From attempting to manipulate the definition of “supervisor” to changing the way in which workers are organized, the above seems to be a guiding principle in organized labor’s bold new approach to increasing union membership. Consistent with that, some union friendly government officials are trying to change the way in which votes for some workers are counted.
Today, as The Wall Street Journal reports, National Mediation Board chair Elizabeth Dougherty wrote to more than a dozen Republican senators, protesting her colleagues’ proposed rule…
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Liberals are busy sending each other twitters falsely claiming that Justice Antonin Scalia, one of the more conservative members of the Supreme Court, said that he would have voted to uphold school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education (1954).
There’s just one problem: he never said any such thing. He said the very opposite!
A liberal reporter for Capitol Media Services, Howard Fischer, made the claim that Scalia said he would have voted to uphold segregation, in a story carried in the East…
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The federal government has no problem paying exorbitant sums of money to people who head failed government agencies like Freddie Mac. Its CEO will receive compensation estimated at $5.5 million. The Federal Housing Finance Agency took direct control over Freddie Mac, a government-sponsored enterprise, after it ran up tens of billions of dollars in red ink buying risky mortgages, without adequate capital reserves. At the direction of the Obama administration, Freddie Mac is now running up $30 billion in losses to…
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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.…
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Recently, the Senate voted to ban defense contractors — that is, much of American business — from contractually mandating arbitration of employment discrimination disputes. The bill’s sponsor, Al Franken (D-Minn.), pushed the bill by claiming that arbitration provisions in an employment contract kept Jamie Leigh Jones from suing her alleged rapists. But they didn’t: a federal appeals court ruled the arbitration provisions didn’t apply to Jones’ case, leaving her free to sue in court.
Franken’s amendment to a defense appropriations bill banned contractors…
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Today, Slate features a rant by disgraced former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer that includes distortions and falsehoods so blatant that they wouldn’t merit a response if they didn’t come from so loud a megaphone.
Spitzer is miffed at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for opposing the major expansions of government power currently being proposed in Washington.The Chamber, he says, has a “right to be wrong” (wrong in Spitzer’s universe apparently being anything that opposes the expansion of government), but it doesn’t…
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Plenty, according to the new film, The Cartel. The film purports to show “educational system like we’ve never seen it before. Behind every dropout factory, we discover, lurks a powerful, entrenched, and self-serving cartel.” Trailer below.
In fact, the power of teachers unions is part of an even greater problem: the growing ranks of unionized government workers, a phenomenon that creates a permanent constituency favoring the growth of government — one that is well organized, motivated, and well funded.
For more on…
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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…
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The Economist’s current Lexington column highlights the growing public resentment at the widening disparity between compensation and job security in the private and public sectros — which are largely the result of increasing unionization of government employees. (Subscription required for the Economist link.)
Those who are still employed have seen their wages stagnate and their pensions shrivel in the stockmarket crash. Their health insurance is insecure, but they don’t trust Congress not to make it worse.
Meanwhile, they can see that one group…
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Unemployment has risen to 9.8 percent, a 26-year high.
That’s much higher than the Obama administration predicted unemployment would rise, if Congress had refused to pass his $800 billion stimulus package. The administration claimed unemployment would rise to 8 percent without a stimulus.
Small businesses are finding it more difficult than ever to borrow badly needed money to meet their payrolls. New financial regulations backed by the administration are contributing to a terrible credit crunch. Meanwhile, the wealthy Wall Street investment bank Goldman Sachs, perhaps the…
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“Stimulus” packages that increase government spending don’t work, notes Harvard economist Robert J. Barro in the Wall Street Journal.
The administration claimed that Obama’s $800 billion stimulus package would deliver a short-run “jolt” that would quickly lift the economy, but unemployment rose rapidly after its passage, and the package has actually destroyed thousands of jobs in America’s export sector.
Countries that refused to adopt big stimulus packages have fared better than those that imitated Obama. And the biggest-spending countries have suffered worse in the recession.
Obama claimed his…
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Thanks to the $800 billion stimulus package, and other huge government spending increases, the number of federal and state employees is projected to increase massively. The federal government’s payroll may grow by more than 200,000, and perhaps as much as 600,000, over the course of the Obama administration. Obama’s budgets, which would result in record deficit spending of $9.3 trillion, would add at least 100,000 additional bureaucrats during just his first budget, and perhaps as many as 250,000.
This is going to be…
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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…
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Yesterday in Harrisburg, rowdy unionists disrupted a rally held by two Pennsylvania state legislators to promote legislation to end project labor agreements (PLAs), which put nonunion contractors at a sever disadvantage, on state construction projects. Under a PLA, an open shop contractor could be required to employ workers from union hiring halls, acquire apprentices from union apprentice programs, and require employees to pay union dues. The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that “testy exchanges and pushing and shoving followed” the press conference. Meanwhile, the…
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Remember the California budget debacle? Now it seems like not a month goes by without another state facing a budget crisis. Now it’s Michigan’s turn. Predictably, state politicians are trying to scare the public with talk of cutting funding for libraries and prisons, in order to make tax increases an easier sell. Also predictably, policy makers appear to be avoiding looking for budget savings where substantial ones could be realized: government payrolls. As The Detroit News points out:
Employee pay and…
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Thanks to their union, bus drivers for Washington’s Metro system can be dangerously incompetent and still draw a government paycheck, avoiding discipline for repeated accidents. (Metro employees sometimes make more than $100,000 per year).
Yet the Obama administration wants airline security and Amtrak to become more like Washington’s inefficient Metro, by increasing the power of unions and making it harder to get rid of problem employees.
As Radley Balko notes at Reason magazine’s Web site,
“Washington, D.C.’s Metropolitan Area Transit Authority fired Metro bus driver Carla A. Proctor this week…
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While Obama ally ACORN attempts to gag whistleblowers who exposed its role in a recent scandal, the Obama administration is trying to gag critics of its health-care plan, which the Congressional Budget Office says could wipe out many Medicare Advantage programs relied on by the elderly. (”The Obama Administration wants to seriously curtail or end Medicare Advantage.”)
It has issued a gag order to Humana, a health insurer that provides Medicare Advantage services, ordering it not to tell customers about how Obamacare could reduce the availability of…
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In his 2008 campaign, Barack Obama talked a lot about “bipartisanship,” but in office, he has governed from the far left, on both domestic and foreign policy, by meddling overseas in favor of left-wing would-be dictators, and at home in support of powerful left-wing unions, at the expense of taxpayers, airline security, the Constitution, and the rule of law. (One possible exception to his left-wing path is his support for the obscene Wall Street bailouts, which disgusted left and right…
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The AFL-CIO, at its recent convention in Pittsburgh, had much to celebrate, including the fact that a Labor Secretary showed up to pay tribute to her biggest supporters when she campaigned for Congress. Reports Investor’s Business Daily:
Late last Friday, the White House decided to slap a 35% import tariff on Chinese tires. In doing so, the administration sided with the United Steelworkers despite the risks of a trade war with China, the largest holder of Treasuries at a time of record…
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In the aftermath of 9/11, Congress foolishly shifted airline security screening to the inept Transportation Security Administration (TSA), which has failed to detect explosive ingredients and fake bombs, in performance tests.
Now the Obama Administration is making matters even worse by undermining both airline security and railroad safety. A study found that the TSA is more than twice as likely to fail to detect a bomb as the private security firms it replaced. And TSA’s failure rate is three or four times as…
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