Union Bosses Are Stealing From Union Workers

Doug Ross wrote an intersting article in The Washington Examiner about unions and their workers.  He provides a common sense view of the state of unions today, and explores the sordid past of Richard Trumka.

Take a look at his logic and share this with any union members you know. 

Mine workers -- According to a study by the United Mine Workers of America, a new EPA rule cracking down on "airborne toxins" could cost 250,000 workers their jobs.


Steel workers -- The United Steelworkers wrote last August that the EPA's new environmental regulations would cost "tens of thousands" of union members their jobs.


Farm workers -- Legendary unions like the United Farm Workers are threatened by oppressive EPA regulations ranging from oversight of spilled milk to dust kicked up by farm equipment. By making farming more expensive with onerous regulations, fewer dollars can be spent on workers' salaries and benefits. Layoffs of union members will be the inevitable result.


Labor -- For at least a dozen years, certain powerful union bosses have advocated open borders policies. In 2000, the AFL-CIO's bosses have "called for blanket amnesty for illegal immigrants."


And today, despite high unemployment, leaders of big unions like the SEIU still pursue the same policy of "comprehensive immigration legislation" (i.e., amnesty). This could cost union members hundreds of thousands of jobs as lower-wage workers displace American citizens throughout the economy.


When you get your next paycheck, take a minute to calculate how much money is going to union dues (say, for example, $90). Multiply that by the number of pay periods per year (say, 26). The total (in this example, nearly $2,500) is going to line the pockets of the union bosses who will give your money exclusively to one political party, Democrats.


Your money -- the product of your labor, of your finite time on Earth spent working -- is being stolen and funneled to the same political party bent on destroying you. The EPA is destroying jobs. The Department of the Interior is destroying jobs. The Department of Labor's open borders advocacy is destroying jobs.


All of these immense bureaucracies, which you pay for with your taxes (more money stolen from you) are targeting union workers, America's backbone. And these gigantic government regulatory bodies are doing so with the full knowledge and assistance of the union bosses who support Democrats.


And, just for a moment, consider how poorly the biggest labor leaders have performed. In 2009 alone, private-sector unions lost 10 percent of their members. Let me repeat that: In a single year, 10 out of every 100 folks like you were terminated, thanks to a failure of leadership on the part of union bosses. Worse still, these horrible results occurred the same year that government borrowed a trillion dollars from future generations for so-called "shovel-ready" construction projects.
Instead of saving up your dues for extra unemployment insurance or improved benefits, union bosses are helping fund the EPA, the Department of the Interior, rampant illegal immigration and other policies that will continue to destroy union jobs.


If you want to save this country for yourself and your children -- to save this country from rampant deficit spending, insane immigration policies, nightmarish environmental regulations -- you need to ignore the bosses whose mansions and boats you're funding with your hard work. You must throw out the Democrats bent on destroying you and your family.

Source

Obama Goes Off Teleprompter - Unions

Public Sector Unions Assault On Taxpayers

Public sector unions came under increased scrutiny due to the outrageous antics of the union machine - and the Democrat senators - in Madison.  Obama expressing "solidarity" with the unions just pumped 93 octane fuel onto the already billowing bonfire. 

They all got the attention they sought.  And it's probably a good thing they did, although I doubt they got the outcome they anticipated. 

This event brought some important issues into the public discourse.  It gave some flesh-and-bones to the topic of public sector unions.  It humanized it and gave some us some image of who "the union worker" really is, how they protest, and an idea of their collective values. 

It also allowed the public to experience the impact of unions on our political system.  While most people wouldn't read past the tag line of a piece exploring the legitimacy of public sectors unions in the 21st century, the drama and antics coming out of "Madtown" were simultaneously hard to ignore, and a guilty pleasure to watch.  A real time Survivor series, episode after episode, with no commercial breaks.

Mike Flynn wrote about this in Everything that is Wrong with Public Sector Unions in Thirty Seconds.  He walks through a brief history of PSU's, their massive growth, and their malignant legacy.  He even includes a YouTube clip, showing how the SEIU rolls. 

