Credit: Rian Castillo

Just how pushy can unions get when trying to organize new members? For the United Auto Workers, the answer is as simple as it is audacious: they orchestrated a mock card check election, make employees believe unionization was inevitable, and did it all with the complicity of public officials.

Luckily for employees, they were going up against Donald Trump. Their scheme targeted 11 casinos in Atlantic City—including gambling-floor employees of Trump Entertainment Resorts, Inc. After the UAW pulled off an unsurprising election win, Trump filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board.

Unsurprisingly, the NLRB required Trump to sit down with the union. Instead, he appealed—and, now, the United States Court of Appeals in Washington has ruled in his favor, reversing the NLRB and admonishing the UAW.

Blaming the NLRB for ignoring “substantial circumstantial evidence,” the Court’s three empaneled judges have told the NLRB to review Trump’s claim that the UAW misled voting workers with the mock card check charade.

This stinging rebuke of the NLRB and the UAW is more than a victory for one of America’s most highly visible celebrities. It’s a win for the casino workers who were misled.

General Motors’ (GM) Moraine (OH) plant was one of the most productive and cooperative factories, yet it was closed following the automaker’s 2007 labor pact with the UAW.  Two years later in the midst of a recovery, Moraine’s 2,500 laid-off workers are barred from transferring to other plants under a deal brokered by the UAW during GM’s bankruptcy–locking them out of the industry’s rebound.

The problem: Moraine’s workers weren’t in the UAW.

Originally an appliance factory, the plant moved to automobile manufacturing under GM.  The workers there elected to stick with the International Union of Electrical Workers (IUE), rather than join the UAW. However, they generally accepted contracts negotiated by the UAW.

When GM began having financial difficulty in 2007, IUE leaders decided to break ranks with the UAW and offer concessions to keep GM and Moraine afloat. However, as the company’s financial situation worsened, and GM and the UAW began negotiating, IUE had no seat at the table. Unfortunately, by the time GM had satisfied the UAW, there was nothing left for IUE workers in Moraine.

In the end, “we had to take care of our own members,” says Cal Rapson, the former UAW vice president leading negotiations with GM. “It was unfortunate what happened to the others. But there wasn’t enough to go around.”

There are strong forces in America that preach the vision of scarcity, the vision of division and the vision of fear. They try to convince us that we are not a country gifted with great abundance; they try to convince us that there is not enough abundance to go around, so we had better be jealous of anyone who has more than we do. We had better try to take away from someone who has more than us and bring them down to our level of scarcity rather than trying to bring ourselves (and everyone else) up to their level.

That sounds like something that a free-marketer would right, albeit an surprisingly emotive one. After all, unions have been playing the class card for decades, asserting that our abundance is a limited pot and the wealthy need to relinquish their wealth more through taxes. Virtually all union rhetoric hinges on this idea.

As a matter of fact, it was written by United Auto Workers President Bob King in a recent op-ed. King was presumably describing conservatives who think union members are overpaid. Or something. Whatever the case, Bob King accidentally did a pretty good job describing the mixed-up world f Bob King. (Takes one to know one?)

Here’s the rub. King wrote in another op-ed just a few months ago: “But remember, some cynically want this government to fail in order to remove all restrictions on corporations and preserve tax cuts for the ultra wealthy.” Sounds like Mr. King needs figure out which side of the “out-of-step with reality” fence he’s on.

Image courtesy of L4urenZ.

The United Auto Workers on Sunday voted by an overwhelming margin to allow leadership to call a strike against Caterpillar Inc. if a new contract cannot be hammered out.

UAW members at seven locals – including Local 974 in East Peoria – voted by a 94 percent majority to authorize a strike if necessary. The union did not give vote totals.

The existing six-year contract expires March 1, and UAW and Caterpillar have been negotiating since Dec. 15. Neither side has gone public with details from the talks, which are taking place in Caterpillar’s Building CV in East Peoria and are scheduled to resume Monday.

Caterpillar is staying quiet on the issue. We’ll keep you updated at this develops.

In a strikingly candid interview today, King admitted that the UAW’s very survival depends on this campaign:

“Here’s the terrible position we’re in (with) autos,” King said. “Because we’ve fallen so far in the percent of workers represented by the UAW in autos,” the union can’t demand big increases because of non-union competitors.

“So if we go in, we dramatically raise fixed costs for Ford, General Motors or Chrysler, we’re shooting ourselves in the foot…. We don’t want to disadvantage the (Detroit 3) companies.”

Welcome to the real world, Mr. King. This is as clear an admission as you’ll ever get from a labor leader that unions drive costs up for businesses and make them less competitive. Foreign automakers have apparently acted as a check on the UAW, keeping its demands reasonable. Now the UAW wants to do away with that check.

Why? It seems the UAW is getting nostalgic:

“What we’re really committed to is creating the UAW of the ’40s and ’50s and ’60s. The UAW of those days was an activist union — members were mobilized all the time,” King said.

Just what the country needs right now: more business disruptions.

Image courtesy of TrevinC.