Archive for the ‘Collective Bargaining’ Category

WHY THE LABOR MOVEMENT MOVED LEFT

Saturday, August 27th, 2011
The Wall Street Journal

  • AUGUST 26, 2011

Unions weren’t so uniformly behind tax increases when most of their members worked for companies in the private economy.

Although the field of Republican presidential contenders is still in flux, the National Education Association (NEA) decided in early July to endorse President Obama’s 2012 re-election bid. The move by the nation’s biggest teachers union was entirely expected. The NEA—the fifth biggest giver to political campaigns in the past 20 years, according to the Center for Responsive Politics—supports almost no one but Democrats for federal office, having given just 5% of its campaign contributions to Republicans since 1990.

Don’t expect anything different from the nation’s other biggest unions, private or public, including the dozen unions on the Center’s list of the top 20 contributors to federal elections. Those unions, ranging from the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees to the Service Employees International Union to the Teamsters, overwhelmingly support Democrats. They have given only 3% of the $384 million they’ve contributed to candidates for federal office over the past 20 years to Republicans. Union advocates argue that this is because the Democratic Party looks out for the interests of union members. But a significant plurality of their members doesn’t always agree.

Exit polls estimate that 59% of union members voted for President Obama in 2008, a particularly strong Democratic year in which the president garnered 53% of the overall vote. In 2010, union members swung somewhat the other way, an ABC News/Washington Post poll found, with 54% of union members voting for Democratic congressional candidates and 42% for Republicans.

While there are no polls specifically on NEA members, data from the General Social Survey (GSS) suggest that grade school teachers in general have voted Democratic only somewhat more often than they have Republican in presidential elections dating back to 1972. Teachers have favored Democrats by 50% to 44% for the GOP (with the rest voting for independent candidates), according to an analysis of the massive GSS database by the blog The Audacious Epigone.

In recent years, as private-sector union membership has declined while public-sector union ranks have grown, the movement’s leadership has focused not just on traditional labor issues like raising the minimum wage, but also advocating consistently for bigger government and more public spending.

Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama

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THE FALL OF THE MIDWEST ECONOMIC MODEL

Wednesday, August 17th, 2011
The Wall Street Journal

  • AUGUST 16, 2011

In 1970, the future seemed to belong to Michigan’s example of big companies and big unions. Not anymore.

President Obama has kicked off a three-day bus tour of Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois, where the corn is high and at least some factories are spewing smoke. He’s holding town-hall meetings on the economy, putting the unemployed back to work and “growing wages for everyone.” He won these Midwestern states handily in 2008, but he’s not taking anything for granted these days. The Midwest is the region with the largest number of target states. The president’s latest Gallup job approval there is 39%, the same as the nation as a whole.

To understand the political economy of the Midwest, it helps to put it in historic perspective. Originally the Midwest’s economy was built on its farms, then later on its factories. The long farm-to-factory migration lasted from roughly 1890 to 1970. At the end of that period, when I was working on the first edition of “The Almanac of American Politics,” it seemed there were two models for the U.S. future. One was the Michigan model, which prevailed in the industrial Midwest and the factory towns of the Great Plains. The other was the Texas model, which prevailed in most of the South and Southwest.

The Michigan model was based on the Progressive/New Deal assumption that, after the transition from farm to factory, the best way to secure growth was through big companies and big labor unions.

The Big Three auto companies, economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote, could create endless demand for their products through manipulative advertising and planned obsolescence. The United Auto Workers would ensure that productivity gains would be shared by workers and the assembly line would never be speeded up. In those days, 40% of Michigan voters lived in union (mostly UAW) households, the base vote of a liberal Democratic Party that pushed for ever larger governments at the local, state and federal levels. You found similar alignments in most Midwestern states.

Liberals assumed the Michigan model was the wave of the future, and that in time—once someone built big factories and unions organized them—backward states like Texas would catch up. Texas liberal writers Ronnie Dugger and Molly Ivins kept looking for the liberal coalition of blacks, poor whites and Latinos that political scientist V.O. Key predicted in his 1940s classic “Southern Politics.”

The latest census figures show that Detroit has lost 25% of its population in 10 years.

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OBAMA’S NEW GIFTS TO ORGANIZED LABOR

Wednesday, August 10th, 2011
The Wall Street Journal

  • AUGUST 9, 2011

A union election is a decisive event in an employee’s life, and new rules limit the information employees get before voting.

Government encroachments typically come as a wolf in sheep’s clothing, Justice Antonin Scalia once observed, but occasionally they are brazen—then, the “wolf comes as a wolf.” The Obama administration recently proposed a pair of rules to help unions win workplace elections. One rule is obviously a wolf. The other is a pretty creepy looking sheep.

The “wolf” is a proposal of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to enable unions to force organizing elections with as little as 10 days’ notice. Critical issues governing the election—such as which employees may vote—would be determined in a hearing just a week after the union petitions for a vote.

The company, which often will not even know a labor lawyer, would also have one week to prepare a hearing statement addressing such arcana as “the Board’s jurisdiction to process the petition; the appropriateness of the petitioned-for unit; . . . [and] the existence of any bar to the election.” In the same week, the company would have to learn its rights and responsibilities under the labor laws, prepare for the hearing and launch its campaign for the upcoming election. Oh—it has a business to run too.

