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© 2011 The Union Label Blog & Grassfire Nation
-By Warner Todd Huston
Presidential candidate Herman Cain (R) recently spoke with FOX Business Network’s (FBN) Neil Cavuto about the dispute between the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and Boeing and its impact on the United States economy. Cain said what the NLRB is trying to do keeping Boeing out of Charleston is “a direct assault on the free market system” and he hopes Boeing will “fight it all the way to the Supreme Court if that’s what they have to do.” Cain went on to say it is “uncertainty” that is preventing the U.S. economy from adding jobs in the “private sector” which must be “the engine” for economic growth and it is issues like the NLRB/Boeing dispute that are “killing the engine.”
Cain says that the reason business aren’t hiring is because of the uncertainty that Obama’s policies have visited upon the nation. The “uncertainty about the impact of Obamacare” chief among them.
“We don’t know what the tax rates are going to be at the end of 2013. This economy is stalled. This economy is like a train stuck on the tracks. You have a boxcar full of 15 million people who don’t have jobs, you have a boxcar of businesses that are hanging on. You have a caboose and no engine. They keep feeding the caboose. The caboose can’t pull the train. The private sector has to be the engine. Everything that they are doing, including this National Labor Relations Board issue, is killing the engine.”
Cain is also incredulous at Obama’s National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) for its decision to attack Boeing attempting to prevent the company from building new manufacturing plants in South Carolina.
“What’s at stake is a direct assault on the free market system,” Cain said. “What the National Relations Labor Board is doing is an attack on free enterprise and that is exactly what we don’t need. I hope that Boeing hangs in there and they do fight it all the way to the Supreme Court if that’s what they have to do.”
Cain echoed what he said on the state of the recent Republican debate on the charge that he is and the other GOP candidates are anti-union. “I am pro workers and I am pro right to work,” he told Fox Business Network. “I am pro free market. They are trying to bring states and businesses down. I don’t agree with it and most of the American people, they don’t agree with it either.”
As to what his own relations with NLRB would be if he were to become President, Cain said that he would make sure that free enterprise would be it goal.
“First I would give direction. We want to help free enterprise in this country, not hurt it. Rather than being a barrier to free market development. Be an assistance. In fact, that would be my message to all of government if I were to become president. Lower corporate tax rates because we’re the only country in the world that has not done it in fifteen years. We should take capital tax gains to zero. Here’s the most important part: make the rates permanent. That’s the only way we’re going to be able to get this economy growing at the growth rate that it has the potential to grow.”
Cain also thinks that tax cuts cannot “cost money” to the federal government. “The American people have been lied to about tax rates costing money,” he said. “I would do two things. I would add a real payroll tax holiday. It wouldn’t be permanent. I’d do it for a year. You get serious about cutting spending.”
-By Warner Todd Huston
President Obama claims that he wants to “create jobs,” and is happily touting several policies that he claims will create jobs in this jobless, non-recovery. Unfortunately, all his polices really do is shore up the high cost unions that kill job growth. As GOP Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConell says, Obama has “relentlessly pursued an agenda that is radically opposed” to job growth.
Speaking on the floor last Tuesday, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said, “For two and a half years, Democrats in Washington have paid lip service to the idea of job creation — even as they’ve relentlessly pursued an agenda that is radically opposed to it… Democrats don’t want to admit that the government-driven policies of the past two and a half years are part of the problem. And until they do, nothing will change. Unless Democrats change their priorities and their policies, the threats of a downgrade won’t go away. The debt won’t get any smaller. Businesses won’t create the kind of jobs we need to build prosperity.
“We need to change course and a good place to start is with trade,” McConnell said. “The President himself has explicitly acknowledged in front of the cameras that free trade agreements will create tens of thousands of jobs for American families who need them. Yet now the President’s advisors say that the White House plans to hold off on this bipartisan job-creating initiative unless it can spend more money on a government benefits program first.”
America is in desperate need of jobs. The country is in worse condition with chronic joblessness than it has been since The Great Depression. Yet all the president can do is placate jobs-killing unions and torpedo the sort of free trade agreements that would improve our economy.
Recently George Will blasted the Obama administration for putting unions ahead of trade agreements that create jobs. “President Obama is sacrificing economic growth and job creation in order to placate organized labor. And as the crisis of the welfare state deepens, he is trying to enlarge the entitlement system and exacerbate the entitlement mentality.”
