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© 2011 The Union Label Blog & Grassfire Nation
The Associated Press reports the words of Lily Eskelsen, vice president of the National Education Association, who went to Washington D.C. to protest the so-called Cadillac healthcare plan tax currently in the Senate’s healthcare bill. “We should tax the millionaires, not teachers and bus drivers,” she told reporters.
This has been the constant refrain from Big Unions since Senator Max Baucus (D, Montana) included the taxing plan into his Senate version of Obamacare earlier this year. This 40 percent tax plan would kick in for any employee whose healthcare plan reaches $8,500 per year for individuals or $23,000 for families.
Of course, there is a fatal flaw in the Democrat’s assumptions of what this tax will do. As the AP reports, “The tax would raise some $150 billion over 10 years to help pay for the Democrats’ nearly $1 trillion health care bill.”
The truth is, of course, that it would “raise” no such amount of taxes. All that would happen is that these sorts of plans would be phased out in order to avoid the tax and people would simply lose their coverage. Little of this tax boon would be realized by the federal government.
I spend a lot of time lambasting the unions, but in this instance they are 100% right. The membership of Big Labor has for years given up higher hourly raises in pay for better healthcare benefits and many of these union members would find that Obamacare is going to tax the heck out of their benefits.
Unions have already been successful in having this “Cadillac tax” edged higher so that it will hit fewer union members, but the issue should be not to make the threshold higher but to get rid of the whole failed idea.
So, in this I do oppose the unions goals with this tax. The higher the threshold goes the more this tax becomes simply punitive on the purported rich as it will not raise the “needed” revenue and the lower it goes the worse it will hurt Americans generally.
It is a bad idea all the way around and is just one more aspect of how Obamacare will hurt this country.
The Weekly Standard has an excellent new article in its latest issue that reports on the discouraging story of the Washington D.C. teachers union that is rushing headlong toward destroying the successful and popular federally-funded D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP).
The program has helped many disadvantaged D.C. are kids get a better and safer education than they would have gotten in the violence plagued public schools system. But Democratic lawmakers in Congress have continually announced their lack of support for the voucher plan despite the inner city kids that have benefited from it all.
And, as the Standard reports, the D.C. teachers unions are ecstatic to see these kids losing their opportunities for a better education.
One group that won’t be bemoaning the voucher programs’ end is the teachers’ unions. This spring National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel bluntly reminded Senators that “opposition to vouchers is a top priority for NEA,” and warned them that the NEA would be paying keen attention to how they vote on vouchers.
“The National Education Association strongly opposes any extension of the District of Columbia private school voucher (‘DC Opportunity Scholarship’) program,” Van Roekel wrote in a March 5, 2009 letter. “We expect that Members of Congress who support public education, and whom we have supported, will stand firm against any proposal to extend the pilot program. Actions associated with these issues WILL be included in the NEA Legislative Report Card for the 111th Congress.”
Kids? Who cares? It’s all about power for the teachers unions. You see, vouchers programs means satellite schools, private schools and charter schools. It means private educators getting that all important federal money and it means that the unions are left with a smaller portion of the largess pie. And unions don’t want to share ANY of those federal freebies even if it does mean a better education for the kids.
So, as we see all across the country, teachers unions are once again saying “screw the stupid kids, just gimmie the cash”!
On Dec. 9th, 1941, the Japanese launched a sneak attack on our forces at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. As a result, America formally joined the war against the Axis powers.
2,402 American servicemen were killed and 1,282 were wounded.
In memory of them.
Over the last few months we’ve talked about several instances of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) committing vote fraud in elections for in-home helathcare workers tasked with choosing a union. We have also reported on the shaky UHW election in Dec. of 2008. (Here, here, and here) Even with those instances extant we have more SEIU vote fraud to report.
The SEIU is still perpetrating fraudulent elections, intimidating union voters, and trying to strong-arm members into accepting SEIU dominance despite what they may want. Recently the Wall Street Journal had another story detailing the SEIU’s un-democratic actions.
Among other things, the Journal is reporting that SEIU officials working with its sister union, California’s UHW, have been threatening deportation to Hispanic union members that were considering a vote for a new union going by the name National Union of Health Workers (NUHW).
The NUHW is a new union made up of disgruntled members of the UHW that quit to form a new union. These new union folks cite illicit actions meant to force them to accept absorption by the SEIU last year as the reason for starting the new union. And since the birth of the NUHW a fight has been brewing as the SEIU and the new NUHW vie to take each other’s membership in new voting all across California. The NUHW has succeeded in calling “decertification” votes to oust the SEIU out of the healthcare industry and an epic battle has ensured between these unions. It is a battle that the SEIU has been waging with the dirtiest of tricks.
One thing that the SEIU has brought to this fight is a deep pocketbook.
The Journal reports that the, “SEIU shipped in 950 or so staff and spent an estimated $10 million on mailings, advertising, phone banks, door-to-door canvassing and the like.” This is the sort of big money effort that the young NUHW cannot hope to match.
