LaborPains.org

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.

–Andy Stern reports that ACORN is closing up shop (the other Andy Stern).

–The SEIU District 1199 and UFCW Local 1059 have made it clear that they will no long support Ohio’s U.S. Rep. Zach Space, the state’s only Democratic representative who voted against the health care legislation. Business Week

–The Hill offers this helpful roundup of who needs to watch their backs come November after the health care vote, thanks to the AFL-CIO and the SEIU.

–Denial is not just a river in Egypt……Bruce Corsaw, SEIU Local 620 field services director, said to a local paper that “a coincidental thing that occurred” when 13 of 14 total SEIU employees in the city all were conspicuously absent and sick on the same day during a contentious contract negotiation.

–Anthony Rumore, former longtime president of the Scarsdale, N.Y.-based International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local 812 and Teamster District Joint Council 16, has plead guilty to forcing, coercing, and threatening union members into performing “domestic” tasks for him…..like installing home furnishings, running errands for his daughters wedding, taking his wife to the doctor, and delivering their Christmas tree. The list continues ad nauseam. So does my nausea.

–The SEIU-UHW and NUHW trial started yesterday.

Daniel Howes asked an excellent question in the Detroit News yesterday:

What will it take for public-sector labor — with no ties to private, for-profit employers — to understand that the steady gravy train of the past 50 years has ground to a halt?

In autos and steel, the UAW and the Steelworkers finally learned brutal lessons for lagging the competition. In aerospace and airlines, the machinists paid a price. In transportation, the Teamsters got it. In construction, the building trades intuitively understood the price they would pay in membership and the work to sustain them if the bills for their services weren’t competitive. But in government, where a labor monopoly insulated from competition is funded by typically increasing revenue, they never really needed to learn any of those lessons.

“The public-sector unions don’t face the same thing,” Ficano says. Increasingly, they will — even after a national economic recovery starts taking hold, adding jobs and building confidence shaken by the Great Recession.

Two things:

There were certainly some brutal lessons learned. But this isn’t just about private-sector unions “learning their lesson”. It’s more about Big Labor seeing the writing on the wall and looking for a way to get in on the governments “gravy train”.  Think rent-seeking, bank regulation, health care legislation, Craig Becker, “High Road” rule changes. The list goes on and on.

Howes says that public unions will increasingly learn their lesson too.  I’d like to know when.  When competition suddenly appears in a government building? When tax payers have finally had enough? When public pension funds are bankrupt? I guess that’s not too far off after all.

The New York Times spared few punches in their piece “Still with Obama, But Worried”:

“Because unions have been so crucial to the Democrats election after election, political experts say labor’s ambivalence, or worse, toward the Democrats could greatly deepen that party’s woes this fall.

“Labor is very disappointed, whether it’s about card check or the effort to tax Cadillac health plans,” said Charles E. Cook Jr., publisher of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, referring to a bill that would have made it easier to unionize and to tax high-cost health plans that many union members have. “They’re really disillusioned. I think one by one unions will start getting engaged and helping out the Democrats, but it could be half-hearted.” [...]

“We’ve seen a decline in support among union members for both Obama and the Democrats,” Terry Madonna, director of the college’s Center for Politics and Public Affairs, said. “Part of it is that unemployment brings low job performance ratings, no matter what the party. And less enthusiasm means that union members are less likely to vote.”"

And my favorite line comes from AFL-CIO head Richard Trumka:

“It’s totally unfair to say that the president hasn’t done this or done that,” Mr. Trumka added. “He’s tried on the stimulus bill. He faces tremendous Republican opposition. On health care, I give him the highest marks for tenacity.”

Saying that someone gets “high marks for tenacity” is like telling your friend that their significant other  “has a great personality”.

This morning, i.e. the day that institutions bury news, the White House released the “Annual Report of the White House Task Force on the Middle Class“, which had some nice things to say about EFCA. Among the pro-labor policies touted in the report on the “Middle Class,” starting on page 23 is a page plus on the importance of EFCA and the values it embodies. The report calling for EFCA does not mean it’s less dead, it’s just that the Administration has a responsibility to stay positive on the party line.

