LaborPains.org

Union membership has steadily declined for decades. Membership peaked in 1979, with over 20 million union members. Today, less than 15 million members remain—less than half of which are in the private sector. In light of the recent push for labor reform and right-to-work laws, combined with unions’ dwindling membership, labor leaders are fighting for a last chance at relevancy and control.

The AFL-CIO is attempting to revive its image with a new advertising campaign. The Wall Street Journal reports that the $1.5 million campaign featuring 30 and 60 second television ads has begun, airing in Pittsburg, PA and Austin, TX. The awkward ads attempt to show how everyone is connected by organized labor, but what they obviously don’t show is all of the people who are forced to be connected to unions in non-right to work states.

Public sector unions in Wisconsin, with the help of their national unions, are also engaged in a fight for their life, as they desperately attempt to rid the state of Gov. Scott Walker. Last year Walker championed a bill that limited state employee collective bargaining rights, leaving union leaders seething.

In 2011, unions spent $35 million in a failed attempt to stop labor reform by recalling a number of Republican state representatives, and this year Walker himself told Fox News, “[Unions] want those automatic dues, and they’ll spend just about anything to get it back.”

With the current standoff in Indiana over right-to-work leaning in its opponent’s favor, the unions’ survival skills will again be tested.

Today the Center for Union Facts launches a multi-million dollar campaign educating Americans about the need for labor law reform.

It’s been more than 50 years since Congress overhauled America’s labor laws. During the following decades we’ve witnessed a workplace revolution that has fostered innovation, opportunity, and flexibility for America’s 150 million member strong workforce. Despite this, labor union leaders continue to cling to outdated labor laws that stifle job creation and trample employee rights.

You can read more about the Employee Rights Act at www.Employee Rights Act.com or you can join our new Facebook page.

After the successes of New Jersey’s Chris Christie and Wisconsin’s Scott Walker in tempering the power of public sector unions, the failure of Senate Bill 5 in Ohio was a difficult loss. But the desire to curb Big Labor’s power is not completely lost; Ohio and Indiana are proving otherwise – even if the odds are against them.

Despite the recent defeat of Ohio Senate Bill 5, Ohioans have set their sights on ending forced union membership. “Ultimately, freedom to associate also means freedom not to associate,” said Maurice Thompson of the 1851 Center for Constitutional Law to The New American. Thompson heads the organization, which is one of several attempting to pass a right to work law in Ohio. If the newly proposed “Workplace Freedom Amendment” is approved by Ohio voters in November 2012, then the state will become the 23^rd state to protect the freedom of choice for its employees – unless Indiana beats them to it.

Indiana leaders also have their eye on the right to work prize. In the 2011 session, right to work legislation was tabled after House Democrats fled the state forcing the Indiana House to shut down. Passing such legislation looks more promising this time around, especially since Governor Mitch Daniels is reportedly willing to put his weight behind the bill. Indiana Republicans control both the House and the Senate, so the votes are likely there. That leaves Indiana Democrats with only the extreme option of once again fleeing the state.

Yet despite the somewhat favorable political environment, observers doubt that either Ohio or Indiana will become the 23^rd right to work state. Right to work legislation hasn’t been successfully passed since the 1980’s, with the exception of Oklahoma in 2001. The reason? Labor unions will fight these efforts tooth and nail. It is estimated that Unions spent up to $50 million to successfully fight against SB5 in Ohio.

An excellent example of just how difficult it is to pass this kind of legislation can be seen in Colorado. In the fall of 2008, Colorado sought to pass right to work legislation, Amendment 47. In response, unions launched four “poison pill” measures, Amendments 53, 55, 56, and 57. These initiatives would have been “devastating to Colorado’s economy,” said Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce president Joe Blake to the Colorado Statesman.

