Pages
Stay In Touch
More
© 2011 The Union Label Blog & Grassfire Nation
The best one-liner? “It tells us who the real villain is here… a federal government that is big enough and powerful enough that it can absolutely, positively guarantee that it can crush any business over night.”
Of course, we talked about this FedEx/UPS argument last June.
Stephen Spruiell did a fine job summarizing the “Unholy Union” that is the relationship between President Obama and the Service Employees International Union over at the National Review Online.
With the news that SEIU President Andy Stern was the most frequent White House visitor, the evidence is adding up that President Obama is programmed by union thugs like Stern. Spruiell does a great job laying out the illicit actions that Stern, ACORN and the SEIU are responsible for.
Of course, we’ve been warning about Andy Stern for quite some time here, but if you want a good summation of Stern, Sprueill does a fine job.
Go check it out: “Unholy Union,” by Stephen Spruiell.
The Associated Press had an interesting article reporting that women are fast becoming the majority of union members and will be the majority in 10 years if current trends continue.
As it stand now, women make up 45 percent of union members today, up from 35 percent in 1983. Apparently white men now only make up 38 percent of the union workforce, down from almost 52 percent in ’83.
The AP notes that this preponderance of women is changing the goals of union negotiators.
“When you have a majority of women in the labor movement, issues like work-family balance, paid sick days and paid parental leave become more important,” said John Schmitt, an economist at the left-leaning think tank and one of the authors of the report.
And what has caused this change? The growth of public, government unions. At this point, the AP reports, that 49 percent of all union members are now working for local, state, and federal workers in public employees unions. 61 percent of public employees are female.
It is some necessary and interesting information to have when considering how to face unions in America. It also goes to show that the road to defeating unions is to have them removed from the public sphere. Unions only recently became pervasive in government as before the so-called little Wagner act in New York, government employees were not unionized. We must return to this status as government employees unions are antithetical to good government.
In a victory for free labor, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) has cancelled its solicitation for bids to build a new Jobs Corps Center in the state of New Hampshire. Why is it a victory? Because initial plans to receive bids would have discriminated against non-union construction companies per President Obama’s orders. Over 80% of all construction companies are non-union.
Executive Order 13502, signed early in Obama’s term, was applied to the New Hampshire construction project and instituted what is known as a Project Labor Agreement (PLA). A PLA is a way to force all companies working on a construction project to agree to union rules, dues, pensions and payments whether they are union shops and their employees are union members or not.
In effect, a PLA turns every employee and company working on a PLA enforced project into a unionized force. Naturally, this drives up costs, lengthens deadlines, and forces employees to fork over dues money even if they don’t belong to a union.
A PLA ruling either outright excludes non-union companies (often as much as 80% of the workforce in any particular state) or forces them to be hobbled under union rules, but PLAs are nothing less than a government payoff to unions. In essence a PLA is a direct transfer of government money to union coffers and that is precisely why President Obama decreed via Executive Order that henceforth all government construction projects would be forced to proceed under PLAs.
As David Denholm amusing put it:
To put this in perspective, picture a thug at a candy store in Chicago telling the store’s owner that for a weekly payoff his windows won’t be broken and his customers will not be molested. The cost of the weekly payoff is, of course, passed along in higher prices to the purchasers of candy. The thug has the additional economic responsibility to impose the same terms on all other candy stores in the area so that his client won’t be at a disadvantage.
I wonder why Mr. Denholm used Chicago as his example…
The victory in New Hampshire came after Associated Builders and Contractor (ABC) member North Branch Construction of Concord, N.H. filed a protest with the Government Accountability Office (GAO). North Branch Construction challenged the PLA as unlawful and discriminatory.
“This is a real win for the principle of fair and open competition in government procurement,” said North Branch Construction attorney Maurice Baskin of Venable LLP, ABC’s General Counsel. “It is no coincidence that the Department of Labor cancelled its unlawful PLA mandate the day before the agency was required to file a response to our bid protest. We demonstrated that there was no justification for imposing a PLA on this project and that the PLA mandate violated the Competition in Contracting Act and other longstanding federal procurement requirements.”
“There is no justification for playing favorites in the government procurement process,” said ABC President and CEO Kirk Pickerel. “We hope that other federal agencies will heed this example and recognize that PLAs only result in delayed construction and harm to taxpayers. ABC will continue to protest any attempt to impose PLAs on federal construction projects in violation of competitive bidding laws.”
“The Department of Labor can still move this project forward by abandoning this illegal PLA,” said Ken Holmes, president of North Branch Construction. “Our company and other New Hampshire businesses deserve a fair opportunity to provide the public with the best construction product at the best price and we hope the Labor Department will build this project without a PLA in early 2010.”