On May 4, the administration announced that, at last, it was ready to proceed with congressional ratification of the agreements. On May 16, however, it announced it would not send them until Congress expands an entitlement program favored by unions… The basic TAA [Trade Adjustment Assistance] still exists. But the administration’s stimulus included TAA in its policy of increasing spending almost everywhere in the hope that stimulus-level spending could be made permanent. Which is what Democrats who do organized labor’s bidding are trying to do: Forty-one Democratic senators are supporting Obama’s demand that the stimulus-level TAA spending, which expired in February, be resumed before the trade agreements will be submitted.
Will thinks that some Democrats do oppose the Administration on these anti-growth measures but he thinks they lack the “courage” to speak up. He feels that unions have such a stranglehold on the Democrat Party that they won’t speak up. Me, I doubt there are any that really feel that way, courage or no. The entire edifice of the Democrat Party is built on the billions spent by unions to get favorable, plaint Democrats into office.
Unions feed Democrats campaign cash by the billions so that Democrats will get elected in order to give unions sweetheart deals at the taxpayer’s expense. Then Democrats comply with union demands causing unions to reward Democrats with even more campaign cash. It is a vicious cycle from which voters are cut out from being able to influence lawmakers, tax rates, and government spending — the latter two of which soar to satisfy unions.
Leader McConnell is right on with his comments on this situation. “The White House is free to advocate on behalf of unions. That’s its prerogative. But this time it’s gone too far,” he said. “When the White House is actively depriving others of jobs because some union boss isn’t getting his way, it’s lost touch. So . . . I’m calling on the administration once again to send us the three pending trade agreements that the President himself has said would create tens of thousands of American jobs — and to leave Trade Adjustment Assistance out of it. We need to separate these issues, deal with them independently, and move ahead with these trade deals.”
-By Larry Sand
Twenty years of schooling in Los Angeles and you’re lucky if you can get any job, let alone one on the dayshift.
Bob Dylan penned the words in the headline (sans the union part) almost a half century ago but having been quoted by many, they live on. The latest example of the lyrics’ relevance can be applied to a new 58 page report commissioned by United Way and several civil rights’ groups, produced by the National Council on Teacher Quality and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation…and the reactions of a teachers union boss.
Teacher Quality Roadmap: Improving Policies and Practices in LAUSD was published last week, and there were no major surprises in it. Education reformers have been aggressively campaigning for similar changes for many years, and various recommendations from this report are already in force in other states. (While dealing specifically with Los Angeles, its findings could be readily applied to the rest of California. Local school districts do have some power, but education policy decisions are typically made at the state level.)
Among other things, the report, which included interviews with over 1,500 teachers and principals, recommended changes to the current union contract and to state laws regulating staffing, evaluations, tenure, compensation and work schedules. Some of the prescriptions include using criteria other than seniority if layoffs are necessary and utilizing standardized test scores as part of a teacher’s evaluation and when making staffing decisions. Additionally, it was suggested that teachers be denied permanent status until they have been in the classroom for four years instead of the current two. Continue reading »
-By Warner Todd Huston
This is a novel approach. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU), one of the largest government employee unions in the nation, has decided that they’ve had enough of all those darn Republicans that are… well… acting like Republicans. So, the union has lighted on a new way to be rid of all those darn Republican-like Republicans. They are going to sponsor their own Republican candidates in upcoming elections in the land of fruits and nuts.
The SEIU has created a new “Republican” political action committee (PAC) meant to recruit purported moderate Republicans to run for office to replace the Republicans now sitting in Sacramento. SEIU is calling this PAC the “Golden California Committee.”
The name of their PAC reminds me of the phrase, “don’t pee on my leg and tell me it’s raining.” This golden shower that the SEIU is trying to pull off doesn’t fool anyone. The SEIU has no interest in helping Republicans. They have but one goal, to implement laws and government regulations that give to government employee unions payoffs, higher salaries, and outrageous benefits and pensions that exceed anything that the general public will ever see. They know that the only way to do this is to control government from both sides of the aisle.
After all, as weak as the Californian Republicans are, they are the only resistance to unions getting free reign to steal from the taxpayers with impunity. The SEIU knows this and they are trying to eliminate that last, tiny, little spot of resistance.
As it is the government in California is by the unions, of the unions and for the unions but if they can place in office faux Republicans whose loyalty is to unions and not the party or the people, then that will be the end of any chance that the Golden State could ever return to any fiscal sanity at all.
Now, by and large California has some of the least conservative Republicans in the country and the few real conservatives they have in office have next to no power. Yet, one of the spokesmen for this absurd new union effort is claiming that the “far right” is “hijacking” his party.
