labor unions

Labor Unions Join Fight Against EPA Regulations

by Brian McGraw on March 17, 2011

in Energy

This is a few days old, but it’s worth mentioning: “EPA Tangles With New Critic: Labor.”

The labor unions were supportive of the Waxman-Markey bill in the House, and are clearly much more aligned with Democrats than Republicans, especially given the collective bargaining issues that have emerged in the past month. However, they aren’t supportive of EPA’s current efforts to regulate mercury, carbon dioxide, etc. The article quotes a union leader:

“If the EPA issues regulations that cost jobs in Pennsylvania and Ohio, the Republicans will blast the President with it over and over,” says Stewart Acuff, chief of staff to the president of the Utility Workers Union of America. “Not just the President. Every Democratic [lawmaker] from those states.”

This is certainly true, and it would seem to counter the (rest of) left’s argument that none of these costs are trivial, that EPA regulations will actually create jobs, are a free lunch, etc.

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Pressure Mounts for Three Free Trade Agreements to be Submitted

by Fran Smith on March 10, 2011

in Agenda for Congress, International, Trade

Bi-partisan pressure mounts for the Obama administration to move on long-pending free trade agreements (FTAs). At Senate Finance Committee hearings yesterday on the trade agenda, both Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Ranking Member Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) gave the Obama administration a hard time on not moving on pending trade pacts as U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) Ron Kirk testified before the full committee.

Sen. Hatch took a particularly tough line in his questioning. He noted that while the Obama administration is prepared to submit the U.S.-Korea FTA, he questioned why it has dragged its feet on setting any definite timetable for considering the pending free trade agreements with Colombia and Panama. Both trade pacts have been negotiated and re-negotiated for several years now, and yet the administration still claims there are still some outstanding issues that need to be resolved, mainly relating to labor unions.

Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) also expressed concern about the pace with which these agreements are being submitted to Congress. According to USTR Kirk, the U.S.-Korea FTA is ready for technical drafting and submission to Congress, but the Colombia and Panama FTAs don’t have clear timetables for congressional consideration. Sen. Thune asked what further changes the president wants in the agreements and questioned whether U.S. credibility about future agreements will be hurt if more revisions are required after the FTAs have been negotiated and signed.  He said, “A deal with the U.S. ought to be a deal.”

In response, Kirk said that “a vast majority of people in the U.S. don’t believe in the wisdom of our trade policy” and we have to “keep faith with American workers.” He noted that the Korea trade pact is ready, and Congress should move on that, while the other two agreements are moving forward and should be ready this year.

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Obamacare’s Costs Rise, as Obama Backers Get Preferential Treatment

by Hans Bader on March 7, 2011 · 1 comment

in Economy, Features, Healthcare, Politics as Usual, Regulation

Post image for Obamacare’s Costs Rise, as Obama Backers Get Preferential Treatment

The cost of Obamacare continues to explode and exceed its sponsors’ predictions. HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has now admitted to double-counting in the Obamacare budget, using the same $500 billion twice, first “to sustain” the existing Medicare program and then to “pay for” brand new Obamacare entitlements. Last year, the CBO hiked its estimate of Obamacare’s costs by $115 billion, even as many of its promised benefits failed to materialize.

Obamacare was supposed to save patients money by curbing insurance company profits and expanding state Medicaid programs to cover millions more people. (This expansion was criticized by state officials, including a few Democrats such as former Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen, who called it “the mother of all unfunded mandates.” Bredesen’s health care legal advisor concluded that Obamacare’s Medicaid-expansion provisions were unconstitutional.)

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CEI Podcast for February 24, 2011: On, Wisconsin

by Ryan Young on February 24, 2011

in Features, Labor, Podcast

Post image for CEI Podcast for February 24, 2011: On, Wisconsin

Have a listen here.

Vice President for Strategy Iain Murray, who also directs CEI’s Center for Economic Freedom, discusses the labor reforms that have led to a thousands-strong sustained protest in Madison, Wisconsin. While the reforms themselves are relatively minor, both sides know that the stakes are high. This may prove to be at a watershed moment in the relationship between public sector unions and taxpayers.