It remains to be seen if this success can be replicated in other projects in the future, but for now this can be seen as a victory for free labor and a hopeful precedent for the future.
From BigGovernment.com:
A state worker is recovering after a bloody brawl at a union hall. He says members of the local SEIU 1000 beat him up and sent him to the hospital all because he wanted to expose alleged corruption within the union.
Ken Hamidi is a state worker at the California Franchise Tax Board. Last night he walked into a union hall in Sacramento for an SEIU local 1000 meeting.
“We had every right to be here, very simple; it wasn’t anything private or anything exclusive,” said Hamidi.
But Hamidi says the union members did not want him there.
“Three, four people jumped at me, wrestled with me, then did all that,” said Hamidi. “I was covered in blood and then over to the emergency room.”
Photos of Hamidi in the hospital show him bloodied from the brawl. So why did this happen? Besides being a state worker, Hamidi says he’s an unpaid reporter for a cable access show and a vocal critic of the SEIU. He calls the state workers’ union corrupt.
“This is a union hall that is leased and is being furnished and equipped and everything with our money,” said Hamidi.
Hamidi says he came to the hall to expose how he says SEIU union leaders are spending tens of thousands of dollars on a political race, he claims, they have no right to do. After he and a photographer walked in to the meeting, it didn’t take long for Hamidi to be right out the door and on his way to the hospital.
There’s not much that union supporters and I can agree upon. But here is one incident where I can wholeheartedly support the aggrieved members of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) who have found themselves victims of their own union.
The SEIU wanted to renegotiate a contract with officials of Sonoma County, California for its in-home healthcare workers supported by county funds. SEIU representatives met with and crafted a new contract with the assistance of County officials. This was all done behind closed doors without the general knowledge of or the assistance of the workers themselves.
But that isn’t the main problem here. It’s how the contract was approved that shows how little the SEIU cares for democracy, member’s rights, and the American way.
First of all, the SEIU tried to prevent the members from voting and having a say in the contract. Unions officials changed the voting rules in an effort to drive down participation by members. The SEIU went so far as to hire thuggish “security guards” to prevent members from entering the county facilities where the vote was taking place. Then, the SEIU carefully instructed those that were “allowed” into the facilities on how they must vote. This vote was entirely rigged by the SEIU with the tacit approval of Sonoma County officials. Additionally, the SEIU never provided the actual contract ahead of the vote so members could see what was in it and steadfastly refused to provide any information about the contract to members.
The fact is, the SEIU orchestrated a sham vote on the contract, squelched its member’s voice and stomped on nearly every American right in the process.
In an email to me on this issue it was asked, “I wonder how SEIU’s Andy Stern can possibly square SEIU’s supposed advocacy for ‘employee free choice’ with SEIU’s vote rigging and voter intimidation practiced against his own members. Would you trust SEIU to run your city council or municipal elections? Not me.” I have to agree with this question, of course, and have asked the same questions myself many times.
Now, doesn’t this all sound like Obama’s Washington, Pelosi’s House of Representatives and Harry Reid’s Senate? Doesn’t this sound like the same sort of un-American style perpetrated by the Obama administration — its “Chicago way” if you will?
But the essential anti-American, anti-democratic actions of the Obama administration should not surprise anyone when looked at through the prism of the actions of the SEIU under President Andy Stern. After all, Stern is the single most frequent visitor of the White House as the recent release of the White House visitor records have shown. With Stern’s 22 visits to the White House, one cannot help but recall that old adage “birds of a feather flock together.”
A new healthcare worker’s union that split from the SEIU, The NUHW, is hosting an interesting video featuring some of the SEIU members that were so ill treated by their own union leaders. The video also shows that County officials were taken aback by the SEIU’s actions.
The NUHW also has a webpage filled with interesting violations of common decency perpetrated by the SEIU.
Now I do not support these members in the details of their complaint against the contract, to be sure. They are, of course, complaining about cuts in their benefits. That I have no problem with. In fact, I’d likely support deeper cuts in their over generous California benefits. The simple fact of the matter is that California cannot afford luxurious benefits to be given to in-home healthcare workers. As a matter of fact, I don’t support a state giving any benefits at all to in-home healthcare workers.
But that is not why I am supporting these workers. These workers have every right to expect their union to negotiate their new contract with the full participation of the members. They have every right to expect that the union will provide them with all relevant information as to what will be in the very contract upon which they will be called to vote. And, above all, they should expect their union to allow them unfettered access to the ballot box so that they can vote their conscience on that new contract.
The SEIU’s actions are un-American in the extreme and these union members have been sorely mistreated by the Service Employees International Union.
Eric Odom (Media Director)
Warner Todd Huston