The Journal also reports on some of the intimidation that SEIU operatives were charged to carry out. The Journal found an operative for the SEIU named Carols Martinez who has decided to speak out on what the SEIU made him do to cajole Spanish speaking union members into voting the SEIU’s way.
Speaking in an interview over a sandwich at a hotel in the Bay Area late last month, Mr. Martinez says he was instructed by superiors to tell the workers that if they voted against the SEIU, they could lose their medical benefits, see their green cards or citizenship revoked and possibly be deported. He says he and other staffers were also told to pressure voters to spoil ballots that had been filled out for the NUHW. In other instances he filled ballots out for them. He says he even took some to the post office, as did other SEIU campaign workers.
…Mr. Martinez says he raised his concerns directly with Mr. Regan and other superiors. He also says he tried to submit a complaint with two state agencies but was ignored. He then repeated these charges under oath before an NUHW lawyer. Six other Fresno workers confirmed parts of his account in affidavits. For example, Adriana Gomez, a home-care worker, said that Mr. Martinez “took my ballot and made a mark for the SEIU team.”
The NUHW has now filed complaints against the heavy-handed tactics employed by the SEIU.
I cannot stress enough that this is the brain child of SEIU president Andy Stern. Stern is well known for his somewhat megalomaniac pretensions of becoming the leader of all unions not just that of the SEIU. He envisions a personal empire of unions so powerful that it also controls the federal government.
We can also see that this man has an inordinate amount of influence with President Barack Obama evidence of which is the fact that Stern has been the most frequent visitor to the White House offering his consultation. It is assured that Obama has signed onto Stern’s plans and has placed the powers of the federal government at Stern’s disposal.
Of course, the shame of it is is that we can see that Stern will do anything to gain power despite how illicit, undemocratic, or anti-American it is. That he is so close to President Obama certainly makes one fear that the President himself is a party to Stern’s antics.
As each month passes we see more and more proof of the unprincipled man that SEIU President Andy Stern is. And we see that this is the sort of person that Obama “pals around with,” if you will.
Florida is right now at the vanguard of a new railroad project that could bring good news to those that care about solving bloated state budgets, common sense employment laws, and cutting the corruption that comes with unions by pushing for a non-union workforce with its proposed intrastate rail system. And the unions are incensed, naturally.
The new commuter deal would see the state buying 61.5 miles of CSX track, which would effectively sever that link from interstate commerce. Federal regulations require rail systems that cross state boundaries to employ union workers (and that is a law that should be overturned, too) but this new system would be entirely contained within the state of Florida. Since it is a intrastate project, this absolves Florida from being forced to employ a union workforce.
Additionally, the state is claiming that this is not a “railroad” project, but just another common transportation project and since the state of Florida is not forced to employ union workers on all transportation projects, it sees no reason to make an exception for the new commuter-rail line.
If Florida is successful at launching its new commuter-rail project free of the burdensome weight of unions upon it, this might be a precedent for other states to begin heading this way with other projects in the future.
Commuter-rail projects are universal money pits in every state, so to have Florida start off its ill advised new project without the crushing waste and expense of having to deal with union labor would at least start the project off with just that much less of the taxpayer’s money going to waste. This is a good thing, such as it is.
It goes without saying that unions are lining up to fight Florida’s efforts to deny them access to the purportedly bottomless wallets of Florida’s taxpayers. So, let us hope that Florida is successful in convincing its pols to dump the forced union contracts with its new rail deal. If Florida can do it, so can all the other states and this will be a foot in the door of eliminating pernicious union influence in our state governments at least where transportation projects go.
One of four Democratic politicians hoping to fill the vacant seat left by the late Ted Kennedy has received a glowing personal portrait about his efforts to live up to Kennedy’s legacy, especially with respect to the sadly misnamed Employee Free Choice Act.
The Valley Advocate writes of Mike Capuano:
“I think that actually one of the problems in this country right now is that too few people are organized,” said Capuano, noting that the rise in union membership in the U.S. corresponded with the rise of the middle class—and the decline of unions with the decline of the middle class.
“I’m for whatever it takes to allow people their own choice whether to organize or not,” he said. In recent decades, labor laws have tilted too far in the direction of anti-union employers. “I’m just trying to level the playing field again.”
Well, we’ll gloss over most of that since it’s boilerplate talking points for organized labor’s head honchos. What we’re amazed by is the willingness to say one is “for whatever it takes to allow people in their own choice whether to organize or not.”
Certainly the Employee Free Choice Act’s two killer provisions — card check that takes away an employee’s ability to vote on whether or not to join the union and government-imposed contract arbitration which can take away the right to vote on a contract — actively work against allowing people their own choice of organizing and working conditions.
To take the claim a step further, if Capuano were really concerned whether people had the choice to not organize, wouldn’t he support a “right to work” law which would ensure that no employee were forced to pay a union for representation?
We certainly hope that is what Capuano means, but we certainly doubt it.
(Cross posted at TheTruthAboutTheEFCA.com.)
Eric Odom (Media Director)
Warner Todd Huston