Image credit: WxMom’s flickr photostream.

Full Employment, Motherhood, and Apple Pie

by Ivan Osorio on January 27, 2011

in Economy, Employment, Labor

These are not good economic times for labor unions, whose membership continues a long decline in the private sector. However, they remain a potent force in politics, providing considerable funding and on-the-ground help (canvassing, get-out-the vote drives) for Democratic politicians.

Thus, it makes sense for organized labor supporters to argue for the value of unions in terms of politics and policy goals. Mother Jones blogger Kevin Drum takes this approach, maintaining that unions play a vital role in pushing government to promote full employment.

[T]hat’s the point of a strong labor union: it forces the government to fight for full employment. It fights for lots of other stuff too, and that’s the whole virtue of organized labor. It’s true that they also produce a modest wage premium for their own members, but if that’s all they did then I wouldn’t care much about them and neither would most other liberals.

Unions have lots of pathologies: they can get entranced by implementing insane work rules, they can get co-opted by other political actors, and they can end up fighting progress on social issues, just to name a few. But they fight for economic egalitarianism, and they’re the only institution in history that’s ever done that successfully on a sustained basis. That’s what makes them so indispensable to liberalism and that’s what makes them the sworn enemies of conservatism.

Drum is right that unions, by fighting for redistributionist policies (which he terms “economic egalitarianism”) make up a key constituency in the overall left-liberal coalition — nothing controversial about that. However, his point about unions pushing for “full employment” seems forced. Has anyone ever heard of somebody openly promoting less employment?

More employment (with full employment its logical conclusion) is the domestic policy equivalent of a strong defense — everybody’s for it. Of course, how to employ more people is contentious, so much so that people of different ideological persuasions will argue for diametrically opposite policies to achieve it, with plenty of room for honest disagreement and debate.

More importantly, it’s worth considering what kind of employment unions want. Unions have a built-in incentive to sign up more dues-paying members. Therefore, they have an incentive to promote employment in industries and sectors where they have a greater hope of organizing workers.

In the marketplace, this gives unions very good reason to work to skew the playing field to favor unionized companies over nonunion ones. In politics, it gives unions an incentive to promote more government employment, because that is where their best organizing prospects lie. Taken together, that incentive structure — and the policies it promotes — indeed “makes them the sworn enemies of conservatism,” with “conservatism” taken to mean open markets and restrain on government

For more on labor, see here and here.

Harper’s vs. UAW

by Ivan Osorio on January 19, 2011 · 1 comment

in Culture, Labor, Politics as Usual, Zeitgeist

When can one expect leftists to oppose unionization of a business? When it’s their own.

That’s the case at Harper‘s magazine right now, where some members of the staff are leading a union organizing drive, which publisher John “Rick” MacArthur is actively opposing.

The tale takes some strange, and sometimes even amusing, turns — and even provides some occasions for libertarian Schadenfreude. As New York magazine reports:

The current crisis began a year ago, when MacArthur fired the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Roger Hodge. The two men had once been close, but their relationship had frayed as the red ink mounted: Newsstand sales dropped, MacArthur’s appetite for losses waned, and Hodge tried to defend the staff from cuts.

Then things got weird, as MacArthur revealed some not-so-progressive views on online publishing and employee relations.

A couple of months after Hodge’s firing, senior editor Donovon Hohn helped to convene a meeting about publishing Harper’s on the iPad. MacArthur didn’t attend. But shortly thereafter, staffers began receiving xeroxed articles from MacArthur in their mailboxes that trashed the iPad and Kindle. One article from the Spectator had a hand-typed line at the top:

To: Hoipolloi
From: Rick

Last month, MacArthur wrote a column for the Providence Journal, subsequently posted on Harper’s‘ website, that bashed the Internet. “I never found e-mail exciting,” he wrote. “My skepticism stemmed from the suspicion that the World Wide Web wasn’t, in essence, much more than a gigantic, unthinking Xerox machine …”

Some staffers then contacted UAW Local 2110 (which also represents employees of Harper Colllins, The Village Voice, and The New Press). MacArthur wasn’t amused.

