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© 2011 The Union Label Blog & Grassfire Nation
-By Joe Kefauver
For the last year, unions have been trying to accomplish through a pro-labor National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) what they couldn’t get done through legislation, pushing new regulations making it much easier for them to organize nearly any workplace. Whether it was the NLRB’s jaw-dropping arrogance in the infamous Boeing case or its repeated attempts to change organizing rules, at least you have to give the unions and their allies credit for being shameless in the light of day. What is less well known, however, is a different unionization approach being led in the shadows by some of the anti-employer community’s most influential leaders.
Desperate to reverse years of declining union membership, the American labor movement has been quietly rolling out a new labor organizing tool over the past few years, the worker center. By operating behind this non-profit model, the anti-employer community is able to circumvent organizing laws while actively recruiting new members and attacking non-unionized industries and employers. The growth of this strategy has been explosive, with about 170 worker centers incorporated as of 2009, compared to just five centers in existence in 1992.
In short, this approach emulates much of what happens in a typical organizing effort whereby a handful of activists approach employees of a particular business and ostensibly offer worker training and other vocational education seminars. They use this sham seminar as a ploy to enter into dialogues with workers and try to determine (or foster) a given level of discontent among the workforce with regard to pay equity, discrimination, promotion history and other factors. If the organizer thinks that there might be a pattern of anti-employee policies, they piece together anecdotal information from employees and present the employer with a “bill” for perceived back wages, overtime, etc., payable of course to the worker center itself. If the employer pays or “settles,” the organizers then brand him a “white hat employer” and publicly commend him or her for the responsible business they operate. If sanity prevails and the employer refuses to pay, the group resorts to the standard union playbook of demonstrations, protests, reputation smearing, harassment, lawsuits and other notable public attacks in hopes the employer will eventually succumb. This is reminiscent of the stereotypical mob-run fire insurance scams….
Read the rest at CSNews.com.
INDIANAPOLIS — Indiana Democrats may not be able maintain their absence from the Indiana House to prevent a vote on that state’s right-to-work legislation.
The Indiana House was scheduled to resume at 1:30 p.m., but it is unclear if the 40 Democratic state representatives will show up.
Last week, House Democrats were not present, preventing the majority needed for a quorum that would allow House Bill 1001, the right-to-work proposal, to be introduced in the House on the record. Without a quorum, no legislation can be introduced….
Read the rest at Statehouse News.
Also see coverage by The Watchdog.org: Indiana Senate committee passes Right-to-Work bill; Unions protest while Democrats boycott
-By Clarice Feldman
From an historian’s point of view, one could do worse than studying the United Mine Workers of America. It is a microcosm of the American Labor Movement. It is a startling picture of the role of individuals in the making of American history. It is the story of how a once powerful institution’s leaders repeatedly sold out its members as the nation drifted from large scale industrial production of power and goods to being a producer of private and public services . Finally, not least, it is a story of breathtaking betrayal of working men by a man who used them as a stepping stone to greater personal power and to influence with an administration which time will prove the epitome of crony capitalism in the U.S.
I have some intimate personal experience with the UMWA having represented Joseph A. Yablonski (“Jock Yablonski”) in his bid for the presidency of the Union in the late 1960′s and his successor Miners for Democracy, the reform group which took over after he, his wife and daughter were murdered by thugs in the pay of then Union President Tony Boyle.
The stage for that fight was set by the dictatorial control of the union by its most famous leader, John L. Lewis, whose physical and mental decline left no suitably compelling successor, but only the levers to unhampered power over the union’s resources to whomever grabbed the reins. My records of that fight are available to scholars at the Wayne State University Labor Archives. They provide an interesting snapshot of the labor movement, the union, the coal industry and labor law in that period…
Read the rest at American Thinker.
-By Larry Sand
Teachers and other public employees use “air time” to pick your pocket. The California State Teachers Retirement System tries calming words. David Crane tells the truth and loses yet another job.
Saying that the state teachers’ retirement system is underfunded is the understatement of this or any year and now, CalSTRS is giving us specifics. On December 27th, it said,
“Recent media reports have suggested that to solve the unfunded liability the state will have to increase CalSTRS funding by $3.8 billion a year for 30 years for a total of more than $114 billion. Although this is an accurate statement based on current projections, achieving adequate funding can occur several ways that would be phased in over time. The CalSTRS $56 billion funding shortfall can be managed, but it will require gradual and predictable increases in contributions.”
