union

In Wisconsin Recall, Unions Run to Stay in Place

by Vincent Vernuccio on August 9, 2011 · 3 comments

in Economy, Employment, Labor

No matter what the outcome of today’s recall election, nothing substantive will change in Wisconsin. Even if organized labor were to sweep all six recall elections of Republican state senators, the unions would still not have the votes in the Assembly to pass any legislation. They will not be able to restore the government union’s lavish benefits, which were brought down to Earth this spring. And even if they were somehow able to muster legislation through both the Senate and the Republican-controlled Assembly, they still will not have enough votes to overturn a veto by Governor Scott Walker.

According to the John K. MacIver Institute for Public Policy, a Wisconsin think tank, Big Labor and its allies have funneled over $14 million into the recall effort.

The Washington Post reports that much of the money (on both sides) comes from groups outside of Wisconsin.

Outside groups — led by national unions on the Democratic side and limited government groups such as the Wisconsin Club for Growth on the Republican side — have shoveled more than $25 million into the recall effort, with both sides spending about the same amount. The candidates, meanwhile, have raised more than $5 million.

The staggering dollar amounts being showered on the eight recall campaigns — which after a July 19 election and Tuesday’s six contests will conclude with two elections on Aug. 16 — are shattering state records. In 2010, when the 99-member assembly and half the 33-member state Senate was up for election, outside organizations spent $3.75 million in Wisconsin — 15 percent of this year’s total.

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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.

An Intrusive, Ineffective, Unionized TSA?

by Hans Bader on November 29, 2010

in Mobility, Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Precaution & Risk, Privacy

Much has been written about the backlash against the TSA’s intrusive new screening methods. Law professor Jeff Rosen has argued that they violate the Fourth Amendment, since they are more invasive than alternative screening methods, but may be no more effective. Others have argued that the screening will kill more people than it saves from terrorist attacks, even if it ever prevents a terrorist attack, since it will result in angry travelers traveling by car rather than by airplane, resulting in hundreds of additional deaths annually, since fatalities are much higher on the road than in the air. (One scientist argues that the screenings will also lead to an increase in radiation-related deaths.)

Such screening methods are only as effective as the employees who use them, and lazy or inattentive employees can render any screening method useless.  The Obama administration is now poised to unionize the TSA, which would make it harder to remove lazy or inattentive employees, and harder to reassign employees as needed in responding to any attempted terror attacks.  The Washington Examiner, and John Fund of The Wall Street Journal, earlier criticized the administration’s support for unionization, which past TSA heads recognized would undermine public safety.

As John Fund notes, “if you think TSA is dysfunctional and unpopular now, wait until it unionizes. This month, the Federal Labor Relations Authority ruled that 50,000 TSA personnel will be allowed to vote on whether or not to join a union with full collective bargaining rights. The American Federation of Government Employees and the National Treasury Employees Union are already gearing up their campaigns to win over the screeners.”

As the Examiner notes:

[A]dapting to evolving security threats requires a level of workplace flexibility that is incompatible with rigid union workplaces. After a plot to blow up a dozen U.S.-bound airliners from Britain over the Atlantic was broken up in 2006, the TSA changed its procedures in 12 hours to deal with new concerns about liquid explosives. Unions make it notoriously difficult for managers to change job descriptions and procedures, so it’s hard to believe a unionized TSA would have sufficient flexibility to cope with constantly changing terrorist challenges.

In 2007, Congress, in legislation backed by then-Senator Obama, passed legislation enabling the TSA to unionize — a stance endorsed by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who earlier claimed that “the system worked” when a terrorist nearly blew up a plan, only to be foiled by alert passengers, with no help from the TSA. (The terrorist was allowed on the plane despite being on a terror watch list, and then set fire to explosives.  To put out the fire, passengers had to violate TSA red tape like rules banning passengers from getting out of their seat during the last hour of a flight.) The Examiner says that “the TSA has yet to catch one terrorist.”

