With the Detroit auto industry floundering, the United Auto Workers is turning its attention to…day care provider. And to do so, the UAW partnering with the American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees, a union that organizes workers in the one sector where unionization is growing: government. That’s because some 40,000 Michigan home day care providers have now found themselves classified as working for the state.
Home care providers are government employees? Defining them as such is a novel strategy…
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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’…
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David Michaels, a left-wing ideologue who supports junk science and seeks to restrict gun possession, has been approved by the Senate Health Committee to head the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Only two committee members, both Republicans, voted against Michaels.
The vote occurred with no discussion, and no hearing was even held on his nomination, although hearings have consistently been held on OSHA nominees in the past, even for far less controversial picks.
Lawyer and Second Amendment expert, David Kopel explains how Michaels…
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President Obama’s $800 billion stimulus package creates imaginary jobs, while destroying ones in the real world.
Billions from the stimulus are being spent on creating tens of thousands of imaginary jobs in 440 phantom Congressional districts, according to the government’s own web site:
Just how big is the stimulus package? Well for one, it has doubled the size of the House of Representatives, according to recovery.gov, which says that funds were distributed to 440 congressional districts that do not exist. . . . The web site…
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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,…
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The Obama administration this week called off bidding on what would have been a union-friendly federal construction project bidding process, in response to a contractor complaint over its inclusion of a project labor agreement (PLA), which would disadvantage nonunion contractors, reports The Washington Times. The bids were for a $35 million contract ot build a Job Corps center in Manchester, New Hampshire.
Under a PLA, an open shop contractor could be required to employ workers from union hiring halls, acquire apprentices from union apprentice…
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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,…
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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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