MacArthur contested the entire staff’s right to unionize, arguing that editors and assistant editors who make up about half of the editorial team were management and thus did not qualify. Staffers couldn’t help but chuckle at the irony: The staunch defender of unions, who in a 2009 Harper’s piece called the UAW “the country’s best and traditionally most honest mass labor organization,” was now on the other side of the table as the “worst kind of factory owner,” as one staffer put it to me.

MacArthur hired veteran employment lawyer Bert Pogrebin, who had previously faced off against the Village Voice union, to negotiate on his behalf. In August, the matter was taken up by the National Labor Relations Board. Pogrebin tried to get many of Harper’s‘ editors, including Metcalf and senior editors Donovon Hohn and Chris Cox, excluded from the union on the grounds that were in management positions. In September, the NLRB ruled that Metcalf and the others could join the union. In October, the NLRB denied MacArthur’s appeal, and the union went ahead with plans to hold elections that would certify the union. Staffers put up signs around the office and a ballot box was placed in the conference room.

MacArthur might elicit some sympathy for his efforts to keep his enterprise from being burdened with the bureaucratization and higher labor costs that unionization usually brings — but not much. That’s because a great deal of Rick MacArthur’s leftist advocacy — of which he has a long history — has been fueled by money that was never intended for the purposes to which he put it to use.

Rick MacArthur’s grandfather was John D. MacArthur, whose fortune went into the large foundation that now bears his name and is a big funder of progressive causes. Rick MacArthur’s father, Roderick MacArthur, led the foundation’s sharp turn to the left — an effort that Rick has carried on. However, as journalist Martin Morse Wooster explains, the elder MacArthur never envisioned that.

John D. MacArthur was a hardheaded entrepreneur who created Bankers Life and Trust, a pioneering insurance company. But when MacArthur died in 1978 at age 80, he made the worst mistake a donor could possibly make:  he left his fortune to charity without instructions on how it should be spent.

In a 1982 interview with Foundation News, MacArthur’s lawyer, William Kirby, said that MacArthur told him, “Bill, I’m going to do what I know best, I’ll make it.  But you people, after I’m dead, will have to learn how to spend it.”  Kirby said that on several occasions he asked MacArthur “to do something big for charities.”  MacArthur explained that he wanted to defer the disposition of his fortune until after his death: “If I was trying to decide who to give the money to right now, I couldn’t sit at this coffee table, because I’d be bothered day and night.  They’d all be after me to try and get my money, and I couldn’t lead the life I want to lead.  So leave me in peace.”

When the MacArthur Foundation began, conservatives, most notably William Simon, dominated its board.  But a titanic power struggle soon occurred, led by MacArthur’s far more liberal son, J. Roderick MacArthur. The conservatives were all ousted from the board by 1981, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has been a reliably liberal institution ever since.

A 2003 interview of Rick MacArthur in a Columbia University alumni magazine adds another detail:

“In the first couple of years, it’s just a pitched battle, except that my father loses every vote.” Then, Roderick persuaded the conservative board to add liberal academics “to make it more even ideologically.”

These days, the “balance” is entirely gone, and the foundation entirely leans left.

Now, as Rick MacArthur and his staff fight it out, the rest of us can sit back and watch the fireworks.

For more on labor, see here and here.

Will UAW Seek Foreign Help to Unionize American Workers?

by Ivan Osorio on January 18, 2011 · 2 comments

in Bailout Watch, Economy, Employment, International, Labor

America has a vibrant and successful auto industry — just largely outside of Detroit. For years, many foreign automakers’ American divisions have been successful at making cars profitably, while creating thousands of well-paying jobs. One reason for the foreign automakers’ success has been their ability to work without the burdensome work rules faced by the Big Three under their contracts with the United Auto Workers (UAW) union.

Apparently, UAW President Bob King doesn’t like that one bit. In fact, he seems to feel so strongly about it that he recently announced that for companies that resist its organizing efforts, the UAW “will launch a global campaign to brand that company a human-rights violator.” What might such a campaign entail?

