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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Your host Richard Morrison welcomes guest co-host Jeremy Lott and Editorial Director Ivan Osorio for Episode 63 of the LibertyWeek podcast. We start with CEI’s FOIA fight with the U.S. Treasury, 7-Eleven’s attempt to give consumers a big gulp of government and the solution to a jobless recovery. We then move on to union pension politics, Ireland’s regrettable embrace of EU hegemony and some scantily-clad Olympic News.

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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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Today, DC Progress, a public policy organization that focuses on the District of Columbia, hosted a panel on the issue of underemployment. DC Progress President Christian Robey noted that underemployment can be defined in different ways: either as somebody working at a job for which he or she is overqualified, or at fewer hours than desired. However defined, the problem of underemployment is one of unfulfilled potential, both for job creation and for access to good jobs that do exist.…

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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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Two weekend Wall Street Journal editorials sum up well the ticking time-bomb of underfunded union pension funds. First, the dire state of many union pension funds:

On average, the asset to liability ration at so-called multi-employer plans, which union funds make up the bulk of, stood at 66% in 2006, according to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. By contrast, single employer plans, basically most company-provided pensions, were funded at 96%.

And on who will pick up the tab when these plans implode:

[T]his…

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Considering the enormous amounts of cash that the federal government has hurled at the auto industry since the start of the financial crisis, recipients of government largess in Detroit should at least have the common courtesy of telling taxpayers what they’re doing with their money. Unfortunately, United Auto Workers boss Ron Gettelfinger doesn’t seem to think that applies to him or his union. So kudos are in order to Rep. Jeb Hensarling for calling out Gettelfinger and the UAW on this:

The…

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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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The United Auto Workers’ (UAW) loud complaining that they’re being asked to bear a disproportionate share of the costs of restructuring the Big Three begs the question: How much is their fair share to bear? As Holman Jenkins notes, in his Wall Street Journal column, the UAW may not like the answer.

The two parties that turned the Big Three into a perennially limping freak of unwritten industrial policy now will take formal ownership of their handiwork. The United Auto Workers…

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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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Arkansas Democratic Senator Blanche Lincoln announced today that she will oppose the so-called Employee Free Choice Act, also known as teh “card check” bill. With Pennsylvania Republican Arlen Specter announcing his opposition last week, pro-EFCA forces’ chances to muster 60 votes to break a Republican-led filibuster look increasingly slim — for this Congress.

We can now expect organized labor to sink millions (from member dues, of course) into Senate races in 2010.

For more on card check, see here.

…

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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…

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The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is being denounced by a group of its own employees for doing, well, nothing wrong or illegal, but something that SEIU wants to keep businesses it unionizes from doing: laying off staff and contracting out some operations. Reports The Washington Post:

The Service Employees International Union, considered the most influential union in the nation, has notified the union that represents about 220 of its national field staff and organizers that 75 of them are being…

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“Socialism” is dead, according to Matthew Dallek, writing in the Politico. I put the term in quotes, because what Dallek defines as socialism is so very narrow, that most gradients of socialistic policies are bound to escape his definition.

Even amid the current economic emergency, there is no viable Socialist Party in the United States, nor is there a serious socialist movement, as there was when Socialist candidate Eugene V. Debs won nearly 1 million votes in both the 1912 and…

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State legislators are unhappy about the prospect of the so-called Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) being imposed on their constituents’  businesses. That was a central theme of a news teleconference today, featuring former Labor Secretary Elaine Chao and Senator John Thune (R-S.D.), hosted by the Alliance for Worker Freedom. The bill would allow unions to circumvent secret ballot elections in organizing campaigns.

Seven state legislatures have passed resolutions opposing EFCA — Alabama, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Georgia, and Washington — and…

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With passage of the so-called Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) growing more in doubt, organized labor and its Congressional allies are resorting to pushing the claim that the bill would not actually do away with secret ballot elections in union organizing, but only offer employees an alleged choice between secret ballots and card check, whereby they sign union cards out in the open.

As I noted yesterday, this is a rhetorical sleight of hand, based on that EFCA does not explicitly…

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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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