LaborPains.org

That’s not a typo. Not only did she call it the “Employer Freed Choice Act,” which is embarrassing enough, but she told the Communications Workers of America that EFCA ought soon be the “law of the land.”  They applauded.

From the CWA:

You can file this under “Good Luck With That.” After what the Washington Post calls “18 months of floundering” (ouch), the AFL-CIO, SEIU, and labor et al. are looking to the Right for help going further Left:

If imitation is the highest form of flattery, the “tea party” movement must be honored. In an effort to replicate the tea party’s success, 170 liberal and civil rights groups are forming a coalition that they hope will match the movement’s political energy and influence. They promise to “counter the tea party narrative” and help the progressive movement find its voice again after 18 months of foundering.

The large-scale attempt at liberal unity, dubbed “One Nation,” will try to revive themes that energized the progressive grass roots two years ago. In a repurposing of Barack Obama’s former campaign slogan, organizers are demanding “all the change” they voted for — a poke at the White House. [...]

The groups involved represent the core of the first-time voters who backed Obama, including the National Council of La Raza, the Service Employees International Union, the NAACP, the AFL-CIO, and the United States Student Association. (The effort is separate from the Democratic Party’s plan to spend $50 million trying to reach those same voters.) Their aha! moment happened after the health-care overhaul passed this spring.

I actually thought this was a joke when I first saw it.

Andy Stern has finally seen the cash and perhaps seen …the light?  He’s apparantly decided to bury the hatchet with an entire industry, and help sell antidotes for biological weapons to the Department of Defense. Again, let me repeat, this is not a joke. From the Wall Street Journal:

“Siga Chief Executive Eric Rose said Stern’s “insight, experience, and leadership, particularly his understanding of how our federal government works, will complement the skill sets” of the existing board. Siga applies viral and bacterial genomics and sophisticated modeling to develop products for the prevention and treatment of serious infectious diseases, with an emphasis on products for biological warfare defense.”

Yes, hilariously, part of the reason they hired Mr. Stern was for his intimate knowledge of how government works. I guess visiting the White House as often as Andy Stern makes all the difference.

Image courtesy of Justin.Scrappers.

From ABCNews:

“More than 500 decisions by the leading federal agency that referees disputes between labor and management will have to be reopened after the Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the five-member board had operated illegally when its membership dwindled to two.

The high court, in a 5-4 ruling in which the court’s leading liberal — retiring Justice John Paul Stevens — sided with the court’s four most conservative members, said the law does not allow the National Labor Relations Board to operate while it is short-staffed because of political arguments. [...]

The decision means that more than 500 of employee-employer cases decided by the NLRB while its membership had dropped to two must now be reopened by the board, which currently has four members.”

Image courtesy of IslesPunkFan.

Here’s a life lesson. If you are going to ignore conventional protesting practices and take a page from the play book of some of the most egregious protesters in modern times, make sure you check who lives next door. There could be a journalist nearby–a journalist with a camera and a website. And check that your “target” is home, not his frightened son hiding in the bathroom.

The SEIU probably couldn’t have planned it worse when they decided to protest at the house Greg Baer, the deputy general counsel for corporate law at Bank of America.  Despite their own desire to minimize the coverage of the protest, by just bringing a sympathetic HuffPo reporter, Baer’s neighbor was none other than Nina Easton, the Washington Bureau Chief of Fortune Magazine. I’ll let her take it from here:

“Last Sunday, on a peaceful, sun-crisp afternoon, our toddler finally napping upstairs, my front yard exploded with 500 screaming, placard-waving strangers on a mission to intimidate my neighbor, Greg Baer. Baer is deputy general counsel for corporate law at Bank of America (BAC, Fortune 500), a senior executive based in Washington, D.C. And that — in the minds of the organizers at the politically influential Service Employees International Union and a Chicago outfit called National Political Action — makes his family fair game.”

