LaborPains.org

This report comes from a volunteer for Granite Staters for Employee Freedom:

Crazy story – today I attended the Rochester NHDP office opening. I stood there quietly with my video camera off and in my pocket, and didn’t say a word throughout the entire event. When things wrapped up, I took out my camera and went towards Representative Carol Shea-Porter. Her staff told me I had to step outside or they’d call the police. Before doing this, they told me I had to turn off my camera or she wouldn’t speak to me, so I did. We stepped outside – the office is their private property and I respect that – and I told the staffer (I think the New Hampshire Democratic Party communications director) that I wanted to ask my representative a question about why she supports card check voting over private ballots. The staffer said, “While I’m around, you will never ask Carol Shea-Porter a question.” I said, “So you’re telling me that I can’t ask my representative a question?” “Never.” She replied.

So again, it seems that the Democrats of New Hampshire are so afraid of discussing their untenable position on the EFCA that they are willing to threaten and coerce their own constituents.

Governor Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat running for Senate, has decided that her town hall meetings should be confidential. There is no other explanation for her decision to use her staff as a human shield to avoid being taped at a recent Deering, NH town hall meeting. In the video, you’ll see a little bit of Governor Shaheen, and a lot of the backs of peoples’ heads. The view becomes miraculously unobstructed when Shaheen calls her staff up to introduce themselves. What do you have to hide, Governor Shaheen?

At her last two public events, Governor Jeanne Shaheen has taken time out of her stump speeches to point out a constituent with a video camera. Shaheen says:
“…I also wanted to introduce the gentleman in the back, so everyone understands who he is. He is here tracking for an anti-union organization, and if you’ve seen the full-page ads they’ve been running against me and against working people, that’s who he’s with. I happen to disagree with the positions that they’ve taken, I think it’s important to support workers in this state and most of us would agree that workers should have the right to orgainze, they should have the opportunity to make a living wage, and to get benefits and health care, and that’s one of the things I support in this race for the United States Senate.”

Interestingly, the only question this constituent has submitted to Governor Shaheen has been whether she thinks that workers should have the right to a private ballot on whether they organize. He’s said nothing about the right to organize, the right to get benefits, or any of the other list of woes she projects against him.

It’s unfortunate that Governor Shaheen feels the need to attack constituents who want simple answers to simple questions.

In Stratham, New Hampshire this weekend, Representative Carol Shea-Porter was asked if she believes that workers have the right to a secret ballot on whether or not their workplace is unionized.  Her support for the EFCA and card check voting gives a pretty clear hint that she doesn’t.  Shea-Porter said this:

… it would also be helpful to go to Educational Labor and look up the committee hearings to find out why they asked for those votes. And I’ll also point out that when you go to town halls here in New Hampshire, we stand up and we count our votes, and there’s a reason that we do that. We have this open… this is not the same as the kind of election for a political office, alright, this is a whole different set of rules here. So, I like our town halls and the way that our town governments function, where people discuss issues in public and vote in public, and I support that.

I think after all I heard, about the difficulty that they have had, that men and women who want to form unions have had, and it’s all on record, so that’s why I recommend you look at that, you realize that for their best protection for all of the workers, it’s good for them to be in, to stand together. And that’s the whole concept of the union anyway: gathering together and working together.

Her answer is meandering, confusing, and well, confused.  First of all, a workplace is not a town hall meeting.  At town hall meetings, citizens who have chosen to live in a certain district get together to talk about legislative issues and the town budget.  After a town hall meeting, it’s uncommon for people from out of town – and not just individuals, but powerful organizations, to come around and influence, intimidate, and coerce the people who are voting on a resolution.

Also, most people don’t earn their living at town hall meetings, and the results of town hall meetings rarely change the fundamental relationship between a citizen and his employer.

For some reason, all these differences evade Representative Shea-Porter.  Perhaps the $260,000 dollars her campaign has received from labor leadership PACs and labor unions have made them easier to ignore.

Jeanne Shaheen continues to refuse to answer a very simple question: do workers have the right to a secret ballot when a labor organizer tries to unionize their shop?  It’s no surprise that she’s unable to give a straight answer as her position is, to most Americans, completely untenable.

Wow! Check out this video of New Hampshire’s Democratic Senate candidate Jeanne Shaheen totally botching her response to a constituent’s question about labor unions’ plans to eliminate workplace democracy by destroying the 60-year-old tradition of electing unions by a private ballot election.