Always a questionable proposition, unionization of the public sector, for a period, seemed a luxury we could afford. Yeah, public workers had job security and great benefits, but their pay was lower, so it seemed a fair trade-off. Over the last couple decades that implicit understanding was upended…public sector pay moved much higher and those great benefits were jacked up on steroids. Worse, we’ve recently learned that the benefits aren’t actually ‘paid for.’ As a result, we face the prospect of far higher taxes to meet these past promises.

At the same time, globalization and the natural forces of competition changed the economic equation for many of us in the private sector. We have had to become more productive, shoulder a greater share of our benefits and assume greater responsibility over our retirement. We’ve also realized that past politicians’ promises about Social Security were checks that couldn’t be cashed.

For the past couple of years, we’ve stayed awake at night wondering whether we would keep our job or whether our employer would stay in business. We saw our take-home pay eroded by higher state and local taxes and higher contributions to our own benefits. We watched in December as politicians of both parties congratulated themselves that they weren’t going to take even more of our earnings–well, for at least a couple more years. After that, who knows…

The recap:

• We’ve allowed labor unions to become monopoly personnel providers for many state and local governments
• We force employees to make weekly payments to union leaders
• The union leaders use these payments to hire lobbyists to agitate for more government spending
• The union leaders use these payments to spend millions on campaigns to elect politicians
• The union leaders then negotiate with these politicians to set pay, benefits and work rules for their members
• The politicians know that if they cross the union leaders, their reelection plans are more complicated
• We fund the whole thing

And so the public - whom the Democrats always assume to be their useful idiots - have an uneasy feeling as they are forced to wrestle with two key questions at a very personal level.

1) Why should I pay to give others job security AND a standard of living that I don't have?

2) If the Democrats, the unions, and the Obama political machine are all organized to promote this, doesn't that mean they are organized to take advantage of me? 

Public sector unions were a questionable concession that was tolerated initially.  One person's mole is another person's beauty mark.  But now it's time to surgically remove these radically malignant cells before they consume the host.

Public Employee Union Thugs Keep Democrats In Power At Taxpayer Expense

When the Wisconsin General Assembly voted to pass Gov. Scott Walker’s budget-repair bill, Democratic legislators made themselves indistinguishable from the protestors surrounding the assembly floor.

They wore the same pro-union orange T-shirts. They behaved in the same sophomoric way, breaking out in a noisy, finger-pointing demonstration. They chanted the same ubiquitous word: “Shame!” They might as well have brought guitars onto the floor for a Woody Guthrie sing-along and touted “Walker = Hitler” signs.

The fight in Wisconsin has focused on collective-bargaining rights, but that is not the main event. As Daniel DiSalvo of the City College of New York-CUNY notes in a Weekly Standard article, 24 states either don’t allow collective bargaining for public workers, or permit it for only a segment of workers. Even if Walker prevails, Wisconsin will allow more wide-ranging collective bargaining than these states.

Not to mention the federal government. Obama may lecture Walker about union rights, but he can go straight to Congress with a highly political proposal to freeze the pay of federal workers because they can’t collectively bargain for wages or benefits.

No, the most important measure at stake in Wisconsin is the governor’s proposal for the state to stop deducting union dues from the paychecks of state workers. This practice essentially wields the taxing power of the government on behalf of the institutional interests of the unions. It makes the government an arm of the public-sector unions. It is a priceless favor.

Wisconsin doesn’t collect dues for Elks lodges or the NRA. What makes these organizations different from public-sector unions is that people freely choose to join them and freely choose to pay their dues. They are truly voluntary organizations that don’t rely on the power of the state for their well-being. Walker wants to give members of public-sector unions a measure of this same autonomy.

Perhaps some of these members aren’t liberal Democrats, so they don’t want to pay dues — roughly $1,000 annually in the case of teachers — which will overwhelmingly go to funding and organizing for Democratic candidates. Perhaps some of them, regardless of their politics, want to spend that money on their families or other pressing needs. Walker will allow them to exercise a choice now closed to them. In most of 21st-century America, that surely sounds like common sense; for the unions, it sounds like a dire threat.