The TSA often fails to detect explosive ingredients and fake bombs in performance tests. A study found that the TSA is more than twice as likely to fail to detect a bomb as the private security firms it replaced. And TSA’s failure rate is three or four times as high as the few remaining private firms still allowed to handle airline security. In tests, TSA failed to detect fake bombs 60 percent of the time at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, and 75 percent of the time in Los Angeles.  The Obama administration is also undermining railroad safety through pro-union favoritism.

Washington Subway Terrorist Bomb Plot Leads to Arrest

by Hans Bader on October 28, 2010

in Labor, Mobility, Regulation

Federal authorities arrested Farooque Ahmed for plotting to bomb the Washington Metro subway system.  Ahmed, who immigrated from Pakistan, “conspired with people he thought to be al-Qaeda operatives to bomb the Arlington Cemetery, Pentagon City, Crystal City and Court House stations, according to a federal indictment.”

Don’t count on the subway system itself to guard against terrorism, though.  Many of the Washington, D.C. Metro’s unionized employees are incompetent or grossly overpaid, and some simply disregard threats to public safety, as a letter writer recently chronicled in The Washington Post.  Members of its governing board, like Arlington County politician Chris Zimmerman, have turned a blind eye to incompetence, waste, and safety hazards at Metro, even while jacking up subway fares by massive amounts. Federal investigators rebuked the subway system for a “systemic breakdown of safety management at all levels” that led to the deadly Red Line crash last summer and other fatal accidents.

The Obama administration is undermining airline and railroad security against terrorist attacks by pushing policies that benefit public employee unions at the expense of competence and public safety.

General Motors’ Losses Hidden by Deferral of Union Pension Obligations

by Hans Bader on October 21, 2010

in Bailout Watch, Economy, Employment, Labor, Regulation

Any General Motors bonds issued this year will be classified as junk by a key ratings agency.  Why?  There’s some risk GM will go bankrupt again, and it hasn’t really returned to profitability, the way it appeared to have. That’s because GM’s recent quarterly profit, which came after years of losses and tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts, was artificially created by the temporary deferral of billions of dollars in pension obligations that it owes to the United Auto Workers union.  Those unfunded pension obligations have risen by $6 billion since the end of 2009.  As Charles Lane of The Washington Post notes,

[A] little-noticed October 6 report from Fitch, the ratings agency, which highlighted the major unresolved issue of the bailout: pension obligations to its United Auto Workers employees. The union successfully resisted efforts to trim this long-term burden on the company through the bankruptcy process, and they continue to weigh heavily on the company’s future. Specifically, GM’s relatively robust free cash position – one of its major selling points in its pending IPO – is being artificially propped up by the fact that it is not yet legally required to make multi-billion-dollar payments into its ‘heavily underfunded’ U.S. pension funds. How underfunded are they? Well, the U.S. plans alone are $17 billion underfunded as of the end of 2009, Fitch says. When you include global operations, the total is $27 billion. . . GM’s pension obligations are actually $6 billion higher than they appeared at the end of 2009.

These obligations will likely have far more impact on GM’s financial future than the recent revelations that it lied about the Chevy Volt, which it was trumpeting in a “publicity stunt” to curry favor with politicians crusading against global warming.

Earlier, GM lied about whether it had paid back taxpayers for its bailout, which resulted in GM getting $50 billion in taxpayer money, and its finance arm GMAC getting another $17 billion.  (GM also received billions indirectly from taxpayers, through programs like the incredibly wasteful Cash for Clunkers, which cost  used-car and car-parts dealers billions.)

The Obama administration used the bailouts to keep the United Auto Workers’ massive compensation (worth up to $70 an hour), pension benefits, and rigid union work rules largely intact, while giving the UAW a big chunk of General Motors‘ stock, even though the UAW helped bankrupt the company.  The auto bailouts were so wasteful and so biased in favor of the UAW that they disturbed even the liberal Washington Post editorial board.

