of these reasons, we urge you to oppose the mis-named “Employee Free Choice Act” in all forms.
Eric Odom (Media Director)
Warner Todd Huston