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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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 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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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 a new poll, Gallup finds public support for organized labor at its lowest level since it began taking the survey.

Gallup finds organized labor taking a significant image hit in the past year. While 66% of Americans continue to believe unions are beneficial to their own members, a slight majority now say unions hurt the nation’s economy. More broadly, fewer than half of Americans — 48%, an all-time low — approve of labor unions, down from 59% a year ago.

These results…

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It’s not every day that a Democratic Senator blasts a labor union, which is why the recent mini-controversy surrounding the nomination of United Transportation Union General Counsel Daniel Elliott to the Surface Transportation Board is not only amusing, but embarrassing for the Obama administration. The controversy erupted last week, when, as the Journal of Commerce reports:

Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., denounced a claim by the United Transportation Union of leveraging influence with the Obama administration from its political affairs committee for…

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Senate Democrats and organized labor leaders are reportedly near a deal on removing the card-check provision from the s0-called Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA). That provision, if enacted, would have made secret ballots in union organizing elections a dead letter.

Naturally, it generated a lot of opposition. Having lost that public opinion battle, Big Labor is now trying to push through the other parts of the bill, including its bindig arbitration provision, which would subject newly unionized companies to the whims…

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Kurt Vonnegut’s short story, “Harrison Bergeron,” describes a world in which the utopian dream of equality has been achieved beyond anyone’s wildest imaginings: “Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else.” This strict equality is enforced by the U.S. Handicapper General through a regimen of artificial “handicaps,” like disruptive ear transmitters for the highly intelligent and weights for the athletic.

Equality taken to that extreme strikes nearly everyone as absurd. Unfortunately, when it comes…

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With Democrats just shy of the 60 votes they need to end a filibuster, the fate of the so-called Employee Free Choice Act remains in the balance in the Senate. While the current version of the bill seems unlikely to pass, EFCA supporters are likely to try alternative versions. One such option is EFCA without its controversial card check provision, which would allow unions to circumvent the secret ballot in organizing elections, and has been the bill’s most controversial provision…

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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…

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Today’s Wall Street Journal, in an editorial, notes organized labor’s latest hardball tactic in its effort to help enact the so-called Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA, H.R. 1409), which would effectively replace secret ballot organizing elections with the card check process — whereby union organizers ask employees to sign union cards out in the open. Essentially, some unions want the Treasury Department to muzzle companies that have received any funds under the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) to keep from lobbying…

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As Barack Obama is sworn in as the nation’s 44th President today, Rep. Hilda Solis (D-Calif.) will likely be the next Secretary of Labor. As I’ve noted here recently, her cozy relationship with organized labor should raise concern among not only lawmakers and the public, but among rank-and-file union members who could soon find it harder to find out how union leaders spend their dues. The Department of Labor, under outgoing Secretary Elaine Chao, has enacted stronger reporting requirements. Reports The…

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Yesterday’s NYTimes had a good article on the city of Pittsburgh and its surprising resurgence.

A generation ago, the steel industry that built Pittsburgh and still dominated its economy entered its death throes. In the early 1980s, the city was being talked about the way Detroit is now. Its very survival was in question.

…

Entrepreneurship bloomed in computer software and biotechnology. Two of the biggest sectors are education and health care, among the most resistant to downturns. Prominent companies are doing well. Westinghouse Electric,…

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Today’s Washington Post and Los Angeles Times both endorse passage of the U.S- Colombia free trade agreement, which many Democratic politicians, pressured by organized labor, have refused to endorse. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has ducked the issue by refusing to bring it to a vote. President-elect Obama got considerable help in his campaign from labor unions that oppose the deal, but no political debt is worth undertaking such a disastrous course as scuttling this trade deal.

Not only is Colombia the United…

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…looks very different than it does in the United States. And by Miller, I mean Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.).

In 2001, Rep. Miller and several of his colleagues wrote to a labor adjudication body in the Mexican state of Puebla urging that body to uphod the secret ballot as “absolutely necessary to ensure that workers are not intimidated into voting for a union they might not otherwise choose.”

Yesterday, the Mexican Supreme Court agreed, ruling that workers’ secret ballots in union organizing elections…

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