LaborPains.org

There have been several times when I’ve discussed the alternate means of implementing some of the key tenets of the Employee Free Choice Act, like HERE and HERE. It’s just nice to have the President blatantly confirm this agenda in his speech to the AFL-CIO.  Basic story? EFCA will be a challenge in the lame duck session, but no worries, we’ve got other ways of making it happen. From the Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Obama reiterated that the administration will put its weight behind it. “We are going to keep on fighting to pass the Employee Free Choice Act,” he told the 54 executive council members and others in the room. “We also know what and who is standing in the way of progress,” he said, adding that it will be “tough” to get the bill through the Senate and will take time to reverse the impact of “at least eight years in which there was a profound animosity toward the notion of unions.”

Mr. Obama also reminded the labor officials of the ways in which the administration has already supported unions, in part by wielding executive powers for actions that don’t require legislation.

“There’s a reason why we nominated people to the National Mediation Board that would ensure that folks in the rail and air” industries can organize, said Mr. Obama, referring to the board’s overhaul in May of a decades-old rule that had made it harder for airline and railway workers to unionize. He also cited the Democrats he nominated to the National Labor Relations Board to “restore some balance” to the group, which supervises union elections and referees disputes between private-sector employers and employees.

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.

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.

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.

Today the Center for Union Facts expressed puzzlement and disbelief following the Washington Post report that Service Employees International Union (SEIU) President Andy Stern may be nominated to President Obama’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform.

“Putting Andy Stern on a debt reduction commission is the equivalent of putting a tax cheat in charge of the Internal Revenue Service, but crazier things have happened in Washington” said J. Justin Wilson, Managing Director of the Center for Union Facts. “Stern and his unions know a thing or two about government debt, as they do their fair share to contribute to it. The SEIU has single-handedly driven more than a few states to the edge of fiscal insolvency. We can’t let him do the same to the rest of the country.”

The rumor that Stern will sit on the budget panel should not come as a surprise, given his long history of thwarting states’ attempts to balance their budgets. Stern’s SEIU, and other unions that represent state employees, have blocked many attempts to renegotiate state employees salaries and benefits.

For instance, as California struggles to avoid bankruptcy and close a $20 billion dollar budget deficit, unions including the SEIU have fought tooth and nail against any effort by legislators to save money. California also faces $100 billion in unfunded pension liabilities in the next five years, but unions have vowed to reject any attempt to fix the pension crisis—and therefore any effort to address the state’s financial meltdown.

Equally entangled in their own budget crisis of unions’ making, New York State is working to close a $7.4 billion dollar deficit.  Last month, Governor Paterson stated that the public sector unions were “thumb[ing] their nose at the public’s face.”

“Stern’s self-serving brand of ‘deficit reduction’ would likely increase taxes on everyone to pay for the pensions and wages of a few—without regard for our nation’s fiscal future,” Wilson continued.

Update: Senator Harkin justifies vote saying NLRB nomineee “cannot” change the rules

As the Director of Organizing at the AFL-CIO, Stewart Acuff draws a smaller crowd than the SEIU’s Andy Stern or his boss at the AFL-CIO, Richard Trumka. But that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have something laughable to say.

In his poorly timed Huffington Post piece yesterday, Acuff took that opportunity to sing the praises of the Employee Free Forced Choice Act and bemoan it stalling on the Hill.  Acuff decided it would be a great idea to show big labor’s cards on the day before the Craig Becker vote.  He wrote that if the Senate “no longer” has EFCA’s 60 votes, then labor will be able to simply create new regulation through nominees to the NLRB.

Um, that’s exactly what the opposition to Craig Becker is claiming will occur, and they have Acuff to thank for confirming that publicly. From his own post:

“We are very close to the 60 votes we need. It we aren’t able to pass the Employee Free Choice Act, we will work with President Obama and Vice President Biden and their appointees to the National Labor Relations Board to change the rules governing forming a union through administrative action to once again allow workers in America access to one of the most basic freedoms in a democracy–the freedom of speech and assembly and association so that workers can build the collective power to challenge the Financial Elite and Get America Back to Work.”

Acuff may have gotten some much needed attention from his post. But if the Senate doesn’t confirm Becker now, Acuff might get some attention and credit for that too.

Image courtesy of coloradostatesman.com.