What’s funny is whose cited in the report.  The EFCA section of the White House report cites the Economic Policies Institute, a union-founded and funded group. According to the New York Post, it is a “creature of the national AFL-CIO.” What’s even more ridiculous is that it cites a report from EPI by none other than Jared Berstein and friends, entitled “The State of Working America 2008/2009.”

So who is Jared Bernstein? Why today he’s the Chief Economist and Economist Policy Advisor for Vice President Biden, who just happened to release this enlightening report. He says elsewhere he is the Executive Director of the task force. Yes my friends….Bernstein quotes himself.

Hallmarks of the middle class that raised millions into the middle class over the last 50 years were basically ignored.  “Unions” or “unionization were mentioned 34 times, by my count. By contrast,”small business(es)” were mentioned just 8 times. The word “entrepreneur” is never even mentioned in the report. Heck, even the Great Depression got mentioned twice.

What’s that old Chinese proverb?

“There are many paths to the top of the mountain, but the view is always the same.”

No matter whether the Administration does it through a jobs bill, by reanimating a very dead EFCA, by NLRB rule changes, or executive orders, they have to find a way to give something to their loyal big labor constituants.  The Administration is currently considering something known at the “High Road Procurement Policy.” And for your information, it doesn’t take the proverbial “high road” on it’s way to handouts for big labor–and it gets labor unions exactly what they want.

From the New York Times:

The Obama administration is planning to use the government’s enormous buying power to prod private companies to improve wages and benefits for millions of workers, according to White House officials and several interest groups briefed on the plan. [...]

Although the details are still being worked out, the outline of the plan is drawing fierce opposition from business groups and Republican lawmakers. They see it as a gift to organized labor and say it would drive up costs for the government in the face of a $1.3 trillion budget deficit. [...]

The Daily Caller, a conservative Web site, reported Feb. 4 that the plan would “heavily favor government contractors that implement policies designed by organized labor.”

From the AP:

Documents obtained by The Associated Press show the plan under consideration would examine the wages and benefits — such as health insurance, retirement benefits and paid leave — a company pays its employees as a factor in the contract award process.

Image courtesy of Jakob Montrasio.

Sometime there’s just a great sentence that comes along and captures the essence of what you are trying to say. From Daniel Griswold at CATO in the Washington Times:

“Unions are rapidly becoming an economic anachronism. In recent decades, barriers to international trade and investment have fallen, and domestic markets, including transportation, energy and telecommunications, have been largely deregulated. U.S. industries, on the whole, have accepted and even embraced the more competitive environment. Sectors such as steel, textiles and sugar continue to demand protection from foreign competitors, but they are now the exceptions and not the rule. But leaders of organized labor, on the whole, do not accept the new, more competitive environment.

A return to the era of more closed and regulated markets should be strongly resisted. Although it may be seen by labor leaders as a golden era, it extracted a heavy price on Americans in the form of lost consumer welfare, product innovation and freedom. The preferable policy alternative is to allow competition to work in labor markets just as it has been allowed to work more fully in product markets.”

Out of place, out of good ideas, and out of time, unions are indeed as anachronistic as they come.  At times it seems that unions are the Luddites at the tech convention, imploring everyone to replace their iPhones with a union made CB radios and their iPads with clipboards.

Image courtesy of Kenn Wilson.

William Forbath, professor of law and history at the University of Texas and author of Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement, used his most recent Politico piece to call for Craig Becker‘s appointment by President.  He doesn’t come right out and call the Administration (and the Hill, for that matter) cowards–but he gets pretty close.

His motivation for pushing the Democrats so hard to support labor? To quote the absent minded professor here: “Unions are on the verge of vanishing.” From Politico:

“The Becker nomination offers President Barack Obama a more important opportunity, what he likes to call a teachable moment. […]

But unions are on the verge of vanishing. If the Democrats won’t even go this far to halt the battering unions have been taking, then Democrats and the nation will be the losers. For soon, we won’t have any institutional player to do the heavy lifting, to provide the serious money the Democrats need to campaign for job creation, health care reform and financial regulation. McCain and company have demonized Becker simply because he’s a union lawyer. Obama should stand up to them.”

Did you catch that? Unions are the “institutional player” that do the “heavy lifting” and pays the bills in the house of card check.

Image courtesy of Veebl.