The Wall Street Journal explains the significance of the crucial shift in union membership that reached a tipping point last week: More union members now work for government entities than for private businesses. (I discussed this development last week.) The Journal editorial states:
Unions once saw their main task as negotiating a bigger share of an individual firm’s profits. Now the movement’s main goal is securing a larger share of the overall private economy’s wealth, which means pitting government employees against middle-class…
Read the full story
Former Service Employees International Union (SEIU) associate general counsel Craig Becker, who has been nominated to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) by President Obama, could make drastic changes in labor law to favor unionization, were he confirmed and appointed to the Board. Critics of Becker - mostly conservative and libertarian - have made this argument. Senate Republicans oppose his nomination. But don’t take from us. Now two pro-union lawyers, writing in The Nation, acknowledge the far-reaching nature of the changes…
Read the full story
My colleague Lee Doren uncovers the money behind an online hatchet job on the tea party protests:
I just came across a new website titled: http://www.TheTeaPartyIsOver.org
It is paid for by the American Public Policy Committee. Well, according toopensecrets.org, the two donors for American Public Policy Committee this year are Patriot Majority and Patriot Majority West.
However, according to opensecrets.org, the 2nd largest contributor in 2008 to Patriot Majority was SEIU and other top Unions around America. I imagine the diversion of Union money gets much…
Read the full story
At Biggovernment.com, blogger Mandy/Liberty Chick has a good, concise account of the rise of shareholder resolutions as a favorite tool of organized labor. By leveraging their pension funds to purchase shares in companies they are trying to organize, unions can bring pressure on those companies, usually as part of a corporate campaign — a coordinated attack on a company’s reputation and ability to do business. She focuses specifically on the use of shareholder resolutions by the Service Employees International Union…
Read the full story
The powerful Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has taken a major hit from a rival union, the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW), which is led by a former SEIU dissident. The Los Angeles Times reports that Kaiser Permanente workers throughout California have voted to disaffiliate from SEIU and join NUHW.
Before he was removed by the SEIU’s national leadership, NUHW President Sal Rosselli headed the Oakland, California, SEIU affiliate, United Healthcare Workers West (UHW). Rosselli had opposed SEIU chief Andy…
Read the full story
For the first time in U.S. history, the majority of the country’s union members work for government, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports. For the cause of limiting the size of government, the implications of this development are ominous. Because they depend on the growth of government to increase their membership over the long term, government employee unions function as a permanent lobby for bigger government — one that is organized, motivated and well funded. As Brian Johnson of the Alliance for…
Read the full story
by John Eskew
January 21, 2010 @ 5:01 pm
In Missouri, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), have formed a coalition known as the Missouri Home Care Union. The two unions are now holding another election to unionize home care workers, after having the results of the first union election overturned. The union is seeking to represent about 13,000 home care workers. Home care workers as government employees?
As CEI Editorial Director Ivan Osorio and his co-authors note in their…
Read the full story
The row between the UNITE-HERE hospitality and textile union and Workers United — which broke away from UNITE-HERE earlier this year and joined the powerful and growing Service Employees International Union (SEIU) — has taken a bizarre and ugly turn.
According to The New York Times, several UNITE-HERE organizers have complained about a practice known as “pink sheeting,” in which union members are pressured to reveal private and potentially embarrassing personal information about themselves. Union organizers then allegedly use those workers’…
Read the full story
Workers may get violent if their wages are cut. The United Auto Workers union (UAW) has a monopoly and was an anchor on the Big Three U.S. automakers. These two ideas were professed by two labor leaders at the recent Federalist Society Convention in Washington, D.C.
There may be violence, says Damon A. Silvers, Associate General Counsel for the AFL-CIO and Deputy Chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel for TARP. Silvers spoke on last Friday’s panel “Labor: Wall Street, Labor Unions,…
Read the full story
The bitter ongoing fight between the national leadership of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the former leadership of a SEIU Oakland, California, health care workers local has taken an even nastier turn.
Early this year, SEIU, under the leadership of Andy Stern, forced a merger between the Oakland health care local, United Healthcare Workers-West (UHW), and a Los Angeles-area local where a major corruption scandal broke last year — leading that local’s chief, Stern ally Tyrone Freeman, to resign.