The poison pill measures were more or less introduced as union bargaining chips in order to kill Amendment 47 by effectively blackmailing businesses – and it worked. Members of the business community struck a deal and pledged $3 million to defeat Amendment 47 in exchange for the removal of the offending measures. Amendment 47 did not pass, and Colorado was left with its hybrid right to work law, which allows employees by a vote of 75 percent or more, to eliminate right to work privileges and become a closed shop.

Union leaders are so desperate to retain their members that they are willing to go to almost any length to make sure right to work legislation is out of play. Right to work legislation is a great way to expand employee rights, but history suggests you shouldn’t hold your breath for it to pass in either Ohio or Indiana.

The Economic Policy Institute: STILL Wrong on Public Employee Compensation

—Center for Union Facts—

Despite statements by labor unions and their supporters that a sizable compensation premium is a benefit of union membership, the Economic Policy Institute (EcPI)—with the assistance of associate professor Jeffrey Keefe of Rutgers University—has gone to great lengths to argue that this compensation premium doesn’t hold in the public sector. Specifically, EcPI and Keefe argue that public sector workers suffer approximately a four-percent compensation penalty when compared to similar workers in the private sector.[i]

Criticism of Keefe’s original study demonstrated that claims of a compensation penalty were off the mark. An analysis from the Center for Union Facts that includes all relevant employees and properly accounts for the size of their employer demonstrates that public employees receive a compensation premium of at least 5 percent over their private sector counterparts. Others suggest that properly accounting for the value of public sector job security, retiree health benefits, and pension funding could create an even larger premium—as high as 30 percent.[ii]

In a recent Issue Brief, Keefe doubled down on his assertion that public employee union leaders are ineffective at doing their job—specifically, that there is no public employee pay premium.[iii] Keefe dismissed our criticisms of his original study as “desperate,” “unsound,” “inappropriate,” “unreliable,” and “incorrect.”  Strong words—but unfortunately for Keefe, they’re not backed up by equally strong facts.

MISSING EMPLOYEES

The Center for Union Facts (CUF) criticized Keefe’s original analysis because he excluded part-time, full-year employees, including one-quarter of all teachers (a major public sector occupation). In total, that means approximately 12,700 people were missing from his analysis, an exclusion that made the public employee pay gap appear smaller than it otherwise would have been.

In his rebuttal, Keefe ignores this point. Instead, he defends his decision to exclude all part-time employees—something that CUF never criticized. This clever bit of rhetorical misdirection makes it appear that Keefe and EcPI address our criticisms while actually ignoring them.

Even if Keefe had been correct in his decision to exclude part-year full-time employees (including teachers) from his analysis, he still should be analyzing a sample of approximately 60,000 people. Instead, he’s looking at 44,280—over 15,000 fewer people than there should be for this study to be accurate.

In total, Keefe left out about 40 percent of the employees who should have been included in the analysis—28,213 people. It’s unclear whether they were excluded intentionally, or because of lack of knowledge of the data being used. What is clear is that the tens of thousands of missing people in Keefe’s analysis seriously biased his results.[iv]

UNREALISTIC ASSUMPTIONS

CUF also criticized Keefe’s original analysis for inappropriately controlling for the size of an organization that an employee works in. Keefe assumed that any employee currently working in state government would otherwise be employed in a large private sector business with 1,000 or more employees. It’s like arguing that every tech support person in the Department of Motor Vehicles is qualified to work at Google or Microsoft—a plainly unrealistic assumption.

Once again, instead of responding to our criticism in his rebuttal, Keefe ignores it. He defends his decision to include a con

trol for organization size—a decision that CUF never criticized (and, in fact, agreed with, even though we disagreed with the manner in which he controlled for size). This rhetorical sleight of hand again makes it appear that Keefe addresses our criticisms instead of cleverly avoiding them.

As the chart below demonstrates, well over half the employees in the private sector are employed by companies with fewer than 1,000 employees. Keefe’s unrealistic and inaccurate assumption that each state public employee would be qualified to work in the largest size company (with traditionally better benefits) significantly biases his results. Correcting for this error alone turns a public employee compensation penalty in the range of 2 to 4 percent into a compensation premium of 3 percent.



