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© 2011 The Union Label Blog & Grassfire Nation
The thugs over at the AFL-CIO are demanding that Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolincompentano cease all federal programs with the state of Arizona over the recent anti-illegal immigrant measures that the state took.
Absurdly, the AFL-CIO says that if the federal gov’t keeps working with Arizona it will “be complicit in the racial profiling that lies at the heart of the Arizona law.”
Of course, the amusing thing is that what “lies at the heart of the Arizona law” is the same language at that in federal law!
The Arizona law states that immigrants have to have identification papers on them and this provision is claimed to be an infamous Nazi requirement forced on these poor, innocent illegals by those racist Arizonans. Would that it were for the AFL-CIO.
In truth, federal law — U.S.C. 1304(e) — already requires immigrants to carry their identification and other relevant papers and has for the last 50 years.
Yet the AFL-CIO seems to have had no problem working with the federal government lo these last 50 years. One wonders why that would be?
Oh, right. It’s because the thugs at the AFL-CIO want to inject themselves into a hot button current event in which they have no business. Right. I forgot.
-By Warner Todd Huston
As America loses jobs, as American workers find they have to tighten belts, do without, and are told to accept a world of permanently high unemployment, elites lucky enough to join the government find themselves living high off the hog — and by that we mean raping the taxpayers for undeserved paychecks. We find yet another example of the gold strike that is being hired by the Obama administration with the union operative that became Obama’s Labor Secretary, Hilda Solis.
It appears that Solis re-hired six of her former congressional staffers at huge pay raises courtesy of the American taxpayers.
Now, as Mark Hemingway of the Washington Examiner reports, the Bush administration prevented giant windfall pay raises by limiting job jumpers to a 20% increase over previous salary. Like all the other so-called “responsible government” ideas that Obama keeps claiming he is sure to implement, this old Bush corruption cutting idea has been tossed by the wayside. I say this because Obama’s appointee gave one staffer a better than 95 percent pay raise with only one of the six getting a less than 30 percent pay raise.
Here’s the list of the lucky elites that are rolling in the taxpayer’s clover:
Staffer: Roberto Soberanis
Last congressional salary: $44,500
Dept. of Labor salary: $86,927
Percentage increase: 95.34
Staffer: Laura McDonald
Last congressional salary: $53,500
Dept. of Labor salary: $86,927
Percentage increase: 62.48
Staffer: Cindy Chen
Last congressional salary: $49,000
Dept. of Labor salary: $73,100
Percentage increase: 49.18
Staffer: Megan Uzzell
Last congressional salary: $82,000
Dept. of Labor salary: $120,830
Percentage increase: 47.35
Staffer: Laura De La Torre
Last congressional salary: $37,000
Dept. of Labor salary: $50,408
Percentage increase: 36.24
Staffer: Noelle Lee
Last congressional salary: $52,999
Dept. of Labor salary: $60,989
Percentage increase: 15.07
One of the aspects of the inaptly named Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) is the card check rule that is meant to make creating a union easier for unions and harder to resist for employers. But the EFCA is stalled in Congress as too many people understand just how bad this legislation really is. So, in order to help unions, both union leaders and President Obama have aimed to begin to push union aiding policies through the back door by changing federal rules governing the relationship between labor and business.
This week, Obama tossed unions a favor by changing the rule governing the way unions are ushered into the work place in the air transportation industry. By a 2 to 1 margin the National Mediation Board changed the percentage of “yes” votes that certifies a union from 76 percent of employees to a mere majority. The 75 percent rule has been in place for 75 years.
This is a radical change made by an Obama beholden to unions.
“This rule change… is arguably the most controversial change that the National Mediation Board has ever undertaken, at least in my 30 years of watching the industry,” said William “Bill” Swelbar, a research engineer with the International Center for Air Transportation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It appears quite driven by an administration’s policy to promote unionization and collective bargaining.”
This move by Obama will help unions radicalize Delta Airlines, a business that is already struggling beneath a sluggish economy.
What we see here is a prime example of the Obama administration going around Congress and implementing its radical, union-friendly polices anyway. Many of the union’s most economy killing ideas are sitting fallow in Congress, but not to worry, the union’s best buddy Obama is there to circumvent the will of the people.
This move is, of course, part of the wider union agenda. Last week AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka echoed the plan that Big Labor would get its favorite ideas in place by hook or by crook… mostly crook.
On May 6 Trumka assured his followers that they’d attach failed union-friendly legislation to any bill they could find in a stealth move to get their ideas passed regardless.
Anything we can get it attached to, there are multitudes of things we can get it attached to, and we will. We will get it done and it will be a good thing for the country.
Interestingly, it seems that through their representatives in Congress, the country is saying that they don’t want Big Labor’s bad ideas passed, not that any union thug cares much about democracy.
