Back to Basics

Watch this teaser from EAGnews.org about their just-completed investigation into “the links between radical people and organizations and the ‘mainstream’ labor unions that have been the public face of the massive demonstrations, occupation of the capitol and recall efforts of 2011 and 2012. Our research shows there is a much broader agenda at play in Wisconsin:”

Reminder, readers:

Here are all of the Wisconsin recall targets and their campaign donation pages. Do your part:

Gov. Scott Walker

Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch

Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald

Sen. Van Wanggaard

Sen. Terry Moulton

Yeah, a war on decency, a war on taxpayers, a war on women, a war on …

Well, you get the picture.

At the New York Times, “Recall Election Tests Strategies for November“:

The combination of the squeeze on state budgets, high rates of unemployment and the conservative movement’s revived energy provided an opening for Republican efforts, often business-backed, to promote tough-on-labor legislation in key states. Those efforts have succeeded in rolling back gains made by unions over decades, prompting vows from labor to fight back with newly engaged members shaken from self-described complacency.

“The steelworkers will be working harder this year than in 2008, because we can see what can happen,” Michael Bolton, the director of the United Steelworkers unit representing 48,000 workers in Wisconsin and Michigan — including many hundreds in Koch facilities — said in an interview last week at his office in Menasha, Wis.

The steelworkers will be part of a broader effort that national union strategists say will fill the streets in battleground states with hundreds of thousands of their members, who will go door to door telling union colleagues — and, for the first time, nonunion households — why they should vote for Mr. Obama. The A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s political director, Mike Podhorzer, said his organization, which reached 25 million voters in 2008, would easily exceed that this year.

Officials for the steelworkers say it has been awkward at times to wage partisan battles against the family that owns the factories that employ them.

The union’s leaders recently agreed on a contract with Georgia Pacific that they considered fair. When liberal groups called for a boycott of Koch products late last year, a Steelworkers vice president, Jon Geenen, said it would harm “the wrong people,” writing of a “dilemma and a paradox,” namely, “While the Koch brothers are credited with advocating an agenda and groups that are clearly hostile to labor and labor’s agenda, the brothers’ company in practice and in general has positive and productive collective bargaining relationships with its unions.”

But, Mr. Bolton said, that has not stopped the union from telling workers at those companies what it believes to be the goal of the Kochs and their allies. “They want ineffective, weak unions,” he said, adding, “A lot of these bills didn’t directly affect our private sector members, but we realize that we would be the next.”

In an interview, Mr. Walker called that a “bogus argument,” saying he has no plans to pursue right-to-work legislation, as private sector unions have feared. Such legislation lets employees at unionized workplaces opt out of paying union fees.

“Private sector unions are my partners,” he said. Mr. Walker said that in restricting collective bargaining rights for government workers, save those in public safety, he was confronting a reality facing virtually all state governments with aging, unionized work forces: “We can’t sustain our budgets unless we make some reasonable changes.”

Mr. Walker said charges that he is doing the bidding of wealthy supporters like the Kochs are “the biggest joke out there.”

IMAGE CREDIT: Grandpa John’s.

UPDATE: Walter Russell Mead has more: “Walker Gains in Wisconsin: NYT Shields Readers From Distressing News.”

“To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.” – Thomas Jefferson

Longtime readers of my work know that I’ve been exposing the compulsory-union dues racket since my days as a columnist at the Seattle Times. Here’s my 1999 column on how public school teachers in Washington state challenged their union over their political dues power grab. Here are your rights as a union worker. Here is a backgrounder on the permissible use of forced dues. As I wrote on Labor Day in 2010, free speech not only means the freedom to voice your political views, but also the freedom from being forced to pay for someone else’s.

U.S. Supreme Court precedent established by the D.C.-based National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation guarantees the right to full financial disclosure from a union and a right to challenge the figures in court if they disagree.

More and more rank-and-file union members have been speaking up against the confiscation of their dues for political purposes they oppose. Remember this Chicago SEIU member from 2010?

Or this letter from a Minnesota teacher last year?

As events have unfolded in Wisconsin, I have been reflecting on my nearly 10 years in public education. My parents were both teachers and I greatly admired the work they did with their own students. I began with that same passion for teaching that they instilled in me, but am finding it more and more difficult to keep that flame alive.

