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© 2011 The Union Label Blog & Grassfire Nation
Mark Mix, president of the National Right to Work Committee, has a great piece in the Wall Street Journal revealing how much danger the various healthcare bills steamrolling through Congress presents to America’s healthcare workers and patients both.
Read the Union Health-Care Label
Get ready for Detroit-style labor relations in our hospitals.
In the heated debates on health-care reform, not enough attention is being paid to the huge financial windfalls ObamaCare will dole out to unions—or to the provisions in the various bills in Congress that will help bring about the forced unionization of the health-care industry.
Tucked away in thousands of pages of complex new rules, regulations and mandates are special privileges and giveaways that could have devastating consequences for the health-care sector and the American economy at large.
The Senate version opens the door to implement forced unionization schemes pursued by former Govs. Rod Blagojevich of Illinois in 2005 and Gray Davis of California in 1999. Both men repaid tremendous political debts to Andy Stern and his Service Employees International Union (SEIU) by reclassifying state-reimbursed in-home health-care (and child-care) contractors as state employees—and forcing them to pay union dues.
Following this playbook, the Senate bill creates a “personal care attendants workforce advisory panel” that will likely impose union affiliation to qualify for a newly created “community living assistance services and support (class)” reimbursement plan.
The current House version of ObamaCare (H.R. 3200) goes much further. Section 225(A) grants Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius tremendous discretionary authority to regulate health-care workers “under the public health insurance option.” Monopoly bargaining and compulsory union dues may quickly become a required standard resulting in potentially hundreds of thousands of doctors and nurses across the country being forced into unions.
… read the rest at the Wall Street Journal.
As the president and Congress considers passing the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) in which the “card check” feature is still a major provision, a federal agency is trying to prevent its own employees from using the card check practice to organize.
The Legal Services Corp., a congressionally chartered, taxpayer-funded entity has hired legal counsel to try and prevent its employees in its oversight office from using the card check procedure to become unionized.
Employees in LSC oversight offices, with the help of the IFPTE, appealed to LSC President Helaine Barnett in a July 20 letter, asking her to accept authorization cards signed by “an overwhelming majority” of workers signaling their intent to unionize. Ms. Barnett dismissed the request in a July 28 letter, saying that “authorization cards are often an unreliable indicator of support for a union,” according to a copy of the correspondence obtained by The Times.
Of course, it is a bit of amusing hypocrisy that a federally created agency is trying to stop employees using card check even as Congress is trying to pass a law that forces card check on the private sector. As they say on TV hucksterism, though, “But wait, there’s more.”
The preference of the LSC, which is legally structured as a nonprofit corporation, for using the secret-ballot election process complies with federal organizing requirements. Federal agency employees, unlike their counterparts in the private sector, aren’t permitted to unionize voluntarily using authorization cards.
So, even if Congress does pass the card check bill forcing the private sector to eliminate the secret ballot it seems that it won’t affect federal employees anyway because they have different rules!
So once again we are seeing Congress making rules for the great unwashed that Congress — and by extension the federal government — don’t have to suffer under.
Utter hypocrisy.
A recent report by the Sacramento based California Budget Project shows that two out of five working-age Californians are out of work. The jobless rate has not been this bad since 1977. California’s unemployment rate is one of the worst in the country at 12 percent.
Yet, union membership has grown in California despite the recession. And it’s no wonder when looking at the CBP study. On page three, for instance, we see a notation that reports that unionization in government jobs has grown substantially and is also at a much higher percentage of the total sector workforce in California than it is in the rest of the country.
Unionization rates were consistently higher in the public sector than in the private sector in 2008-2009. As Figure 2 shows, public-sector unionism was especially strong in Los Angeles as well as in California: during 2008-2009, well over half of all workers in the California and Los Angeles public sectors were union members. In the nation as a whole, the unionization rate for public-sector workers was 37.0 percent; much higher than the 7.5 percent rate found in the private sector, but well below the rates for public-sector workers in California (57.4%) or Los Angeles (56%).
So, while regular citizens are losing their jobs by the millions, government workers are in clover, riding the gravy train, on easy street.
During one of the worst economies in generations government is growing.
