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© 2011 The Union Label Blog & Grassfire Nation
-By Larry Sand
President Obama has talked a good education reform game, but when push comes to threats, he is above all a good union man.
On August 25th, AFL-CIO boss Richard Trumka uttered a few words that seemed to resonate with President Obama. He said, “The AFL-CIO has not yet decided if it will participate in next year’s Democratic National Convention, as labor union members ponder whether President Obama has earned their support.…” He said the major economic speech the president has planned for early next month will tell union members what they need to know about whether he will be worth supporting.”
Trumka has a history of following through on his threats. As president of the United Mine Workers in the spring of 1993, he wanted to ensure that no one would be able to find employment as a miner without paying union dues to the UMW. Accordingly, he proceeded to order more than 17,000 mine workers to walk off their jobs, and told the striking miners to “kick the sh– out of every last one” of their fellow employees and mine operators who resisted union demands. UMW thugs dutifully responded by vandalizing homes, firing gunshots into management’s offices, and cutting off the power supply to another mine, temporarily trapping 93 miners underground.
Now it’s true that Trumka didn’t threaten to “kick the sh–”out of the president, but he may as well have. Last week, when Obama gave his speech to Congress, the thuggish Trumka was part of a small group who sat with Mrs. Obama listening to the President spew out yet another stimulus plan (how’d that last one work out, Mr. President?) This time it will cost $447 billion, and like the 2009 version, will allegedly fix all our economic ails. Long on demagogic rhetoric and short on details, the president made it sound so simple, “Pass this jobs bill, and we can put people to work rebuilding America.”
Perhaps even more important to the president than AFL-CIO backing is the support of the biggest union in the country – the National Education Association. So not surprisingly he also offered more “free” money – $60 billion – to education. This money will allegedly save 280,000 jobs according to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Since NEA gets $168 in dues from each of its members, it’s obvious why it welcomed Obama’s proposal. But that doesn’t mean that the union was satisfied. Continue reading »
The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) has sued the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to stop a new regulation by the board that would require employers to post notices informing their workers of their right to organize a union.
Filed Thursday in in the U.S. District Court in Washington, NAM’s lawsuit says the labor board is acting out of its jurisdiction and should suspend the rule. The legal action comes as the NLRB increasingly comes under more scrutiny from Republican lawmakers, who have been angered by several of the board’s decisions this year.
In a statement, Jay Timmons, NAM’s president and CEO, said the rule is “just another example of the board’s aggressive overreach to insert itself into the day-to-day decisions of businesses — exerting powers it doesn’t have.”…
Read the rest at The Hill.
-By Warner Todd Huston
In one of the most disgusting examples of the self-absorption of the union mind set, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka decided that his 9/11 memorial would not be much about 9/11, but would instead be just another excuse to say how great unions are and how evil conservatives are. This isn’t just gauche, but insulting, infuriating, and just plain ignorant. Not only that, but it is most certainly disrespectful of the fallen and just plain un-American.
But, then again, that describes unions in just about every instance, doesn’t it?
Disgustingly, the AFL-CIO’s Trumka turned a “memorial” to 9/11 into a union snake-oil sales pitch. Worse he began with an almost dismissive attitude to the memory of the attacks on our homeland.
Trumka begins by saying “we need no reminding” of the “horror and anguish we experienced 10 years ago.” This is his first paragraph and from here he launches into doing just that, not bothering much about what happened that day, suffice to say that the “solidarity” we experienced is the “cornerstone of the union movement.”
Yeah. I don’t know about you but as the towers were falling and thousands were dying, all I could think about was the cornerstone of unionism.
Oh, and guess what? Instead of waking us to the dangers of Islamofascism, all 9/11 did was open “doors to hate, suspicion of ‘others’ and self-centered greed. Our fear was twisted into something much more dangerous.”
Then this moron goes on to claim that as a society we have gone from treating our firemen, police and other first responders as heroes to “vilifying them.”
Just 10 years after 9/11, despite our vows, the public servants, construction workers and others who lost their lives or still suffer with the cancerous remnants of the Twin Towers haven’t just been forgotten. They’ve been vilified. The extremist small government posse has turned them into public enemy No. 1, as though teachers and firefighters, EMTs and nurses and union construction workers ruined America’s economy.
This is a bald-faced lie. No one is “vilifying” first responders. And notice how he slipped “teachers” into the same category as 9/11 first responders. Sorry, pal, but teachers are not just like cops, firemen, and EMTs.
Even more specifically, no one is saying that police, teachers and other public servants have “ruined America’s economy.” It is their unions and their handmaidens in the Democrat Party that are responsible for that. We who are against public employees unions are against the unions, not the public workers that the unions bully and steal from.
Then this creep gets into name calling…. yes, name calling in a 9/11 memorial address.
Wealthy CEOs, anti-government extremist front groups and frothing talk show hosts—from the Rush Limbaughs and Glenn Becks to the Koch brothers, Karl Rove’s American Crossroads group, Americans for Prosperity, the Club for Growth, FreedomWorks and the American Legislative Exchange Council—also pushed open the door to hate.
Shameless.
But wait he gets worse. Now he goes into a rant of non-sequiturs:
We’ve seen the costs of hatred in ill-thought wars, in shameful attacks on immigrants and our LGBT neighbors. We saw it in the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. We saw it in the racism that has found overt and covert expression since Barack Obama began his run for office—from outright declarations of people who said out loud they would never vote for a black man to the ridiculously persistent obsession with our president’s birth certificate. Regardless of his policies or priorities, President Obama is shadowed by the drumbeat of suspicion based on his “other”-ness. And those suspicions are fed and watered constantly by forces that were threatened by his message of “hope and change.”