The hold that unions have over the public educational system is nothing short of toxic. Year after year, I have a lot of money taken out of my paychecks for union dues. What do I get for my money? I am bombarded with emails and flyers “urging” us to vote for candidates that coincidentally always have the letter (D) after them. I get to be lectured to by union reps about the evil Republican candidates are and why they know what is best for me.

Now I am being hit with email after email “urging” me to stand with the teachers of Wisconsin. One teacher who is very tight with our union replied to our district making fun of Republicans directly. You might ask why I don’t forward this to human resources, but the repercussions would be brutal.

The truth is that any teacher who does not hold down the talking points of the unions, DNC or Obama White House needs to keep quiet to keep their job. The vitriol I heard over the Bush years was deafening but acceptable and expected. I can hardly remember a week that went by where teachers, sometimes in front of students, were not making fun of Republicans. I’ve personally been the subject of much ridicule and scorn from fellow teachers and will continue to be as long as I am in public education. I believe in what I am doing in my own classroom by focusing on educating students, but as time goes by it is becoming more and more likely that I will leave education all together.

All those rules requiring that work be done by unionized workers only had a small (I assume temporary) impact on the percent of workers who are unionized. From the WSJ:

The percentage of workers who belong to a union inched down to 11.8% from 11.9% in 2010, a decline the Bureau of Labor Statistics said left the rate “essentially unchanged.” . . .

In 2011, the private sector added about 110,000 union members, pushing the total there to 7.2 million. In the public sector, membership fell by 61,000 as budget-strapped federal, state and local governments cut jobs.

Still, public-sector union members continued to account for more than half of the nation’s total union members, and their membership rate of 37% remained five times greater than the private sector’s rate of 6.9%. . . .

Organized Labor was all aglow. After the National Labor Relations Board decided it was going to tell Boeing that the company could not shift production from its union shop in Seattle to its non-union shop in South Carolina, there was reason to celebrate. Big Labor had successfully enlisted its allies in Big Government to infringe upon the economic liberty of Americans and a company in order to protect itself. There were smiles all around among the workers and their leaders.

But, as fate would have it, reality would not be denied. As always, when reality is bent, it snaps right back to thwack the knuckles of those who foolishly try such an impossible feat.

Earlier this month Boeing announced that, due to costs, it would shut down its unionized plant in Kansas City. The aftermath? 2,160 employees, including many union employees, are going to be shown the door and given pink slips. It does not escape notice that perhaps some of these jobs in Kansas City might have been able to be saved had Boeing been allowed to go ahead with its original plans for operations in South Carolina and saved money in that regard.

Some of the work from the Kansas City plant will be diverted to Oklahoma City. Boeing operates a non-union facility there according to published reports on the company’s plans moving forward. Sounds to me like, if they are going to be consistent, the NLRB should be prepared to meddle here too. That is if they value the union workers in Kansas City as much as the ones in Seattle. Or was this part of the deal all along? Was it decided that the union workers in Kansas City would be sacrificed to save the union workers in Seattle? It is hard to say with as secretive as the Obama Administration is. But if the NLRB does not act on behalf of the Kansas City union members it is a very real question that must be asked.

The union machinists and engineers at the Kansas City facility are obviously upset by the news of their plant closing. As are some elected officials in Kansas who went to bat for Boeing over the issue with the South Carolina plant. They thought they could buy them some good will and that this good will would prevent Boeing from touching the local plant.

The tiff between Boeing, the Seattle union and South Carolina was front page news for the longest time. Outside of Kansas, however, the end of an 85-year era with Boeing as a major employer in the State is barely garnering any news. Almost as though the hypocrisy is so blatant that not even the mainstream media wants to draw attention to it. After all, they cannot dare cast President Obama as uncaring about the plight of union workers in America after they spent months pumping him up and trumpeting his interference with Boeing’s “sinister” plans to undercut organized labor. Right?

In the end it seems as though Boeing gets the last laugh. It still gets to cut costs. It still gets to shed itself of untenable labor agreements which it allowed itself to be strong armed into accepting. And most importantly it still gets to make airplanes.

Where is your union now?

