organized labor

Dulles Rail Union Giveaway to Increase Costs

by Ivan Osorio on April 15, 2011

in Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Employment, Labor, Regulation

An expensive rail line for passengers traveling in and out of the Washington, D.C. region’s Dulles International Airport never struck me as a good use of taxpayer dollars. As a resident of northern Virginia, I’ve found the Washington Flyer bus service reliable and affordable. However, now that the Metro rail line is being built, its costs should be  kept as much under control as possible.

Unfortunately, the Metropolitan Washington Airport Authority (MWAA) — which oversees both Dulles and Reagan National — threw caution to the wind recently, by imposing a project labor agreement (PLA) on the second phase of the line’s construction. PLAs impose onerous conditions on contractors who wish to bid on government projects.

Under PLA, employers can be required to hire workers through union hiring halls and apprentices through union apprentice programs. In addition, workers — whether previously unionized or not — can be required to pay union dues. The Washington Examiner reports:

The MWAA board’s 11-2 decision last week to mandate a project labor agreement, or PLA, for the second phase of Dulles Rail construction, will not preclude nonunionized contractors from bidding on the multibillion-dollar project. If they win the bid, however, it will require they follow specific wage guidelines, offer union benefits, and hire union workers. The move comes on the heels of the board’s decision to spend $330 million more on the Dulles International Airport train station, against the wishes of state and local officials.

“Basically, this mandates unions,” said Fairfax County Supervisor Pat Herrity, R-Springfield.

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Labor Secretary Admits Union Bias

by Vincent Vernuccio on March 1, 2011 · 1 comment

in Features, Labor, Zeitgeist

Post image for Labor Secretary Admits Union Bias

Speaking to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) Winter Meeting in Washington, D.C., over the weekend, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis admitted she was biased toward unions. Unions only account for 11.9 percent of the workforce, but Solis’ favoritism puts them ahead of the other 88 percent of the American workers.

From the Washington Examiner:

President Obama is staying mostly quiet about the union battle going on in Wisconsin. His labor secretary, Hilda Solis, is not.

“The fight is on!” Solis told a cheering crowd at the Democratic National Committee’s winter meeting over the weekend in Washington. Giving her support to “our brothers and sisters in public employee unions,” Solis pledged aid to unionized workers who are “under assault” in Wisconsin and elsewhere.

It’s no surprise Solis sympathizes with the unions against Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s budget reform proposal. After all, Solis often tells audiences how proud she is that her father was a Teamsters shop steward and her mother belonged to the United Steelworkers union. “Admittedly, I am a little biased,” she told the DNC, “because … I come from a union household.”

But is it the role of the secretary of labor to take sides in a fight that pits public employee union members against workers and taxpayers who support Walker’s reforms? After all, the Labor Department mission statement says its purpose is “to foster, promote, and develop the welfare of the wage earners, job seekers, and retirees of the United States.” It doesn’t say anything about unionized wage earners, job seekers, and retirees.

“The Labor Department should not represent only that part of the work force that is unionized,” says Elaine Chao, labor secretary under George W. Bush. “It should be responsible for the overall welfare of the entire American work force.”

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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.

Unions’ Shifting Lame Duck and NLRB Agenda

by Ivan Osorio on November 22, 2010

in Bailout Watch, Economy, Labor, Regulation

With Democrats losing control of the House of Representatives and a substantial number of seats in the Senate, organized labor’s hopes of seeing its legislative agenda enacted are fading fast. But that won’t keep union bosses from trying, in two ways. First, a last-ditch push in the current lame-duck session of Congress; and second, shifting efforts away from the legislative to the regulatory process, specifically in the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Thankfully, this shift in union strategy is getting some public attention — and more is needed.

In Congress, Big Labor’s allies are most likely to focus on passing bills bailing out underfunded union pensions and forcibly unionizing state and local government public safety employees. As my colleague F. Vincent Vernuccio and I noted recently in Forbes regarding the proposed bailout:

During the lame duck session, the main Big Labor priority to watch out for is a union pension bailout. Introduced in the House (Create Jobs and Save Benefits Act, H.R. 3936) by Rep. Earl Pomeroy (D-N.D.) and in the Senate (Create Jobs and Save Benefits Act, S. 3157) by Rep. Robert Casey (D-Penn.), this legislation would create a new fund within the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation ( GRTYA.PK - news -people ) (PBGC), through which it would direct taxpayer dollars to shore up some underfunded union pension plans. The use of public funds to insure private pension plans is a first for PBGC and stark departure from the way it has operated since its creation in 1974.

Earl Pomeroy lost his reelection bid, which makes the prospects for his legislation dim. However, just because unions lost one champion of this legislation does not mean they cannot find another. Pomeroy was an odd sponsor of such legislation anyway; unions are not exactly political powerhouses in North Dakota, which is a right to work state.

The so-called Public Safety Employer-Employee Cooperation Act (S. 3194, H.R. 413) would corral public safety — police, firefighter, and EMT personnel — into unions. For organized labor, this may be its best option for a long-term growth strategy, now that more union members works for governments than for private businesses. But states and cities struggling to balance their overstretched budgets, higher labor costs is the last thing they need. As National Right to Work Committee President Mark Mix notes in The Washington Examiner:

Last year, even as the nation’s economy endured a severe recession, state and local employee real compensation rose by nearly 3 percent. Meanwhile, businesses whose revenues were plummeting had no choice but to cut back real compensation for private-sector employees by 4 percent.

Incredibly, Reid and many likeminded senators and representatives now appear eager to put an even more onerous burden on private-sector employees and employers so that already bloated unionized government payrolls can keep expanding.

The Public Safety Employer-Employee Cooperation Act would force countless policemen, firefighters and emergency medical technicians to accept as their monopoly-bargaining agent a union they never voted for, and want nothing to do with. All contrary state laws and local policies would be overridden.

Even in many states that already authorize public-safety union monopolies, the bill would widen their scope. That’s why the vast majority of the 50 states will be forced either to rewrite their public-sector labor statutes, or hand over control of their public-safety officers to the federal government, if it becomes law.

Moreover, as former Service Employees International Union second-in-command Anna Burger has boasted, it would “create a national collective,” i.e. monopoly, “bargaining standard for all [state and local] public workers.”

Meanwhile, the fight over card check and other pro-union legislation is shifting to the NLRB, where Board members Craig Becker and Mark Gaston Pearce — both recess-appointed by President Obama — are likely to push Big Labor’s agenda. As Katie Gage of the Workforce Fairness Institute notes in The Daily Caller:

Recently, the NLRB has taken action to favor labor bosses over employees and employers. Obama’s appointees to the board are carrying Big Labor’s water, and our freedoms and jobs are at risk.

Cases that have been decided and closed for years are now being reopened by these new board members, who aim to change pro-worker and pro-small business decisions into pro-union boss ones.

For example, most recently, the board backed unions in their practice of holding protest signs at small businesses who use contract workers, claiming that the signs are not coercive.

In addition, the NLRB is now considering implementing electronic voting services for remote elections as opposed to worksite elections where physical ballots are both cast and counted, a move that would open elections to potential fraud and workers to intimidation.

And now there is discussion that this “independent federal agency” will shorten the amount of time for workplace elections even though most take place within a month. While Big Labor bosses could begin planning and organizing months ahead of an election being called, small business owners could be caught unaware and have only a few days to make their case to their own employees.

The lame-duck session ends next month, but Becker’s and Pearce’s recess appointments run through the end of the next session of Congress, so they’ll be on the Board through 2011. The NLRB bears watching.

For more on labor, see here and here.

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