Another reason for treating GM bonds as junk is the way the Obama administration mistreated GM’s past bondholders.  It engineered the wiping out of General Motors’ bondholders, some of whom were non-union employees who had invested their life savings in the company, so that the GM stock that the Obama administration was giving the UAW would be worth more.

GM also faces increased regulatory burdens, such as CAFE rules ratcheted up in the name of global warming  (the initial tightening of those rules will wipe out at least 50,000 jobs in the auto industry), that will make it hard for it to expand its anemic 19 percent market share.  Other EPA global warming rules are expected to wipe out at least 800,000 American jobs and impose heavy costs on suppliers of materials used in manufacturing automobiles.  The EPA’s proposed ozone rules would wipe out 7.3 million jobs, according to one study.

Vincent Vernuccio on Union Shutting Down GM Plant

by Marc Scribner on October 7, 2010

in Labor, Video

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31i-rRUnMc8 285 234]

LibertyWeek 87: Digital Due Process

by Richard Morrison on April 5, 2010

in CEI Projects, Podcast

Richard Morrison, Jeremy Lott, Marc Scribner and Ryan Radia bring you Episode 87 of the LibertyWeek podcast. We take on the politics in the land of Lincoln, the chances of a union pension fund bailout, the fallout from Climategate and the strange bedfellows of electronic privacy.

Hate Crime in St. Louis? Obama Backers Beat Up Black Critic of Health-Care “Reform,” Use Racial Slurs

by Hans Bader on August 9, 2009 · 2 comments

in Healthcare, Labor, Legal, Personal Liberty, Politics as Usual, Sanctimony

Kenneth Gladney, a black critic of Obama’s health-care plan, was beaten, kicked, and called racist names by members of the SEIU, a corrupt and powerful left-wing union that backs Obama’s plan, leaving him wheelchair-bound and too weak to speak. This apparent hate crime took place at a St. Louis “town hall” meeting. SEIU members are bused in to town hall meetings called by liberal lawmakers in order to create the illusion of grassroots support, and intimidate would-be critics.

To curry favor with the corrupt SEIU, the Obama Administration has betrayed union workers by gutting federal regulations that help uncover corruption by union leaders and their misuse of union members’ dues. The SEIU spent over $60 million to elect Obama.

Although the federal deficit has exploded, due to massive new government spending, the Obama Administration wants to pile on even more federal spending, including a health-care “reform” proposal predicted to cost at least $1,000,000,000,000 ($1 trillion). In reality, Obamacare will likely cost far more than predicted, the way past health-care expansions always have.

One of Obama’s own advisers says the Obama Administration’s health-care plan will harm people with insurance while raising their taxes. CNN says Obamacare will take away 5 freedoms. It will also destroy many affordable health-care plans while breaking Obama’s campaign promises.

ObamaCare also contains subsidies for left-wing community organizers, and preferences for illegal aliens, who are exempt from its taxes and penalties, but may be able to access its benefits due to lack of meaningful eligibility verification safeguards.

The Obama Administration has a glaring double standard when it comes to hate crimes. It has turned a blind eye to hate-crimes committed by liberals, such as voter intimidation in Philadelphia by black panthers who included a Democratic official and Obama poll-watcher. Yet it has advocated reprosecuting in federal court other people found innocent of hate crimes in state court, taking advantage of a loophole in constitutional protections against double jeopardy.

LibertyWeek 54: Read My Lips

by Richard Morrison on August 3, 2009

in CEI Projects, Podcast

Your host Richard Morrison welcomes back returning guest co-hosts Michelle Minton and Jeremy Lott for Episode 54 of the LibertyWeek podcast. We start with ominous hints of new taxes, California state employees making strike threats and the possible antitrust implications of the Microhoo partnership. We continue with a double-dipping pay scandal, the suppression of dissent in Venezuela and some fully transparent Olympic News.

Lincoln To Vote No on Card Check

by Ivan Osorio on April 6, 2009

in Economy, Labor

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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