When Indiana governor Mitch Daniels ended collective bargaining and the automatic collection of dues in 2005, the number of members paying dues plummeted by roughly 90 percent. In 2007, New York City’s Transit Authority briefly stopped automatically collecting dues for the Transport Workers Union, and dues fell off by more than a third. Without these dues, the ability of public-sector unions to influence elections — what they care about most — drastically diminishes.

This is why Wisconsin Senate Democrats preferred to flee the state rather than stay and vote on a proposal that would curtail their fundraising and organizational base. They can dress up their opposition in the rhetoric of workers’ “rights,” but even if all collective bargaining were stripped from all Wisconsin public workers, they’d still have extensive civil-service protections. For Democrats, the issue is whether they can continue to rely on state government to grease an essential cog in their political machine.

Public-sector unions are a creature of government, and the Democrats are the party of government. The two of them have identical interests and worldviews, and both want to leverage government to swell their campaign coffers. How to characterize this? The word “shame” comes to mind.

Source

Public Employee Labor Unions Should Be Outlawed

Q: What do Michael Moore, Jesse Jackson, Barack Obama, the AFL-CIO, and the SEIU all have in common today? 

A: Supporting anarchy and encouraging the skirting of due process of law.


There has been a huge amount of inflammatory talk flung about in Wisconsin for the past few days.  The President is using words like "assault" to characterize the Governer's attempt to bring a bill up for vote in an attempt to deal with the state's budget gap.  Jesse Jackson is calling this a "Martin Luther King moment".  And Michael Moore is, well, being Michael Moore.  (Plus he heard about all the great pastries they have in Wisconsin and wouldn't miss it for all the tofu in Hollywood.)

I suppose we shouldn't be surprised.  We did elect a man whose entire experience consisted of being a community organizer. But surprising or not, this blatant effort to incite class warfare is deplorable.

Michele Malkin stated it well in an op-ed piece in today's Washington Examiner:

This modest call for shared sacrifice has triggered the wrath of the White House-Big Labor-Michael Moore axis. On Thursday, President Obama lamented the "assault on unions." AFL-CIO and Service Employees International Union bosses dubbed Walker the "Mubarak of the Midwest" while their minions toted posters of Walker's face superimposed on Hitler's.

Moore goaded thousands of striking union protesters to "shut down" the "new Cairo" while the state's Democratic legislators bailed on floor debate over the union reform package.
http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/2011/02/epic-showdown-wisconsin-vs-big-labor

Does this sound like the language of people who are concerned with truth, justice, or the betterment of society?  More like rhetoric designed to evoke strong emotions, while distracting people from the truth. 

In the real world that most of us inhabit, employees have to contribute to their health insurance costs and their retirement savings plans.  We don't have collective bargaining agreements that allow for pay increases simply based on our tenure. 

She continues:

Yes, the so-called progressives truly believe that bringing American union workers into the 21st century in line with the rest of the workforce is tantamount to dictatorship.

Yes, the so-called progressives truly believe that by walking off their jobs and out of their classrooms, they are "putting children first."

If ever there were proof that public unions no longer work in the public interest, this is it. Big Labor dragoons workers into exclusive representation agreements, forces them to pay compulsory dues that fatten Democratic political coffers and then has the chutzpah to cast itself as an Egyptian-style "freedom" and "human rights" movement.

And that is the question that all Americans should be considering.  Is it fair to the rest of society that Big Labor leaders should be allowed to garnish wages from their members, protect them from the public against accountability for their job performance, then give millions of those dollars to political parties and candidates that promise to protect the empires they have built? 

After all, it is the PUBLIC that foots the bill for all of this.  We don't have a choice.  The law dictates that we must pay our taxes.  It's not like the rest of society where the consumer has the ability to do their business elsewhere.  If you are able to afford private education you're free to make that choice.  But you'll still have to pay for your local schools. 

Maybe the tax-paying public should form a union to protect their interests?  A union consisting of laws that do not allow employees of the public to collectively bargain for OUR money.