Then Trumka goes on to invoke the memory of those first responders that died on 9/11 and bends their deaths to his own petty cause to rape the public treasury for high salaries and overly generous pensions and benefits lans his fatcat pals created with pliant Democrat politicians over the last forty years.
It is a disgusting display of ignorance.
Now, just imagine how the extremists on the far left, those shrill voices on the left would be screaming bloody murder if some Tea Party guy, a conservative radio host, or a Republican had used the deaths of over 3,000 Americans on 9/11 for his petty political agenda? Imagine how they’d be calling foul and saying how disgusting it would be. And they’d be right, too.
But here we have a union thug, a man with a long, long history of violence and incitement of the same, using the heroes that fell on 9/11 as a foil for advancing his union agenda.
Trumka is using the heroes of 9/11 to shore up his agenda of high taxes, big government waste, and big money for himself and his other union boss pals.
Trumka is using an incident perpetrated by people that hated capitalism and tried to strike a blow against it. He is using that murderous act to promulgate his own attack on capitalism. In essence, Trumka is announcing his sympathies with the Islamofascist terrorists that attacked us on 9/11.
Remember this, as well: Democrats and Obama support Trumka and his actions.
If this isn’t appalling, what is?
After months of accusations that it is the Tea Party movement that is somehow “dangerous” to America, much of such rhetoric coming from union members and their supporters, we get union members of the Longshoremen storming the Port of Longview, Washington taking hostages, destroying property, and generally acting like lawless thugs.
Imagine what the news would have been if it were people identifying themselves as Tea Partiers that attacked a place, took hostages, and went on a protracted campaign of property destruction. There would have been congressional resolutions denouncing the Tea Party, there would be wall-to-wall coverage and ultimately multiple investigations from every corner.
Yet, since it was union members involved, we get a few passing reports in the media and we all move on to the debut of the new NFL season.
Not only did we see this lawlessness and violence perpetrated by these union thugs, but they are warning that this is just the beginning. Again, imagine of it were Tea Partiers saying this!
These aren’t lone or unusual instances for unions. Unions have a more than 100-year history of violence and murders. A current union chief is even responsible for violent acts, yet makes millions a year as a union chief and is a close adviser to the President of the United States. Another is even allowed to open rallies for the President where he incites his listeners with violent rhetoric.
With all this violence and inciting of same from unionists, there is nothing even remotely similar among the Tea Partiers.
On a side note, it is a bit misleading for the media and the far left to keep calling out “the Tea Party” as if it is a single entity. Of course, there is a such a thing as “the union” when you are discussing stories like this. In this case it is the Longshoremen, in other cases it’s the AFL-CIO, or the Teamsters. These are particular organizations with real bosses to point to. But there is no such thing as “the Tea Party.”
Sure there are thousands of groups across the country calling themselves Tea Partiers, but there is no central organization, no single group under which they are organized. There just is no “the” in “the Tea Party.”
Anyway, the whole point here is that the unions are the violent ones here. But the Old Media does not focus on the danger that unions represent. They are too busy reporting on the fantasy promulgated by the far left and the Democrat Party that it is “the Tea Party” that is “dangerous.”
But, yeah, remember, it’s the Tea Partiers that are violent…
A new study finds that Illinois ranks at the bottom of states with the worst climate of government union accountability in the nation. The Land of Lincoln ranks 47th in the nation of out of control, unaccountable government unions says the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s new “Big Labor vs. Taxpayers Index.”
The index ranks every state on “23 individual aspects to determine the degree to which states favor organized labor and which favor taxpayers.”
The Index provides a national narrative on labor policy. Analyzing 1,150 labor laws and regulations throughout the country, it allows state-level policy makers to learn from the successes and mistakes of their neighbors, and therefore adopt labor policies that are in the best interest of their citizens.
CEI ranks the top most taxpayer friendly states as Tennessee, Utah, Idaho, Texas and Florida. The worst states, areas where unions control the debate and constantly push legislators for ever more favorable laws and rules favoring government unions at the expense of taxpayers and good government are Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Illinois, New Jersey, and New York.
The study looks at such things as the strength of collective bargaining, the lack of or strength of secret ballot protection laws, the adherence to open meetings laws, project labor agreement laws and the like to determine how the states measure up against each other.
It is quickly becoming painfully obvious that states that are government union heavy have the worst economies, they are the least taxpayer friendly, and are more indebted than those that favor government unions less. The best way to make government responsive to voters is to take power away from government unions and those states that have done so are in much better shape than those states that are under complete control of the avaricious government unions.
The simple fact of the matter is that government unions are antithetical to good government. But most people are not aware that government workers were not always unionized. In fact, President Franklin Roosevelt — the patron saint of the far left — was himself adamantly against government workers being unionized. He felt that unionizing government works made government unresponsive to voters and uncontrollable by lawmakers. We have seen his sagacity proven.
Government workers were not allowed to unionize until the 1960s and the concept didn’t really get pervasive until the early 70s, so the thought that government workers have always been unionized is erroneous.
The sad thing is that unions have become a leech on the treasury of governments at every level from the most local towns to the federal government. They give tax dollars they gotten to politicians so that the politicians will give unions favorable rules and laws, the politicians then do just that in exchange for even more campaign money and the circle continues over and over again. Notice who is cut out? The voter.
To make governments once again more flexible to tackle harsh economic realities and to make government once again responsive to voters and not union bosses, government unions should be made illegal like they once were only a few decades ago.
Eric Odom (Media Director)
Warner Todd Huston