CONCLUSION

In his original analysis released by the Economic Policy Institute, Dr. Keefe found that public employees suffered a 4 percent compensation penalty relative to similar employees in the private sector. Correcting for errors in that analysis, the Center for Union Facts demonstrated that the 4 percent penalty is actually at least a 5 percent premium—a 9 percentage point margin. Keefe and EcPI made an attempt to defend their errors, but—as we’ve shown here—those defenses amount to more rhetoric than substance.

The conclusion of our original piece still stands: public employees are overpaid.

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[i] Jeffrey H. Keefe. “Debunking the Myth of the Overcompensated Public Employee.” Economic Policy Institute, September 2010.

[ii] Andrew Biggs and Jason Richwine. “Are California Public Employees Overpaid?” Heritage Foundation Working Paper.

[iii] Jeffrey H. Keefe. “Desperate Techniques Used to Preserve the Myth of the Overcompensated Public Employee.” Economic Policy Institute, March 2011.

[iv] See table A4 in “The Economic Policy Institute is Wrong: Public Employees Are Overpaid.” Center for Union Facts.

Today, the Center for Union Facts released a new analysis proving that public sector employees, on average, earn five percent more in wages and benefits than their counterparts in the private sector. This flies in the face of data from the Economic Policy Institute (EcPI), a “think tank” that has taken millions from labor unions and has released a series of studies making the counterintuitive claim that public sector employees are underpaid by four percent when compared to those in the private sector.

Redoing the same analysis from EcPI’s study, the Center for Union Facts controlled for two key factors that EcPI improperly accounted for: private sector business size and the treatment of full-time, part-year workers (a category that includes roughly one quarter of all teachers). When those two factors are properly considered, the results reverse themselves: public sector, taxpayer-funded employees actually enjoy a compensation bonus of at least five percent.

“We have been hearing for months now about the underpaid public sector workers from outfits that are funded by public sector unions, an obvious conflict of interest,” said Rick Berman, the executive director of the Center for Union Facts. “Unfortunately, the study’s author made two key errors, both of which coincidentally skew the results in the direction that labor unions support.”

The argument that public workers are underpaid has been made in order to deflect attention from public pay in states that are experiencing multi-billion dollar budget gaps.

“The Economic Policy Institute study assumes that every state employee would otherwise be working in a large private sector business  with 1,000 employees or more,” Berman explained. “Using this assumption is like saying that every computer tech in the state capital would qualify for a job at IBM – it’s bogus, and it creates a fictitious gap in wages that EcPI was more than happy to exploit for political gain. They also excluded full-time, part-year workers like certain teachers and recent retirees, another move that inflated that false deficit.”

Berman continued: “And that doesn’t even include other unaccounted for factors, like the ironclad job security in the public sector and the fact that most teachers’ full-time salary covers a work year only 36 weeks long. In times of economic distress, we all have to give a little back; public sector unions can’t hide behind the false pretense that their members are ‘underpaid’ any longer.”

Click here to read the report.

Labor unions are allowed to “pressure” businesses with which they have a direct dispute. But what about companies that are completely neutral? Keith Eastland, a labor lawyer in Grand Rapids, wrote an op-ed explaining an unfortunate decision by the National Labor Relations Board.

Employers can expect the new board to grant much broader protections to union-related activity. An Aug. 27 board decision on “bannering” highlights this point. Bannering refers to the display of large signs, often containing misleading claims, at job sites belonging to neutral parties. It is a union tactic often designed to threaten and coerce neutral businesses to avoid dealing with non-union contractors or suppliers.

Although the law expressly prohibits unions from engaging in coercive or threatening actions toward neutral businesses, the new board has ruled that bannering is protected. Under this new rule, unions can now target your business or job sites with large banners — or use giant inflatable rats signifying the presence of “scabs” — even when you have no labor dispute with that union.