As the Obama term rolls on look to his appointees to aid Big Labor further by these back door rules changes tat favor labor and harm businesses. And in this bad economy, yet!
George Will has a great column in Newsweek this month where he details the mess that unionism has made of the City of Los Angeles, California.
Will says that L.A. Mayor Villaraigosa, once a “community organizer,” has inherited the worst financial mess possible, one that is “terminal” and is expected to drive the city into bankruptcy.
For 15 years Villaraigosa was an organizer for the Service Employees International Union and the city’s teachers’ union. Now he is trying to cope with, and partially undo, largesse for unionized public employees: “I have to sign the checks on the front, not just the back.”
One of the biggest problems is that the city has included into its city pension plans an automatic 8 percent a year increase. This is idiotic and unsustainable, but now stands as policy. And then, to make matters worse, this “community organizer” added 5,000 new city employees to the ranks when he was elected.
Now both Villaraigosa and the city are stuck with this entrenched foolishness. And what happens when politicians try to untie the Gordian Knot? The unions lobby them with rich contributions not to do so and if they fail to get political satisfaction they get the courts to act in their stead.
Amusingly, now Villaraigosa is the one railing against the very unions that he relied on for his entire career. After decades of trying to get to the top, he’s finally realized that his allies are the people’s enemies.
It all fits with our call to make public employees unions illegal. Public employees unions are antithetical to good government and wholly undemocratic.
Last week Fred Barnes wrote an extensive piece detailing how members of public employees unions have struck it rich by living off the tax payers. Me, I think we should fire them all, but that’s just me. Anyway, Barnes condensed his longer piece to a shorter one for the Washington Examiner today that is worth a quick read.
Barnes notes that public employees salaries are 34 percent higher than those of the private sector and that benefits are 70 percent higher than the private sector. He also notes that “benefits for government retirees are the most flagrant.”
Worse these hangers on and placemen cannot be fired and so spend decades soaking the public for their useless positions.
Most bureaucrats have secure, recession-proof jobs with automatic salary increases, paid leave and lavish benefits, notably in retirement. And they get to retire earlier than private-sector workers.
Barnes details the outrageously high benefits and salaries that public employees get but the biggest problem is the unsustainability of public pensions.
A staggering pension shortfall “is not just [in] California,” Crane told me. “It’s every state.” Nationwide, unfunded retirement benefits are $3.2 trillion, according to Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute. On top of that, he estimates the unfunded debt for the health coverage of state and local government retirees is $1.4 trillion.
That’s more than the yearly GDP the entire country even makes.
Disgusting.
We need to put an end to these government workers unions. They are killing us.
But, let us not forget why this exists. Because compliant Democrats accede to Union demands every time the unions come to politicians with their hands out. This is not just the unions fault. It is also the fault of Democrats that fill their pockets with political contributions from unions, contributions that are mere payoffs to profligate government spending on unions as well as payoffs to give unions more and more lucre every year. This corrupt bargain between Democrats and unions is destroying our governments.
We’ve been reporting that it looked like the Service Employees International Union was going to ignore past President Andy Stern’s pick of Anna Burger to be ushered in as his replacement and would instead pick Mary Kay Henry for its new president.
Well, that has come to pass. It is now official that Mary Kay Henry is the new SEIU president.
Henry announced that she intends to “restore relations with the American labor movement,” which would seem to be a shot over Andy Stern’s legacy seeing as how it was Stern that ruled the SEIU with an iron fist to the point that many smaller unions had broken off communication with him not to mention that a few groups had spilt from the SEIU in anger. These breakaway groups said that Stern was forcing a top-down model of control over them and taking all power from the locals and locating it back at the main office in Washington.
While Henry seems to be admitting that Stern had led the SEIU down a destructive path, it seems that those that spilt from the SEIU are not convinced she intends to reverse Stern’s megalomanic direction. Upon getting the official nod Henry immediately rejected any talks with the breakaway groups and this, they say, proves she has no intention of being a kinder and gentler SEIU chief.
“Mary Kay has a fundamental lack of respect for workers in deciding the course of their union and their contract,” said Tony Aidukas, an NUHW interim board member who works as a rehab specialist at Desert Regional Medical Center in Palm Springs.
They do not trust her a bit, apparently.
There is also another thing that we will have to watch to see what will happen. President Stern was a very, very frequent visitor at the White House and wielded considerable influence over President Obama. Will the SEIU’s new prez still have as much Washington power? I’d have to doubt it. Mere position does not automatically convey such power, after all. The person in that position has a whole lot to do with what power is amassed, to be sure.
So, with a new president in the big seat, we’ll have to see where the SEIU heads. But whatever the case, we must not assume that Mary Kay Henry will be any better for workers, our economy, or our government than any other union bigwig.
Eric Odom (Media Director)
Warner Todd Huston