And the union? Its business is organizing. Often, paid organizers have been working behind the scenes for months, awaiting the opportune moment to spring their election demand. (more…)

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WISCONSIN’S CONTROVERSIAL BUDGET LAW BEGINS TO PAY OFF

Wednesday, July 13th, 2011

Townhall.com logo
July 12, 2011

By Byron York

7/12/2011

“This is a disaster,” Mark Miller, the Wisconsin Senate Democratic leader, said in February after Republican Gov. Scott Walker proposed a budget bill that would curtail the collective-bargaining powers of some public employees. Miller predicted catastrophe if the bill were to become law — a charge repeated thousands of times by his fellow Democrats, union officials and protesters in the streets.

Now the bill is law, and we have some early evidence of how it is working. And for one beleaguered Wisconsin school district, it’s a godsend, not a disaster.

The Kaukauna Area School District, in the Fox River Valley of Wisconsin near Appleton, has about 4,200 students and about 400 employees. It has struggled in recent times and this year faced a deficit of $400,000. But after the law went into effect at 12:01 a.m. June 29, school officials put in place new policies they estimate will turn that $400,000 deficit into a $1.5 million surplus. And it’s all because of the very provisions that union leaders predicted would be disastrous.

In the past, teachers and other staff at Kaukauna were required to pay 10 percent of the cost of their health-insurance coverage and none of their pension costs. Now they’ll pay 12.6 percent of the cost of their coverage (still well below rates in much of the private sector) and contribute 5.8 percent of salary to their pensions. The changes will save the school board an estimated $1.2 million this year, according to board president Todd Arnoldussen. (more…)

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CONNECTICUT – UNIONS TRY TO SILENCE A THINK TANK

Saturday, July 9th, 2011
The Wall Street Journal

  • JULY 7, 2011

Why would the fact that we associate with like-minded institutions be of interest to the attorney general?

Late last month, the Connecticut think tank of which I am chairman was the subject of a bizarre complaint filed by public-union leaders. Their gripe? That the Yankee Institute is critical of union practices and that our funders share the same view.

Since last year’s election, every statewide office is now held by Democrats who support public unions. Possibly intoxicated by this success, public-union leaders filed this baseless complaint with the state’s attorney general, in effect asking: Will no one rid us of this meddlesome think tank?

The first enumerated “fact” in the complaint states that the Yankee Institute “is funded in part by, and connected to, such ‘think tanks’ as The Heritage Foundation, and the Cato Institute and by billionaires such as the Koch brothers.”

Putting aside that this isn’t true—although, believe me, we would like to become connected to the Koch brothers—why would the fact that we associate with like-minded people and institutions be of interest to a law-enforcement official? That is our right, plainly protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution. (more…)

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LETTER TO THE EDITOR – BOEING EXPANSION IN SOUTH CAROLINA IS A SMART MOVE

Sunday, July 3rd, 2011
The Wall Street Journal

  • JUNE 30, 2011

Teddie E. Pryor Sr. Chairman , Charleston County Council, Charleston, S.C.

Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr., Charleston, S.C.

Mayor R. Keith Summey, North Charleston, S.C.

Mayor Billy Swails, Mount Pleasant, S.C.

  • We find Thomas Geoghegan’s “Boeing’s Threat to American Enterprise” (op-ed, June 20) astounding in its ignorance toward our manufacturing statistics and we find statements like “poorly educated and low-skilled workers” insulting.

Boeing made a well-informed, private business decision in locating its second 787 assembly line to North Charleston, S.C. The company weighed multiple business factors, but the bottom line was simple: keep the company globally competitive. Boeing’s confidence in our work force is well-founded.

Although Mr. Geoghegan refers to our labor force as “poorly educated and low-skilled workers,” experienced aerospace workers are coming from Puget Sound, from across the aerospace-intensive Southeast and from other national aerospace labor sheds. Local manufacturing workers with previous experience are also being hired following their graduation from an intensive, customized Boeing training curriculum offered by the state of South Carolina.

South Carolina is rapidly growing its manufacturing sector and leads the U.S. in the number of jobs recruited from international firms per capita, according to the Financial Times. (more…)

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THE SURPRISING ROOTS OF LIBERAL NOSTALGIA

Thursday, June 23rd, 2011
The Wall Street Journal

  • JUNE 22, 2011

World War II created confidence in large institutions and big government. But few would want the cultural conformity of the mid-20th century back.

There’s a longing on the left for the golden years of the 1940s, ’50s and early ’60s. Income distribution was significantly more egalitarian than it is today, and Americans had far more confidence in big government, the wisdom of our elected officials, and the ability of Keynesian spending policies to stimulate economic growth.

Hence the search for policies that will somehow get us back to those golden years. The Obama Democrats have been desperately trying to increase membership in labor unions, to the point of threatening to close down Boeing’s new Dreamliner plant in South Carolina. They passed an $814 billion stimulus package and ObamaCare. And they’re still itching to raise tax rates on high earners, though they botched it when they had supermajorities in Congress.