The case before the NLRB began in Arizona where representatives of the Carpenters Local 1506 (consisting of non-union temp workers  being paid to play the part of “picketer”) held 16-foot-long signs outside two medical centers and a restaurant. The signs read “Shame on…(the name of the establishment)” with the words “Labor Dispute” nearby. The catch? The establishments had no conflict with the union. The dispute was with construction companies doing work for the establishments’ owners.

This should have been a no-brainer for the NLRB. The National Labor Relations Act forbids conduct found to “threaten, coerce, or restrain” secondary businesses not involved in the primary dispute. But chalk one up to the labor-stacked NLRB, i.e. Craig Becker and Co.: They found a way to rule in the union’s favor.

To what extreme’s will unions take this new rule?

Recently the [United Brotherhood of Carpenters in Salt Lake City] has taken its bannering a step further by targeting companies that don’t do business with the Contractors. The banners are the same. But the handbills reveal that the company named is a potential tenant in a building where one of the Contractors is slated to perform work. According to the Union, the company being bannered is guilty of “thinking about profiting from unfair labor practices.” By this measure, most of the population might be subject to bannering.

A “potential tenant” where a company “is slated to perform work”? How far will bannering go? Could a union pressure the company that employs the aunt of the owner of a plumbing company that services an office building that houses a paper company that sells supplies to another company with which the union has a dispute? Or perhaps just thinking about selling supplies is enough to put a company in the unions crosshairs. Thanks to Craig Becker’s NLRB, it’s certainly possible.

This video drives home the point. Despite being about NFCW, not the Carpenters, it’s the same practice of creating a deceptive union picket line.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
Working Stiffed
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Rally to Restore Sanity

Talk about inappropriate comparisons! As reported by the National Journal, Richard Trumka, head of the AFL-CIO and one of the heavy-hitters in the labor movement, came out swinging today and racked up yet another uncomfortable gaffe.

Trumka, the nation’s top union official, said that the anti-Obama views aired by conservative commentators like Glenn Beck constitutes “hate” in his mind and that he fears it could incite violence in these frustrating economic times.

“Our country’s been there a couple of times before, and with one exception, we’ve always taken the high road,” Trumka told National Journal. “You remember when John Kennedy got off the plane in Dallas, Texas, there were people on the airwaves talking about doing violence to the president. And what happened? That kind of stuff didn’t help our country, and we want to make sure that the anger gets turned into action, and it becomes unifying and not dividing and that we get hope and not hate.”

Go ahead and add that to Trumka’s Greatest Hits, which also includes a metaphorical threat to “burn” coal companies that replaced striking union workers, and accusing recalcitrant businesses of “economic treason.”

Of course, the real reason for Trumka’s desperation is that Congress failed to pass the Employee Free Choice Act, item number one on the unions’ wish list. And with Congress looking like it will be less sympathetic to Big Labor after the election, EFCA is as good as gone.

Andy Stern may no longer be the head of the Service Employees International Union, a post he left in April, but that doesn’t mean he’s out of the news.  According to the AP, he’s being dragged into an FBI investigation.  Just read:

“The FBI and the U.S. Labor Department are investigating prominent labor leader Andy Stern in their probe of corruption at the Service Employees International Union, according to two people who have been interviewed by federal agents. The two organized labor officials met with federal agents this summer to answer questions about a six-figure book contract that Stern landed in 2006 and his role in approving money to pay the salary of an SEIU leader in California who allegedly performed no work. [...]

One person who spoke to federal agents twice, in May and June, said they asked about a 2006 contract in which Stern received a $175,000 advance from Simon & Schuster to write the book “A Country That Works.” The SEIU and its locals bought thousands of copies of the book after it was published. The union also paid thousands to fact-check and promote the book, but Stern pocketed the advance.

As the article notes, Andy Stern left the SEIU because he “wanted to focus more on his personal life.” In Washington, that could mean any number of things, but there is one thing it rarely means: the individual wants to focus more on their personal life.