“I feel the far right, the tea party, is hijacking my party, and it’s saddening,” said John Orr, a parking officer at California State University, Fullerton. “I hope through this PAC, this effort and the open primary that moderates can regain their voice.”
This guy has to be kidding. Firstly, he himself is a liar to claim he’s a Republican. Secondly, he’s woefully uninformed to imagine that the Calif. GOP has been hijacked by “the far right.” One of the weakest, mushy moderate GOP parties in the country resides n California. To say it is the party of “the far right” is absurd in the extreme.
Beyond all that there is simply no possible way to be a Republican and a union supporter at the same time. The two are wholly incompatible.
To be a union member you have to support an anti-democratic right for your union to use the law, the courts, and the government to steal from your fellow citizens. You support the end of the democratic tradition of the secret ballot for your fellows. You want to have higher salaries for no merit. You want there to be no legal way to fire you even if you’ve broken the law. You want to have free medical care when the people who you are forcing to pay your salary are lucky to have any healthcare at all. You want to retire at 50 and have the taxpayers (who can’t retire until they are 68 or later) pay to support you for the next thirty or forty years. In other words, you want to build a world where you are “kept” in a luxurious lifestyle all at the expense of others. No self-reliance. No hard work. No merit. These are the principles of a European, not an American and they are certainly not the principles of any Republican.
No candidate that this union operated PAC offers can ever be considered a Republican. The voters should know that these people are sold-out to the grasping, profligate unions before they even get into office. The candidates from the SEIU’s Golden California Committee will be nothing else but union puppets.
But the sad fact is that this new effort, should it be developed to the point where it does offer candidates, will likely fool the voters. Too many voters will imagine that the candidates this PAC offers are real, independent candidates. Too many voters will be blissfully unaware that these candidates are little else but puppets for the unions that will work assiduously against the best interests of the very people voting for them.
But here we have it. The unions once again leading with subterfuge, lies, and false fronts in order to steal as much from the voters as they can. It just goes to show that these people have no scruples. But it also goes to show precisely why government employee unions should be illegal like they were only a few short decades ago.
A four-year Apple store employee in San Francisco wants to unionize the low wage workers that help customers in Apple Stores across America. Should he succeed, this will, of course, take one of the few successful companies we have left in America, hobble it with jobs-killing union rules, and destroy its jobs like the rest of them.
Cory Moll, 30, has a plan to take a bite out of Apple, it seems. He is claiming that the minimum wage, retail jobs of the floor helpers at Apple stores are beset with “unfair practices.” So, he wants to organize the 30,000 retail employees in Apple’s 325 brick-and-mortar stores.
Using Twitter and Facebook, Moll is trying to get the rest of the country’s Apple store employees on his jobs killing bandwagon. Fortunately, he has yet to gain much support from them.
Before I get to more of the specifics of this tale of self-immolation, let me just say this: Apple store jobs are not careers. These are low wage for a reason. They are starter jobs for young people, not the sort meant to be a career with which a family can be raised.
If this idiot is still a shop floor helper after four years and at 30-years-of-age to boot, it is clear he has no ambition to start looking for an actual career and merely wants a union to coddle him in his low skilled job for the rest of his practically useless life.
But what will be the result if he is successful? What else but the loss of jobs! Apple will end up firing thousands of employees in order to be able to afford to pay for the ones that will suddenly cost them triple the costs.
Further, this will mean the end of thousands of entry-level jobs that young people can get to learn how to be an employee. Entry-level jobs for young people are very important. They teach them all sorts of job skills and they serve as a resume enhancer to show that, at their young age, they were dependable employees.
But this doofus will wipe out this opportunity for thousands of young people immediately and hundreds of thousands into the future.
Meanwhile, this Moll character is puffing himself up as some sort of hero of Biblical proportions. “It’s kind of a feeling of David versus Goliath,” he said to reporters. No, it isn’t, Mr. Moll.
Let us hope that this loser fails miserably at unionizing Apple store employees, like he has failed miserably at finding a worthy career for a 30-year-old man.
-By Kyle Olson
There’s a reason labor unions are chided for acting like bullies and thugs.
Just ask Michigan State Rep. Marty Knollenberg, who recently had dozens of unionists picketing outside his business due to education reform legislation currently under consideration in the state legislature.
Knollenberg is supportive of school reforms, so the teachers union has decided that his business and his customers should be targets for intimidation and thuggery.
Read the rest at BigGovernment.com.
Eric Odom (Media Director)
Warner Todd Huston