In fact, saying that the shortfall has to be “managed” is like saying that World War II had to be managed. No, the reality is that there has to be major destruction and rebuilding, no matter how unpopular this will be with the beneficiaries of the theft, their unions and their kick-the-can-down-the-road buddies in Sacramento who are occasionally known as legislators. Tinkering around the edges and “managing” the problem will do little. Continue reading »
Hindsight is supposed to be 20/20, but looking back on the past 12 months, it’s tough to see any sense in many of the Administration’s regulatory missteps. Of course, there are bound to be a few howlers when government churns out more than 3,500 rules in a year, including dozens unleashed by Obamacare, Dodd–Frank, and the perpetually errant Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). But by any standard, 2011 brought forth a remarkable number and variety of regulatory blunders.
Fair warning: Our Top 10 list may prove fatal to any bit of faith in government as a “fixer,” if faith somehow has managed to survive despite all evidence to the contrary. In any event, it should steel our resolve to fight the Leviathan in the coming year.
1. The Dim Bulbs Rule. As per Congress, of course, for issuing an edict to phase out the incandescent light bulbs on which the world has relied for more than a century. With the deadline looming in 2012, Americans by the millions spent the past year pressing lawmakers to lift the ban which, contrary to eco-ideology, will kill more American jobs than create “green” ones. (Congress evidently overlooked the fact that the vast majority of fluorescent bulbs are manufactured in China.) The 2012 appropriations bill barred the use of funds to enforce the regulation, but it remains in law.
2. The Obamacare Chutzpah Rule. The past year was marked by a slew of competing court rulings on the constitutionality of the individual mandate, the cornerstone of Obamacare. The law requires U.S. citizens to obtain health insurance or face financial penalties imposed by the Internal Revenue Service. Never before has the federal government attempted to force all Americans to purchase a product or service. To allow this regulatory overreach to stand would undermine fundamental constitutional constraints on government powers and curtail individual liberties to an unprecedented degree.
3. The Nationalization of Internet Networks Rule. Regulations that took effect on November 1 prohibit owners of broadband networks from differentiating among various content in managing Internet transmissions. (In other words, the Federal Coercion Communications Commission effectively declared the broadband networks to be government-regulated utilities.) The FCC imposed the “network neutrality” rule despite explicit opposition from Congress and a federal court ruling against it. The rule threatens to undermine network investment and increase online congestion.
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10. The Unions Rule Rule. New rules require government contractors to give first preference in hiring to the workers of the company that lost the contract. Tens of thousands of companies will be affected, with compliance costs running into the tens of millions of dollars—costs ultimately borne by taxpayers. The rule effectively ensures that a non-unionized contractor cannot replace a unionized one. That’s because any new contractor will be obliged to hire its predecessors’ unionized workers and thus be forced by the “Successorship Doctrine” to bargain with the union(s).
See the full list at The Heritage Foundation.
-By Larry Sand
There are those among us who think that teachers unions, collective bargaining and peer assistance review are the way to a better education for kids. They look like earthlings, but in fact are extraterrestrials.
As the year draws to a close, newspapers, magazines and blogs are filled with best of and worst of lists that deal with everything imaginable. The Hoover Institution’s Koret Task Force got on the bandwagon early and posted Best and Worst in American Education, 2011 in November. All solid stuff. Can a reformer not be happy about the Parent Trigger being raked over the coals, yet surviving, or that many of Michelle Rhee’s reforms are still in place despite leaving her post as D.C. Schools Chancellor after a major push from the American Federation of Teachers? On the worst list, the Task Force includes the Atlanta teacher cheating scandal and the union-orchestrated overturn of Ohio’s recent anti-collective bargaining law.
Then lo and behold, we received a dispatch from Planet Ravitch on December 23rd. (Most people are not aware that shortly after astronomers ruled that Pluto was not a planet in 2006, a new planet would be identified. And it is inhabited!) The people who live on this celestial body (named after Diane Ravitch, a former reformer who turned into a champion of the failing status quo) are afflicted with a dyslexic-like condition: they have the entire education reform picture exactly backwards. The way to true reform is to hold their ideas up to a mirror with the resulting image revealing the best way to proceed. Continue reading »
Eric Odom (Media Director)
Vanguard of Freedom
Warner Todd Huston