And can we review what government does for the economy? It drains it, feeds off of it, empties it of cash. Government is a drag on the economy, not a help. Government creates nothing but bills. Yet, in California, they are growing the government in this climate.
Amazingly self destructive, isn’t it?
We’ve mentioned this fact before here on the blog, but a New York Daily News article is worth repeating. Union bosses all across the country have so mishandled their member’s pensions and few of them are in good shape as a result. Most are underfunded and in need of help. But that is the worker’s pensions. When one investigates the union bosses pensions one finds a very different story. In fact, from one union to the next, union bosses have fully funded and quite ample pensions plans that show none of the signs of mismanagement that the common worker’s pensions do.
Here is a piece by Diana Furchtgott-Roth that chronicles the selfish attention to their own needs exhibited by union bosses as the needs of their membership goes unsatisfied.
Union bigs get the best deals: A sour Labor Day lesson on pensions
By Diana Furchtgott-Roth
This Labor Day, unions are once again seeking to recruit new members with promises of higher wages and generous pension benefits. These promises are made despite pension funds’ reports to the U.S. Labor Department showing that collectively bargained pension funds are underfunded when compared with other pensions.
In contrast, pension funds for unions’ own staff and officers have been doing just fine.
In 2006, the latest year for which full data are available, only 17% of union-negotiated plans were fully funded, compared with 35% of nonunion plans.
Under the Pension Protection Act of 2006, funds with less than 80% of assets are in “endangered” status. In 2006, 41% of union funds were “endangered,” compared with 14% of nonunion funds.
Thirteen percent of union funds had less than 65% of required assets, also called “critical” status by the Labor Department, while only 1% of nonunion plans were in critical shape.
Unions have separate pension plans for staff and officers of national and local unions because usually officers and staff are employees of the union. These pension plans are doing far better.
A sample of 30 staff pension plans among unions that sponsor the largest 46 rank-and-file plans shows that whereas the collectively bargained plans had 70% of the funds needed to satisfy their obligations, the officers’ own plans were 93% funded.
Take the Service Employees International Union National Industry Pension Plan. This plan covers 103,693 rank-and-file members. In 2007 it was 74% funded, and in 2009 it filed under critical status with the Labor Department.
Yet a separate fund for the union’s own employees, such as support staff, had 1,371 participants and was 85% funded. The pension fund for SEIU officers had 7,064 members, and did even better: 102% funded.
A comparison of the pension funds of ordinary SEIU members with the pension funds for officers and staff shows that neither poor market returns nor the weak economy explain the national pension’s underfunding. The three plans are managed within a single trust, separately, but by the same people.
The major difference is that the decisions regarding contributions to the officers’ funds are made by the officers of the SEIU alone, instead of by several large employers pursuant to collective-bargaining contracts.
The success of the officers’ funds shows the heads of the national organization know how to fund a pension plan properly, if they choose to. If the SEIU leaders can do that, there is no excuse for their inability to push their corporate partners to do likewise. They are on the boards of the pension funds and, therefore, have influence.
Why the different funding rates of rank-and-file and officer pension plans? Most officer pension plans are perks of the job and are not collectively bargained. Rather, they are dictated by the union’s bylaws. Furthermore, they are single-employer pension plans. Both of these distinctions have biases toward better funding.
Union officers make most of the business decisions for the union. They are aware of the financial status of the union, and therefore what pension benefits are affordable. When a single entity is responsible for determining pension benefits, its exclusive responsibility and its flexibility allow it to keep the pension well-funded.
Union officers manage their own pensions. That may give them a greater incentive to ensure that their own pensions are managed well. The members’ pensions then become less of a priority. The outcomes suggest that union leaders are more diligent in protecting their own futures.
It’s a moral outrage that unions are wooing workers with the dubious promise of comfortable retirements even as many collectively bargained pensions are in financial difficulty. It’s even uglier that unions manage to produce well-funded pensions for their own officers and staff from the dues payments made by workers out of their hard-earned wages.
Diana Furchtgott-Roth is a columnist with RealClearMarkets.com and the coauthor, with Andrew Brown, of “Comparing Union-Sponsored and Private Pension Plans: How Safe Are Workers’ Retirements?”
Economists from George Mason University and The Locke Institute, as well as Nobel laureate James Buchanan are warning that if President Obama is allowed his interventionist, fascist way the U.S.A. will be laid low and turned into a third world nation.