One indication can be found in the Obama administration’s report to the bad joke known as the U.N. Human Rights Council — whose members include such human rights champions as China, Cuba, Libya, and Saudi Arabia. In the report, submitted in August 2010, the State Department strongly suggests that the degree to which the law facilitates unionization should be a human rights matter — and that the U.S. falls short in that area.

The UAW — or any other union, for that matter — likely would cite the State Department document in any complaint filed to the International Labor Organization, World Trade Organization, or any other international body — maybe even the ridiculous U.N. Human Rights Council. And King’s recent remarks indicate this is an option the UAW might well pursue.

King also recently acknowledged that the UAW is in trouble. Speaking to an audience of 1,000 union members at a Washington political action conference, he said, “If we don’t organize these transnationals, I don’t think there’s a long term future for the UAW — I really don’t.” With those kind of stakes, it would be surprising for the UAW not to take some drastic action.

The upshot of all this is that we could end up seeing the UAW ask international bodies composed of foreign governments — including some undemocratic ones — for help in unionizing American workers. Stranger things have happened.

For more on labor, see here and here.

What Government Unions Want: One, Two, Many Californias

by Ivan Osorio on January 6, 2011 · 1 comment

in Economy, Employment, Labor, Regulation

That the large Republican gains in the 2010 midterm elections pose a setback for organized labor’s agenda is hardly news. What will be newsworthy is how incoming policy makers at both the federal and state level will fight back against union power — especially government union privileges — over the next couple of years, and to what extent they succeed.

The Economist sums up the challenge elected officials face as they stare down the government union political machine (and offers a good overview of the global nature of this problem):

It would be a mistake to write off the public-sector unions. They are masters of diverting attention from strategic to tactical questions. Undoubtedly the unions will lose some of their privileges over the coming years; the scale of the debt crisis makes this inevitable. But will governments have the courage to tackle the root causes of the problem (such as pensions) rather than dealing with secondary problems (such as wages)? And will they dare to tackle questions of power rather than just pay and perks? If they are to claim victory in the coming fight, they need not just to restore the public finances to health. They also need to breathe the spirit of innovation into Leviathan.

And not all politicians challenging government unions are Republicans. As The New York Times reported this week:

State officials from both parties are wrestling with ways to curb the salaries and pensions of government employees, which typically make up a significant percentage of state budgets. On Wednesday, for example, New York’s new Democratic governor, Andrew M. Cuomo, is expected to call for a one-year salary freeze for state workers, a move that would save $200 million to $400 million and challenge labor’s traditional clout in Albany.

Indeed, as I noted recently, the longstanding alliance between government employee unions and Democratic politicians has become strained. Public sector unions may be among the Democratic Party’s most loyal constituencies, but the gaping budget deficits to which unionized government employees’ generous compensation packages have substantially contributed bear no party label.

And it’s not as if bloated state budgets guarantee a high quality and adequate supply of public services. As Arnold Kling puts it so well in EconLog blog:

If you do not have enough sanitation workers because you cannot fill job openings at the current level of pay, then those government workers are underpaid.

On the other hand, if you do not have enough sanitation workers because your budget is busted by the ones you have, then those government workers are overpaid.

Thus, the bipartisan nature of this pushback should not be that surprising — yet it has taken government union leaders by surprise, being unaccustomed as they are to finding themselves on the defensive. Naturally, they plan a response.

And what the unions want should worry anybody who cares about fiscal sanity. As Politico reports:

Labor leaders take hope in the story of California, where Schwarzenegger arrived after a recall with an apparent mandate for dramatic change and, in 2005, moved to shift state employees from a defined benefit to a defined contribution pension plan — the goal of many Republicans, but anathema to unions that see it as a threat to traditionally secure retirements.

Instead, Schwarzenegger found himself stymied by a state Legislature whose Democrats were tightly tied to labor, as well as by failures at the polls. Most public workers ultimately negotiated new benefit “tiers” with Schwarzenegger, but the changes fell far short of the Republican wish list, and the governor leaves his Democratic successor, Jerry Brown, a large budget gap.

We all know how that turned out.

(Hat tip: F. Vincent Vernuccio)

For more on public sector unions, see here and here.