In response to the Stern-led SEIU bullying,…
Read the full story
In USA Today, liberal law professor Jonathan Turley is criticizing the Obama administration for endorsing a “blasphemy” exception to free speech: “Around the world, free speech is being sacrificed on the altar of religion. Whether defined as hate speech, discrimination or simple blasphemy, governments are declaring unlimited free speech as the enemy of freedom of religion. This growing movement has reached the United Nations, where religiously conservative countries received a boost in their campaign to pass an international blasphemy law.…
Read the full story
Slate blogger Mickey Kaus explains how public sector unions are driving state and local governments to the brink of bankruptcy (via Nick Gillespie at Reason Hit & Run, via Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit):
The justification for public sector unionism is way weaker than that for private sector unionism. “[Government] workers are not extracting a share of the profits but rather a share of taxes,” as former N.Y. Liberal Party leader Alex Rose puts it. And the right to strike, in the hands of key…
Read the full story
In his Wall Street Journal column today, Holman Jenkins highlights one of the prizes at stake for organized labor in the current health care debate.
Union members not only like the tax-free, open-ended health -care benefits they’re used to getting. More important and often overlooked, organized labor itself is increasingly made up of health-care workers who benefit from an incentive system that artificially force-feeds great gobs of GDP into the industry’s maw.
Their long retreat elsewhere in the economy may continue unabated, but…
Read the full story
The former director of the Las Vegas chapter of the far-left advocacy group ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) has agreed to testify against the organization, in exchange for a plea to reduced charges: two counts of conspiracy to illegally pay canvassers registering voters.
While any instance of ACORN being brought to account for breaking the law is welcome, this is only the tip of the iceberg. ACORN’s history of scandal goes back years. Jeremy Lott and Matthew Vadum…
Read the full story
Kenneth Gladney, a black critic of Obama’s health-care plan, was beaten, kicked, and called racist names by members of the SEIU, a corrupt and powerful left-wing union that backs Obama’s plan, leaving him wheelchair-bound and too weak to speak. This apparent hate crime took place at a St. Louis “town hall” meeting. SEIU members are bused in to town hall meetings called by liberal lawmakers in order to create the illusion of grassroots support, and intimidate would-be critics.
To curry favor with the corrupt SEIU, the Obama Administration has betrayed union…
Read the full story
The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is giving away copies of a poster (pictured right) of Barack Obama, which it describes as “an original piece of art for those closest to the movement to fix health care.” Of course, for this crowd, to “fix” generally means to bring government in.
Fittingly, SEIU is limiting the giveaway to “only ONE poster per person and address.” This led the Libertarian Party to challenge SEIU “to live up to the promises behind government-run health care and offer…
Read the full story
At Reason Hit & Run, Michael C. Moynihan looks at the Service Employees Internatinoal Union’s harassing of broadcasters who air ads opposing the so-called Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA).
According to this letter obtained by TPM, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is threatening television stations broadcasting this anti-card check advertisement produced by the Employee Freedom Action Committee. In the letter (viewable here), SEIU lawyer Dora V. Chen tells stations in Arkansas and Nebraska that they should “immediately cease airing this false and deceitful…
Read the full story
It may not get card check this Congress, but organized labor still has plenty for which to thank the Obama administration. Today, in The American Spectator, F. Vincent Vernuccio describes one such fulfilled item on the unions’ wish list:
Department of Labor Secretary Hilda Solis betrayed rank and file union members by repealing vital reporting regulations that allowed members to see how union bosses were spending their hard-earned dues money. …
Solis’s repeal weakens one of the chief reporting tools used by…
Read the full story
The civil war between the two factions that until recently made up the union UNITE-HERE heated up further this week. Yesterday, the leadership of the rump UNITE-HERE voted to suspend the union’s general president, Bruce Raynor, who led a dissident faction out of the union. Raynor’s group incorporated as a new union, Workers United, which is now affiliated with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), as a “conference” of SEIU. Today, UNITE-HERE followed up with a protest outside SEIU’s Washington, D.C., headquarters, at…
Read the full story
Like the Cold War-era Third World civil wars in which the superpowers would fight each other by proxy, the increasingly bitter row within UNITE-HERE appears to have blown up into a confrontation between the AFL-CIO and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which disaffiliated from the former in 2005, taking other unions with it to form a new labor federation, Change to Win.
UNITE-HERE, formed from a 2004 merger between the Union of Needletrades, Industrial & Textile Employees (UNITE) and the Hotel…
Read the full story