Here is a short editorial by Charles K. Rowley of GMU that appeared in The Telegraph.
Adam Smith would not be optimistic in today’s economic world
Adam Smith once commented that “there is a great deal of ruin in a nation”. He meant that bungling governments imposed only a limited check on the economic performance of a Great Nation.
As Nathanael Smith and I show in our study of US economic contractions, Adam Smith would be much less sanguine were he confronted by today’s financial crisis and the US government’s response. Indeed, it is not impossible that the US will experience the kind of economic collapse from first- to third-world status experienced by Argentina under the national socialist governance of Juan Peron.
The US economy suffers from a growing culture of indebtedness that has increasingly contaminated the federal government since 2001 and has spilled over dramatically into private household behaviour. The combination of the ill-conceived fiscal-furnace fired by President Bush and the US Congress and the reckless monetary-furnace fired by Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke throughout the period 2001-2007, created unsustainable housing market and stock market bubbles whose collapse brought on the financial crisis and economic contraction of 2008-2009.
The policy responses to the debt bubble demonstrate crude political consideration rather than economic understanding. If excessive government indebtedness is a major source of the problem, why increase the government debt? Why encourage households to go yet further into debt?
The prognosis is catastrophic if projected government policies are not cut back. According to the White House’s own estimates, the federal budget deficit in 2009 will be $1.6 trillion, approximately 11.2pc of the overall economy, the highest on record since the end of the Second World War. In 2019, the national debt will represent 76.5pc of the US national economy, the highest proportion since just after the Second World War. In such circumstances, the international reserve status of the US dollar will not survive. As it fades, so interest rates on government securities will rise and the real burden of servicing the debt will increase. In such circumstances, the US economy will teeter on the edge of a black hole.
Prosperity and full employment in the US will only be restored by a return to laissez-faire capitalism. Our study outlines a radical, but politically feasible, approach. Monetary policy should be expansionary. But, on the micro-economic side, tariffs and other trade barriers should be repealed unilaterally; a “Right-to-Work” Act should reduce the minimum wage and curtail the powers of unions; and business regulation should be reduced. Individual banks and their counterparties should not be bailed out, although the system should be protected by ensuring that failing banks are wound up in an orderly fashion – this is the only way to restore market discipline.
Charles K Rowley is Duncan Black Professor of Economics at George Mason University and general director of The Locke Institute
Kevin Mooney of the Washington Examiner has a piece from Sept. 2 that warns that H.R. 3200, the House healthcare bill, gives special consideration to union bosses for positions on various healthcare management boards.
This means that Barack Obama is handing official government power to union bosses!
Sections 123 and 2251 of H.R. 3200, the version of Obamacare being pushed by House Democratic leaders, are of particular concern, according to NRTWC, because they could put union-backed appointees on new government committees that recommend mandatory health insurance benefits provided by private insurers, and personnel policies the bill describes as necessary “to ensure quality and adequacy” of the nation’s health care workers.
This is nothing but raw political payback. It has nothing whatever to do with “insurance,” or “healthcare,” or any legitimate attempt to save money and cut costs. In fact, with union bosses heading things up it is likely that costs will soar as they pad the plan with goodies to their friends.
Obama’s Health and Human Services Secretary (currently Kathleen Sebelius) will have a free hand to stack all sorts of committees with union bosses with few committeemembers assured to be non-union personnel.
For example, section 2261 of H.R. 3200 states that the Advisory Committee on Health Workforce Evaluation and Assessment is to have 15 members, which must include no fewer than one representative each of health professionals within the health work force, health care patients and consumers, employers, labor unions, and third-party health payers.
“That’s 15 members, all appointed by Obama’s [Health and Human Services] Secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, and the only one guaranteed not to be a union plant is the guaranteed employer representative,” Mourad said.
This is just one more case of the political games being played by Democrats with this execrable bill. It is also more proof that paying back friends and supporters with federal largesse and extending the tendrils of bog government into every corner of our lives is really the main goals with Obamacare. What about actual healthcare? Phhht. Who cares about that when government can end up controlling all it surveys?
Eric Odom (Media Director)
Vanguard of Freedom
Warner Todd Huston