Union Holds New York Hostage

by Ivan Osorio on December 30, 2010

in Labor, Politics as Usual, Regulation

Public anger over New York City’s botched snow plowing effort this week has turned to the city’s sanitation workers union — for good reason. The New York Post reports:

Selfish Sanitation Department bosses from the snow-slammed outer boroughs ordered their drivers to snarl the blizzard cleanup to protest budget cuts — a disastrous move that turned streets into a minefield for emergency-services vehicles, The Post has learned.

Miles of roads stretching from as north as Whitestone, Queens, to the south shore of Staten Island still remained treacherously unplowed last night because of the shameless job action, several sources and a city lawmaker said, which was over a raft of demotions, attrition and budget cuts.

“They sent a message to the rest of the city that these particular labor issues are more important,” said City Councilman Dan Halloran (R-Queens), who was visited yesterday by a group of guilt-ridden sanitation workers who confessed the shameless plot.

Halloran said he met with three plow workers from the Sanitation Department — and two Department of Transportation supervisors who were on loan — at his office after he was flooded with irate calls from constituents.

The snitches “didn’t want to be identified because they were afraid of retaliation,” Halloran said. “They were told [by supervisors] to take off routes [and] not do the plowing of some of the major arteries in a timely manner. They were told to make the mayor pay for the layoffs, the reductions in rank for the supervisors, shrinking the rolls of the rank-and-file.”

New York’s Strongest used a variety of tactics to drag out the plowing process — and pad overtime checks — which included keeping plows slightly higher than the roadways and skipping over streets along their routes, the sources said.

The snow-removal snitches said they were told to keep their plows off most streets and to wait for orders before attacking the accumulating piles of snow.

The costs that government employee unions impose on taxpayers are bad enough. But holding a city hostage during an emergency should be truly beyond the pale. In this case, people died because emergency vehicles couldn’t get through the unplowed streets. (It’s worth noting that, while The Post is to be commended for reporting this story, the workers who revealed the union shenanigans are whistle blowers, who do not deserve the ugly “snitch” epithet.)

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg hasn’t shied away from taking on the teachers unions that have brought the city’s public schools to dysfunction. Now the sanitation union’s bosses have issued him a challenge. He must meet that challenge if he wants to put a good light on his legacy.

For more on public sector unions, see here and here.

Are Government Employee Unions Losing the Democrats?

by Ivan Osorio on December 10, 2010

in Economy, Labor, Regulation, Zeitgeist

Government employee unions have long been renowned as one of the Democratic Party’s most loyal and dedicated supporting constituencies. For years, Democratic politicians have supported public employee unions’ agenda of increased government spending, leading to more government jobs and thus more potential union members.

For teachers unions — which are among the most politically powerful government unions — Democrats have helped them resist popular school reform efforts that could threaten the government-school monopoly, including school choice and charter schools.

That was great deal for the unions and their political allies, but a dead weight on everybody else, as taxpayers funded a continually expanding government sector, while a growing number parents saw their children stuck in underperforming schools. Now cracks are finally starting to show in that alliance — and they may get wider in the near future.

It is perhaps no coincidence that some of the nation’s boldest education reformers have been Democrats. From outgoing Washington, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (who was a Democrat before he re-registered Republican and is now an Independent), it is mayors in Democrat-controlled cities who have faced the most dire conditions in the schools they were elected to oversee.

Both Fenty  and Bloomberg saw the need for drastic action, thus their appointment and strong support for their respective school chancellors — Michelle Rhee and Joel Klein — both of whom pursued an aggressive reform agenda.

Now Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, also a Democrat, has joined the pro-reform chorus. Not surprisingly, his city’s teachers union, United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA), wants no part of Villaraigosa’s reform efforts. Moreover, Villaraigosa himself has a teachers union background. To his credit, the mayor is striking back.  In a speech this week, Villaraigosa criticized the UTLA leadership in no uncertain terms:

Over the past five years, while partnering with students, parents and non-profits, business groups, higher education, charter organizations, school district leadership, elected board members and teachers, there has been one, unwavering roadblock to reform: UTLA union leadership.