But the America of the past is a different country to which we can’t return. As Andrew Levison recently lamented in the Nation magazine: “Doubts about the ability of government to create jobs reflect not only a disbelief in Keynesian remedies for unemployment but also the profound doubts many Americans have about government in general.”

Still, liberals pine for what I call America’s Midcentury Moment. It was the product of World War II, lasting from 1940 until the mid-1960s when the wartime experience wore off and the emerging baby boomers led culture and politics in another direction. For those of us who grew up in those years, the Midcentury Moment seemed the norm in American experience. But in fact it was the result of a unique time in U.S. history, when a united nation was mobilized for total war and Americans were, literally or figuratively, put into uniform. (more…)

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OUR REACTIONARY PRESIDENT – VICTOR DAVIS HANSON

Monday, June 20th, 2011

June 16, 2011

Our Reactionary President

By Victor Davis Hanson
Barack Obama is the most reactionary president in the recent history of the United States. Obama seems intent on turning back the clock to the good old days of the 1960s and 1970s, when rigid political orthodoxy, not an open mind, once guided government.

Take the economy. The 1980s implosion of communism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union proved that state control of the means of production guaranteed poverty and worse. The current insolvent and fragmenting European Union, and the stagnant economics of the exploding Middle East, remind us that state socialism does not work.

Why, then, would Obama, in horse-and-buggy fashion, go back to such fossilized concepts as absorbing the nation’s health care system, increasing the federal government’s role in the economy by taking over automobile corporations, borrowing $5 trillion to spend on new entitlements, or proposing an array of much higher taxes — all in a vain effort to ensure an equality of result?

Almost every key indicator of the current economy — unemployment, deficits, housing, energy — argues that Obama’s reactionary all-powerful statist approach has only made things far worse.

In a bygone era without full workers’ compensation, unemployment insurance and overtime pay, big unions ran the United States. Today less than 7 percent of Americans belong to them.

Yet President Obama wants to block the Boeing aircraft company from opening an assembly plant in South Carolina, on the grounds that it is a right-to-work state and new assembly workers might be free to reject union representation. The administration is now allowing union-backed Democrats in Congress to block free-trade agreements with Colombia, Panama and South Korea in order to limit competition with domestic unionized industries. (more…)

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KNOW THY ENEMY: New Labor Plan – Nationwide Protests

Thursday, April 28th, 2011
New labor plan: Nationwide protests
By: Ben Smith
April 21, 2011 02:31 PM EDT
In a major strategic shift, the Service Employees International Union plans to use its giant political operation to try to build a grass-roots movement of public protest and organization similar to the massive show of pro-labor support that overran Madison, Wis. last month.

The SEIU’s ambitious effort is a dramatic departure from its straightforward approach to the 2008 campaign. That year, the union pressed a single-minded and ultimately successful focus on getting Democrats to commit to a health care overhaul. Then it spent more than $32.5 million in independent expenditures to elect Barack Obama.

SEIU President Mary Kay Henry acknowledged in an interview that the new strategy, which would include aggressive outreach to non-union members, is “a risk.”

“We felt like we were called in this moment to roll the dice and to think about how to use our members resources for the greatest hope for changing members lives,” she said. “I hope what people will see is more of what we all witnessed in Madison. … more people in the streets making demands about what kind of America we want to see.”

The new plan, revealed in a planning document reviewed by POLITICO and the subsequent interview with Henry, reflects the widening recognition by labor leaders that the shrinking national ranks of union members no longer carry the political heft they once did. The draft plan, titled “Fight for a Fair Economy” in what Henry said was a preliminary planning document, would reach outside union ranks to focus on “mobilizing underpaid, underemployed, and unemployed workers” and “channeling anger about jobs into action for positive change.” (more…)

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THE WHITE HOUSE VS. BOEING: A TENNESSEE TALE

Wednesday, April 27th, 2011
The Wall Street Journal

  • APRIL 26, 2011, 10:30 A.M. ET

Our auto industry took off because workers could choose whether or not to join a union.

  • By LAMAR ALEXANDERMr. Alexander is a U.S. senator from Tennessee and chairman of the Senate Republican Conference.  He is also a former governor of Tennessee.
The National Labor Relations Board has moved to stop Boeing from building airplanes at a nonunion plant in South Carolina, suggesting that a unionized American company cannot expand its operations into one of the 22 states with right-to-work laws, which protect a worker’s right to join or not join a union. (New Hampshire’s legislature has just approved its becoming the 23rd.)

This reminds me of a White House state dinner in February 1979, when I was governor of Tennessee. President Jimmy Carter said, “Governors, go to Japan. Persuade them to make here what they sell here.”

“Make here what they sell here” was then the union battle cry, part of an effort to slow the tide of Japanese cars and trucks entering the U.S. market.

Off I flew to Tokyo to meet with Nissan executives who were deciding where to put their first U.S. manufacturing plant. I carried with me a photograph taken at night from a satellite showing the country at night with all its lights on.

Boeing employees assemble a 787 Dreamliner jet at the company’s manufacturing facility in Everett, Wash., in February.

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