“Waving signs denouncing bank “greed,” hordes of invaders poured out of 14 school buses, up Baer’s steps, and onto his front porch. As bullhorns rattled with stories of debtor calls and foreclosed homes, Baer’s teenage son Jack — alone in the house — locked himself in the bathroom. “When are they going to leave?” Jack pleaded when I called to check on him. Baer, on his way home from a Little League game, parked his car around the corner, called the police, and made a quick calculation to leave his younger son behind while he tried to rescue his increasingly distressed teen. He made his way through a din of barked demands and insults from the activists who proudly “outed” him, and slipped through his front door.”

“Excuse me,” Baer told his accusers, “I need to get into the house. I have a child who is alone in there and frightened.”

Those of us who watch SEIU protests know sort of what we should expect. This was outside of that. As Easton put it:

Targeting homes and families seems to put SEIU in the ranks of (now jailed) radical animal-rights activists and the Kansas anti-gay fundamentalists harassing the grieving parents of a dead 20-year-old soldier at his funeral (the Supreme Court has agreed to weigh in on the latter). But that’s not a conversation that SEIU officials want to have.

I should add that there were no arrests, because the three officers on hand feared inciting the rabble-rousers.

Image courtesy of Nina Easton. I hope she doesn’t mind.

So you may have heard about the anti-Wall Street protests…or is it anti-K Street protests?…. that happened around Washington, DC, not New York City, today. Made up of a hodgepodge of unions, they stormed down a bank, closed a road or two (K and 14th NW), pissed off some pigeons in a park, and got generally wet in the rain. This is after they protested in front of the home of a Bank of America executive yesterday.

I decided to brave the weather–without a union branded poncho, of course– and take a few shots. There were a plethora of union colors, a giants cutout of a K Street “corporate” type which reminded me of another protest puppet, posters calling for the Consumer Financial Protection Agency to “protect small businesses”. Riiight.

I hope you are not surprised. While you were sleeping (or relaxing) over the weekend, President Obama made 15 recess appointments, adding Craig Becker and Mark Pearce, to the National Labor Relations Board.

Thanks to CSPAN’s archive, I am going to let McCain et al. have their say. Watch the video here.

Now I will let the White House have the final word on this one. At the height of the controversy, Craig Becker’s bio read like this on the White House’s website:

“Craig Becker, of Illinois, to be a Member of the National Labor Relations Board for the term of five years expiring December 16, 2014, vice Dennis P. Walsh.”

In the announcement on Saturday, the White House re-released a statement which rehashed his bio from last spring when he was first nominated:

Craig Becker currently serves as Associate General Counsel to both the Service Employees International Union and the American Federation of Labor & Congress of Industrial Organizations. He graduated summa cum laude from Yale College in 1978 and received his J.D. in 1981 from Yale Law School where he was an Editor of the Yale Law Journal. After law school he clerked for the Honorable Donald P. Lay, Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit.  For the past 27 years, he has practiced and taught labor law. He was a Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law between 1989 and 1994 and has also taught at the University of Chicago and Georgetown Law Schools.  He has published numerous articles on labor and employment law in scholarly journals, including the Harvard Law Review and Chicago Law Review, and has argued labor and employment cases in virtually every federal court of appeals and before the United States Supreme Court.

You can put out that kind of bio when you know you’ve already won, and you have nothing to lose.

Roger Smith, the CEO of American Income Life Insurance Company, that’s who.

Then again, insurance CEOs aren’t usually on anyone’s top-ten lists these days, that is, except for unions’.

Every time the unions need a CEO to embarrass other CEOs, they trot out Roger Smith.

• Need someone to shill for the Employee Free Choice Act? There’s a CEO for that.

• Need someone to shill for health care reform? There’s a CEO for that.

• Need someone to shill for just about any union-backed cause because he insures more than 9 million union members (and stands to gain many more after they are forced into the union and have to buy insurance from him)? There’s a CEO for that, too.

• Need someone who touts their business as being “All-Union, Wall-to-Wall,” but then hires independent contractors, who report working 80 hour work weeks without so much as a health insurance “allowance”

So I guess it is no surprise that the unions’ favorite CEO didn’t make President Obama’s cut.

Do you know who did make Obama’s list of most admired CEOs? It’s a different Smith, FedEx’s Fred Smith, who has been battling UPS and the Teamster’s attempts to unionize his company by bringing it under the auspices of the National Labor Relations Act.