While not the biggest problem facing our schools, they have consistently been the most powerful defenders of the status quo. I do not say this because of any animus towards unions. I deeply believe that teachers’ unions can and must be part of our efforts to transform our schools. Regrettably, they have yet to join us as we have forged ahead with a reform agenda.

By partnering with the Los Angeles School Board, we created the Public School Choice program that is now allowing non-profits, charters, teacher groups — anyone with a proven track record of success — to compete to run new or failing schools. By 2012, over 50 low-performing schools will be under new leadership, with a new chance for success.

UTLA leadership fought against this reform.

Partnering with the School Board and the charter school community, we doubled the number of charter schools in an effort to raise our test scores and alleviate overcrowding.

Partnering with the Parent Revolution, we successfully passed legislation here in Sacramento, empowering communities to shut down, reopen or takeover a failing school if a simple majority of parents petition to do so.

Working with LA Unified, I founded the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools to turn-around 21 of the lowest-performing schools.

And partnering with civil rights organizations and the ACLU, we filed a lawsuit to take a stand against the practice of seniority-based layoffs, which were disproportionately affecting our poorest schools and students of color.

At every step of the way, when Los Angeles was coming together to effect real change in our public schools, UTLA was there to fight against the change and slow the pace of reform.

Now let me pause to underscore the point once again that I come from an organizing background. I vociferously believe in the fundamental right for a worker to organize, to have a voice and a seat at the bargaining table. But union leaders need to take notice that it is their friends, the very people who have supported them and the people whom they have supported, who are carrying the torch of education reform and crying out for the unions to join them.

UTLA boss A.J. Duffy angrily dismissed Villaraigosa’s remarks, saying that, “Pointing fingers and laying blame does not help improve our schools.” Yet pointing fingers at those responsible for the dire state of public schools is what is needed.

Duffy’s reaction, while unfortunate, is not surprising. For he and other government union bosses to change course, the incentive structure under which the UTLA, and government employee unions in general, operate needs to change.

As the late president of  American Federation of Teachers, Albert Shanker, so honestly put it, “When school children start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of school children.” Until they do, Villaraigosa’s call on UTLA leaders to drop their opposition to his administration’s reform efforts and join him in making L.A.’s public schools better is likely to continue falling on deaf ears.

Likewise, government employee unions exist to represent the interest of their members, not of taxpayers. And government employees benefit from the growth of government, so the interests of public sector unions and those of taxpayers are fundamentally at odds.

Adding to the problem is the fact that it is on union-friendly politicians’ interest to give the unions what they want, since — in the classic concentrated benefits/diffuse costs public-choice problem — they’re more likely to protest at being denied greater compensation than taxpayers are likely to protest seeing their taxes go up gradually. Former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, also a Democrat, recognized this, though unfortunately once he was safely out of office:

The deal used to be that civil servants were paid less than private sector workers in exchange for an understanding that they had job security for life. But we politicians — pushed by our friends in labor — gradually expanded pay and benefits . . . while keeping the job protections and layering on incredibly generous retirement packages.

In government, unionization is greater at the state and local levels. For years, state and local governments were able to sustain their unionized employees’ generous compensation packages, as long as their economies continued growing. But since the nation’s economy went south, states and localities are struggling, and state and local politicians — Democrat and Republican alike — must face this crisis.

Indeed, in New York, Governor-elect Andrew Cuomo — yes, also a Democrat — may be headed for a showdown with government employee unions over wages and pensions. The unions won’t like it, but the taxpaying public will. In that regard, I think left-leaning Mother Jones blogger Kevin Drum gets it right:

I sometimes wonder if [UTLA head A.J.] Duffy understands just how widely his union is loathed? Somebody should correct me in comments if I’m wrong, but as near as I can tell UTLA literally has no support anywhere from anybody that it doesn’t directly give money to. Everybody else hates them with a passion. That doesn’t mean Villaraigosa can win a big public battle with UTLA, of course, since they give lots of money to lots of people, but he might. If Villaraigosa plays his cards right, he’ll have about 90% of the city on his side. Pass the popcorn.

Indeed, this and other similar fights will be worth watching.

For more on public sector unions, see here and here.

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