Unions are problematic. They are particularly problematic when a company has to deal with multiple unions. Each union hopes that the other unions will give in and it won’t have to. From the WSJ:

The privately held Irving, Texas, company’s move marks the second significant court restructuring in the past several years. In a statement, Hostess said the current cost structure “is not competitive, primarily due to legacy pension and medical benefit obligations and restrictive work rules.” It said it would be able to maintain operations thanks to a $75 million financing commitment from a group of lenders.

In bankruptcy, Hostess said it plans to continue negotiating with 12 unions to modify the collective-bargaining agreements governing the employment of its union workers, who comprise 83% of its approximately 19,000 employees.

“Whether the debtors can achieve long-term viability depends directly and substantially on the debtors’ ability to achieve dramatic change to their labor agreements, with a corresponding material reduction in their cost structure and legacy pension and medical obligations, and a restructuring of their capital structure,” Hostess said in court papers. “That is the purpose and the focus of these Chapter 11 cases.” . . .

Nancy Pelosi’s really been gettin’ her Marxist on lately.

First, a little background on the situation from about six months ago:

In what may be the strongest signal yet of the new pro-labor orientation of the National Labor Relations Board under President Obama, the agency filed a complaint Wednesday seeking to force Boeing to bring an airplane production line back to its unionized facilities in Washington State instead of moving the work to a nonunion plant in South Carolina.

In its complaint, the labor board said that Boeing’s decision to transfer a second production line for its new 787 Dreamliner passenger plane to South Carolina was motivated by an unlawful desire to retaliate against union workers for their past strikes in Washington and to discourage future strikes. The agency’s acting general counsel, Lafe Solomon, said it was illegal for companies to take actions in retaliation against workers for exercising the right to strike.

Last Friday, Botoxi the Clown was asked if the National Labor Relations Board should be able to force Boeing to shut down that plant in South Carolina because it isn’t unionized, and you can guess what her answer was:

By Pelosi’s unionization standards this means the NLRB should also shut down next year’s Democratic National Convention.

By this time, we’re all aware that union thugs, including nurses and school teachers, not only went AWOL from their jobs, but caused over seven million dollars in damage to Wisconsin’s state capitol when they stormed Madison and tried to bully Governor Walker and the state legislators into capitulating to their outlandish demands. What you may not have heard about is that hundreds of goons from the Longshoreman’s Union descended on the Port of Longview (Washington), broke down gates, smashed windows, overpowered security guards, damaged railroad cars, cut brake lines and dumped carloads of grain, in a jurisdictional dispute with a different union.

Speaking of union thugs, Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa welcomed Chairman Obama to a Labor Day celebration by calling on his members to take out Tea Party members. I don’t believe he was suggesting an evening of dinner and slow dancing.

It all leads me to pose the following question: What is the difference between the folks who do the bidding of union bosses and Hitler’s Brown Shirts? Answer: The Nazis had a better dress code.

Watching Barack Obama demand that Congress pass his Jobs Act, a half trillion dollar bill that hasn’t been written and calls for funding with money that doesn’t exist, is a classic case of déjà vu. One can’t help being reminded of ObamaCare, which, as Nancy Pelosi coyly pointed out at the time, required passage as a precursor to our knowing what it said.

Thomas E. Dewey (1902-1974)

It’s obvious that Obama realizes that no Republican is going to agree to raise taxes to finance this latest bit of legislative lunacy. He tosses it out for no other reason than as a way to blame Congress for record unemployment and a disastrous economy as he campaigns for re-election.

Clearly, someone, David Axelrod perhaps, remembered that Harry Truman successfully used Congress as a scapegoat when he won the 1948 election. There are a few important differences, however. One, the opposition party controlled both houses in 1948. In Obama’s case, his own party controlled both houses from 2006-2010 and still controls the Senate.

For another thing, Truman was running against Tom Dewey, who had not only been walloped badly by a nearly comatose FDR in 1944, but had been famously mocked by Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Teddy Roosevelt’s socialite daughter, as bearing a striking resemblance to the little man who stands atop wedding cakes. Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and Mitt Romney, on the other hand, are not only more photogenic than Obama, but are far less arrogant, annoying and narcissistic.

Finally, Harry Truman had been the man who green-lighted the dropping of A-Bombs on Japan, bringing World War II to an abrupt and joyous conclusion.

Although Obama will try to cast himself as the guy who single-handedly brought down Osama bin Laden, most people will recall how he hogged the credit, making it sound during his victory lap as if he and not the Navy Seals had carried off the mission.